#aftergood

Secrecy expert Steve Aftergood blogged today with good news and bad news about the national security information classification system. First, the good news. It seems that the federal government is classifying less information than in previous years, continuing a process first begun last year:

In 2012, the number of newly created national security secrets (or “original classification decisions”) dropped by a startling 42% from the year before, according to the Information Security Oversight Office. It was the largest annual drop ever reported by ISOO, yielding the lowest annual production of new secrets since such numbers began to be collected in 1979. (Secrecy System Shows Signs of Contraction, Secrecy News, June 25, 2013).

Now it seems that this 2012 decline in the production of new secrets was not merely a fluke, but perhaps the start of a trend. The latest ISOO annual report indicates that in 2013 the number of reported new secrets continued to decline by an additional 20% to 58,794 original classification decisions, another new record low.

For the first time in a decade, the number of “derivative classification decisions” in which previously classified information is incorporated into new records also declined in 2013, ISOO reported.

Now, the bad news: It still seems that it is impossible to successfully ask for punishment for those who improperly classify information. In a post describing a seemingly egregious case of improper classification that went unpunished, Aftergood notes:

Is there any act of overclassification that is so egregious that the classifier would be held accountable for abusing his classification authority?

The answer is unknown, since no one has ever been held accountable in such a case.

As far as can be determined, no classifier has ever been found to have willfully or culpably defied the rules set forth in the President’s executive order on national security classification.

To combat overclassification, I have recommended before that the government make it easier to object to improper classification, and it would seem that punishing those who engage in improper classification would also help fix this difficult problem.

Steven Aftergood has a great post about new secret legislation related to drones, and Senator McCain's objection to it.

The secret provision was first reported in the Washington Post. “The provision represents an unusually direct intervention by lawmakers into the way covert operations are run, impeding an administration plan aimed at returning the CIA’s focus to traditional intelligence gathering and possibly bringing more transparency to drone strikes,” wrote Greg Miller in the Post. (“Lawmakers seek to stymie plan to shift control of drone campaign from CIA to Pentagon,” January 15.)

Complaints about overclassification have existed almost as long as the classification system itself. In 1956, for example, the Coolidge Committee, headed by Assistant Secretary of Defense Charles Coolidge, complained about overclassification and noted that "there is a tendency to use the classification system to protect information which is not related to the national security." Committees, commissions, and studies over the last half-century have reached similar conclusions and made numerous recommendations. Yet, not much has worked to solve the problem.