The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn't (merely) evidence of political impunity - it's also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have "Top Secret clearance" and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.
Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we're scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless chambers of official secrecy:
Overclassification is a well-documented (ahem) problem, used by bureaucrats to cover up corruption, crimes and incompetence, as well as out of the lazy reflex to declare everything to be secret. This is abetted by members of the vast "Intelligence Community" who have rotated into the private sector and have a lucrative side-hustle as TV talking heads who spin spy-thriller fantasies about the risks of these paper broken arrows.
Dayen points to Senator Moynihan's 1997 report on "Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," and its conclusion that if you declare everything secret, then nothing ends up being truly secret. It's a brilliant, readable, devastating critique of official secrecy. Nothing has been done about its recommendations:
https://sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/
In 2016, the House Oversight Committee concluded that 90% of classified documents should not be classified, the same figure that the DoD came up with in its own report, 60 years earlier:
Meanwhile, the Information Security Oversight Office - which oversees classification - keeps ringing alarm bells about overclassification, with 50m+ documents being classified in a typical year. Rather than listen to the ISOO, Congress has cut its staff in half over the past decade. 620 ISOO employees oversee the three million Americans empowered to classify documents:
In 2010, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin took stock of the post-9/11 explosion in state secrets in their "Top Secret America" report: "No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
Attempts to liberate classified docs using FOIA requests fail repeatedly, with US agencies returning heavily redacted documents, even blacking out a report on the plans of the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge [to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of] Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."
As Dayen says, the talking point from ex-spooks on TV that "overclassification is no excuse for bad document handling," is the equivalent of the old saw that "mass shootings are not the time to talk about gun control." And yet, the press keeps buying it.
Take the Politico op-ed by an ex-FBI spook, who turned the fact that "a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario," proving that there is no overclassification excuse too absurd to get an airing:
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The Washington Post has a big story delving deep into how the Hillary Clinton email scandal happened, noting that Clinton just didn't want to give up her BlackBerry, even as the NSA told her repeatedly that it wasn't secure and there were...
NSA whistleblower gets threatened with 35 years over basically nothing, Secretary of State / Senator gets . . . yelled at. Overclassification and double standards punish whistleblowers, protect the powerful. (See also: General Petraeus et al.)
My position is that all non-malicious errors should be dealt with as administrative/personnel problems, possibly resulting in revocation of clearance and even firing if it indicates sloppy or incompetent work, rather than criminal matters. I also think that classification shouldnât be used as a magic wand where you can charge people for stuff that âshould haveâ been classified (but wasnât) as well as stuff that was classified but shouldnât have been (and was declassified right after it was used to charge someone).
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 âoriginal classification decisionsâ) 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 âderivative classification decisionsâ 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 Presidentâs 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.
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.
After reviewing the numerous suggested and failed reforms over the years, he draws lessons from two areas that actually seemed to make a dent in needless secrecy. First, he notes the relative success of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, which hears appeals from citizens whose requests for declassification of information have been denied. This panel, made up of members of various government agencies, actually overturns the agency decision in a high percentage of cases (Aftergood reports this happened 64% of the time between 1996 and 2008). This contrasts with federal courts who are incredibly deferential of agency classification decisions.
Second, Aftergood evaluates a program of Fundamental Classification Policy Review utilized by the Department of Energy in 1995, which he says was successful at making the culture in the agency more transparent.
As Aftergood recently noted on his blog, President Obama expanded this Fundamental Classification Policy Review to cover all agencies:
The Fundamental Classification Guidance Review was a systematic examination of all government classification instructions that took place between 2010 and 2012 in an effort to validate current classification guidance and to eliminate obsolete or unnecessary secrecy requirements.
And, as he noted in that same blog post, this Review may have contributed to a recent overall reduction in classification.
I recommend the 2009 article to you if you are interested in this area.
I have written that I don't think Snowden should have revealed the NSA surveillance programs publicly. This does not mean, however, that I think the system works perfectly now.
The classification system is a mess and far too much is classified.
There is not enough incentive to object to over-classification and information is not declassified at a fast enough pace.
We classify policy rather than specific operational details, and I think that is a mistake (e.g., the legal memos "justifying" drone attacks).
More Congressional oversight and allowing staffers with clearance (who do the policy heavy lifting) in on briefings would help.
More inter-agency oversight of big decisions and getting more voices in the room would help.
Using government contractors less would help.
Giving intelligence community employees more protection when they use the right disclosure channels would be an enormous improvement.
A better all-around environment for dissent in the executive branch is needed.
Some of this can be legislated, some can't (how do you mandate a more ethical culture?). It can be better. But, given what we have, on balance, I would rather rely on multiple, if flawed, layers of oversight than on people like Snowden. Maybe his disclosures won't be damaging, but there are disclosures that could be damaging, don't you think? Do you trust each of those hundreds of thousands of employees with access to classified information to always make the right decision about leaking or secrecy?
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[Civil Rights Attorney Chase] Madar argues at the start of the book that [Bradley] Manning is guilty of precisely "what Barack Obama swore he would do on coming into office": increase governmental transparency and highlight the constructive role of whistleblowers in society.
One has to wonder about the implications for said society when the entire political and media establishment has unleashed its impromptu expertise in the field of psychoanalysis against Manning while not even the liberal-left cares to scrutinise a president who, as Madar writes, "has preserved, streamlined and often intensified his predecessor's bellicose foreign policies" and "has presided over more leaks prosecutions under the Espionage Act of 1917 - a use that the statute's authors never intended - than all his predecessors combined".
Madar's debunking of efforts to pathologise Manning's actions is meanwhile accompanied by his own replacement diagnoses such as that "[r]ight now, classification is the disease of Washington, secrecy its mania and dementia its end point". With the help of tragicomic details such as that Washington managed to classify approximately 77 million documents in 2010 and that it took the National Security Agency until 2011 to declassify documents from 1809, Madar outlines the perils of over-classification, especially given the post-9/11 "elephantiasis-like expansion of state apparatuses intended to ensure the control of information": "If a society like ours doesn't know its own history, it becomes the great power equivalent of a wandering amnesiac, not knowing what it did yesterday or where it will end up tomorrow."
As for the classification of information such as that the Strait of Gibraltar is a vital shipping lane, Madar wonders: "Have we in America become so infantilised that tidbits of basic geography must now be state secrets?" [++]
In the past 10 years, American statecraft has moved from calamity to catastrophe, laying waste to other nations while never failing to damage our own national interests. Do we even need to be reminded that our self-defeating response to 9/11 in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) has killed roughly 225,000 civilians and 6,000 American soldiers, while costing our country more than $3.2 trillion? We are hemorrhaging blood and money. Few outside Washington would argue that any of this is making America safer.
An employee who screwed up this badly would either be fired on the spot or put under heavy supervision. Downsizing our entire foreign policy establishment is not an option. However, the website WikiLeaks has at least tried to make public scrutiny of our self-destructive statesmen and -women a reality by exposing their work to ordinary citizens.
Consider our invasion of Iraq, a war based on distortions, government secrecy, and the complaisant failure of our major media to ask the important questions. But what if someone like Bradley Manning had provided the press with the necessary government documents, which would have made so much self-evident in the months before the war began? Might this not have prevented disaster? Weâll never know, of course, but could additional public scrutiny have been salutary under the circumstances?
