Too Many Government Secrets?

[Richard]

I've seen some pretty odd things given levels of classification that were questionable to me; I'm sure many others in here have had similar experiences.

Richard

Too Many Government Secrets
WaPo, 25 Dec 2012

THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT keeps petabytes (that’s a million gigabytes each) of information secret every year — some of it highly sensitive, some of it hardly. A 1972 diplomatic telegram that discusses the exchange of gifts between the United States and China — musk oxen from the Nixon administration in return for two Chinese pandas — was labeled confidential, and it wasn’t declassified until 1997.

Americans have a right to know what the government is doing on their behalf or in their name, except in exceptional circumstances. A functioning democracy requires the people to hold their government to account. Accountability, in turn, requires knowledge about government activities. It also requires access to information about what the government has done in the past, and how that worked or didn’t. A complex and cautious system can even harm national security, keeping information from people within and outside government who could help make sense of it.

But America’s classification system “keeps too many secrets, and keeps them too long.” That’s the conclusion of the Public Interest Declassification Board, a presidential task force, in a new report. Most of that classification, it notes, “occurs by rote.”

How big is the problem? Former national security officials have said that half or even most of the country’s classified documents need not be. Records that are 25 years old are supposed to be reviewed and declassified. There are enough 25-year-old records in storage to produce a backlog of 400 million pages. But with the proliferation of electronic communication over the past couple of decades, government classifiers are now cordoning off much more. The backlog, the board reckons, is set to grow exponentially.

Unfortunately, the board reports, those doing the classifying have little interest in shaking things up. They face few incentives to release information and many incentives to be overly cautious. No one is ever punished for classifying too many records, and no one wants to get in trouble for releasing sensitive material.

At the very least, government employees should not be scared of retribution. The board recommends offering “safe harbor” to those who, in good faith, decide to classify material at a lower level or not at all. Classification training should emphasize the importance of releasing information whenever possible. Records that still must be classified should be assessed for their value to the public and prioritized for eventual declassification review. Others that need to be classified for only a very short time might be scheduled for quick, automatic declassification. The process of declassifying what is already in the queue, meanwhile, must be streamlined by changing rules and technology.

Since the executive branch has control over most of the procedure, the White House should take the problem of over-classification seriously and convene a steering committee immediately to implement some of the board’s sensible suggestions. Even if that means some of America’s critical musk-oxen secrets slip out a little earlier.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...y.html?hpid=z3

[miclo18d]

It's usually never the information that is so "secret"; it's the method in which it was obtained or the target that keeps it SO secret.

PIDB sounds like a "feel good" agency that recommends to the prez what to keep classified headed up by Nancy Soderberg, a Clintoon and Doomberg lackey.

[JJ_BPK]

A bureaucratic morass, Never ending, Self expanding,, Nothing new..

[Peregrino]

And we're expecting "the most transparent administration in history" to do WHAT with this report? (FWIW - I agree; far too much is routinely overclassified.)

[DJ Urbanovsky]

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

Sourced (We like to give credit where it's due. Peregrino)

Mayer, Milton [1955] (1966). They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, 2nd edition, p. 166, University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-51192-8 .

[TFA303]

The mentality is, "Well, nobody ever went to jail for OVERclassifying, so I'm going to make all my e-mails default to TS//NF."


Multiply this by a million or so cleared folks, each of whom creates dozens of documents daily.

[Team Sergeant]

Originally Posted by Peregrino

And we're expecting "the most transparent administration in history" to do WHAT with this report? (FWIW - I agree; far too much is routinely overclassified.)

LOL, just what I was thinking when I read this thread. You want to see my birth cert, no problem, want to see my college transcripts, again no problem.

Someone mentioned that given the Community Organizer's background he would not been allowed to obtain a "Secret" clearance in the military.

[mark46th]

If the governement declassified all un-necessary documents, just think how easy it would be to point out all the posers that claim to have a classified DD214!!

[The Reaper]

Originally Posted by Team Sergeant

LOL, just what I was thinking when I read this thread. You want to see my birth cert, no problem, want to see my college transcripts, again no problem.

Someone mentioned that given the Community Organizer's background he would not been allowed to obtain a "Secret" clearance in the military.

Too much drug abuse and association with terrorists, foreigners, and organizations dedicated to the violent overthrow of the US government.

For the uninitiated, these all raise serious red flags with the security clearance process.

TR