How Do You Think the Government Should Protect Its Secrets?

As recently reported in Secrecy News and the Washington Post, the White House is seeking the public’s input into how the Government protects its secrets. This initiative represents an excellent opportunity to convert what is essentially an industrial age secrecy policy which has remained fundamentally unchanged since the era of the Manhattan Project into an enabling national security tool more suited for the information age.

Considering the inevitability of bureaucratic inertia as well as the very real challenges of reprogramming the multitude of national security information systems, it is not unreasonable to expect that any far-reaching recommendations this review produces will take a couple of years or more to fully implement. This means that since September 11, 2001, almost a decade or more will have passed before recommendations of the “9/11 Commission” and others have the ability to ensure that never again will information hording practices on the part of our national security agencies have such tragic consequences for Americans. As reported by The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, "current security requirements nurture overclassification."

In an earlier directive on this subject, the President proposed the creation of a National Declassification Center. While such an innovation will ensure quicker, more efficient and accurate declassification of 25-year-old or older secrets, many of which should never have been classified in the first place, such a relatively modest step would represent implementation of only one of the many recommendations of the “Moynihan Secrecy Commission” that have never been implemented since initially proposed in 1995. In order to make “his administration the most open and transparent in history” as President Obama has repeatedly vowed, the classification policy review task force he has created must provide the President with bold recommendations that fundamentally change how information comes to be classified in the first place.

As a minimum, more substantive and concrete standards and prohibitions regarding classification must be promulgated resulting in the measurable presumption that less information will be classified, at lower levels and for shorter durations – outcomes which are the exception today based upon current policy. The process must also be reformed to provide for increased accountability, both individual and organizational, with respect to the use of classification. As a minimum, in place of the current system of bureaucratic anonymity, each classification decision should be traceable to the specific individual responsible for the decision.

In addition, automatic declassification of information must truly be “automatic” and not require the multiple, serial reviews currently conducted by varied government agencies. Furthermore, the term “intelligence sources and methods” must be precisely defined rather than allowing the perpetuation of a vague catch-all phrase which has been used more as a bureaucratic weapon to avoid external oversight than as a meaningful discriminator for truly sensitive national security information.

In addition, our defense, intelligence, foreign-policy and homeland security apparatus must no longer be needlessly hampered by such antiquated concepts such as the “need-to-know” principle and the “third-agency rule” which sets “thou shall not share” classified information with otherwise authorized recipients, even other government agencies, as the official default policy position. As such, current policy officially sanctions the continued hording of information by individual agencies. Such practices are the antithesis of an agile, interconnected, networked environment essential to protecting our nation against today’s ever evolving security threats.

Finally, the task force must set out for the President recommendations for a consequential and timely system which allows for responsible external review of classification decisions, especially in response to concerns expressed by the Congress and the judiciary. However, the two other co-equal branches of government must not remain idle while waiting for executive action in this area. Both Congress and the courts can play a real role in combating abuses in government secrecy and must replace ready deference to assertions by the Executive with robust scrutiny of claims to secrecy based on national security considerations. Furthermore, unless Congress, as recommended by the Moynihan Commission, was to enact a statute governing classification, any future administration can readily undo accomplishments achieved with respect to increased government openness. While setting forth the particulars of what he recently described as “America’s descent into torture,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) stated: "At the heart of all these falsehoods lies a particular and specific problem: The 'declassifiers' in the U.S. Government are all in the Executive branch. No Senator can declassify, and the procedure for the Senate as an institution to declassify something is so cumbersome that it has never been used."

Dating to the times of FDR, the efforts of any administration to revise national security classification policy has mostly resulted in tinkering around the edges preserving the fundamentals of what is essentially a paper-based process. With his current initiative, President Obama has the opportunity to continue that tradition or to forge genuine and long-lasting change more suitable to the world of electronic information and which enhances national security while at the same time providing truly unprecedented transparency and openness.

The current framework for classification can be found here. During the next several days, I will be elaborating on recommendations that I will be posting to the White House's blog. I encourage all to weigh-in on this opportunity. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, it is not the critic who counts but the individuals who are willing to get “in the arena.” What remains to be seen, however, is whether this opportunity is, in fact, the arena or a sideshow.