Information Doesn't Kill -- Only People Kill

(With Apologies to the NRA)


As the administration currently reviews its classification policies, it is useful to assess the overall objective of information security regimes.

All too often, individuals, if not entire Government agencies, fall into the short-hand trap of believing that if information could damage our national security it must be withheld and classified (although for the past 14 years, the governing Executive order has said no such thing). Such thinking, however, brings up the question; can information cause damage or is information in and of itself inherently neutral in that regard?

On a very simplistic level, any information can be used to cause damage to national security. That is why during the Cold War, the old Soviet Union made certain to ensure that all street maps of Moscow were inaccurate. However, it was not the map itself which threatened the Soviet Union, it was the map in the hands of an invading military which represented the actual damage that could occur.

In and of itself, information is simply knowledge. To result in damage, information must be acted upon. Whether or not specific information can be acted upon and used by others to harm our national security depends upon a number of factors. These include: i) are there actors hostile to our nation with both the intent and the capability to use the information to cause our nation harm; ii) does access to that information provide the foreign actor an advantage in causing harm; and, iii) does denial of access to that information place the foreign actor at a disadvantage in causing harm?

However, remembering that information in and of itself is neutral, there are advantages and disadvantages to friendly actors as well depending upon whether or not they are afforded access to the specific information. So, in the case of Cold War era maps of Moscow, while the Soviet Union did not necessarily succeed in placing NATO at any military disadvantage, it most certainly made every-day life difficult for Muscovites and tourists alike.

In similar but more realistic terms, denying information to the enemy on the battlefield also increases the risk of a lack of awareness on the part of our own forces, contributing to the potential for fratricide or other failures. Similarly, strict compartmentalization in handling human agents increases our own vulnerability to deception as a consequence of using sources that ultimately prove to be unreliable. Simply put, secrecy comes at a price - sometimes a deadly price – oftentimes through its impact upon the decision-making process.

Whether seeking advances in science and technology, formulating government policy, developing war plans or assessing intelligence, the end product can always be enhanced as a consequence of a far reaching give and take during which underlying premises are challenged and alternate approaches are considered. As such, secrecy just about guarantees the absence of an optimized decision. The challenge is ensuring that this trade off – i.e., accepting something less than the optimal result in exchange for denying a potential adversary an advantage – is taken into account when making a decision to cloak certain information in secrecy.

In crafting a new framework for classification, the administration must get beyond the mind-set of looking at information in a purely binary mode when assessing the potential harm to national security and seriously take into account how excessive secrecy and over-classification has a deleterious impact upon the decision-making process. There is no such thing as either good or harmful information – but there are good or harmful decisions by our nation's leaders. Similarly the American people can give good or harmful consent to actions by their leaders depending upon whether their consent is sufficiently informed.