Several government officials who collectively represent much of the public face of the national security secrecy system have retired recently. They include:

*    Sheryl Shenberger, Director of the National Declassification Center

*    Stephen Randolph, Historian of the State Department

*    David J. Sherman, NSA Associate Director for Strategy, Plans, and Policy

*    Joseph Lambert, CIA Director of Information Management

In various ways they have all been significant collaborators — or at least partners in debate — with public advocates of greater openness, and they have all contributed to a gradual increase in public access to national security information.

Their diverse activities and achievements are not fully known to me and cannot be summarized here. But from my own limited vantage point, each one made a positive difference.

After I raised the question of declassifying US records regarding Indonesia in the 1960s (at a June 2016 meeting of the Public Interest Declassification Board), Sheryl Shenberger approached me to ask for more information, which I provided. It turned that this task was ideal for the National Declassification Center, especially since it involved a set of records that were both historically important and relatively limited in volume. She saw to it that the collection was declassified and released last year.

Stephen Randolph helped advocate for the release of the long-suppressed Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) volume on the 1953 coup in Iran, which was finally published last year. Under his leadership, the Historian’s Office was strengthened, productivity was increased, and FRUS began to be published within its mandated 30-year deadline for the first time in decades.

David Sherman helped foster internal and external discussion of changes to government secrecy policy. And when I pointed out that a “finding aid” to historical NSA records at the National Archives was unhelpfully classified, he conceded that was a mistake and expedited its declassification.

Joseph Lambert (who retired early last year) had the difficult task of defending CIA classification policies. But he was always willing to discuss the subject, to acknowledge errors and to correct them.

In fact, the accessibility of these officials — their willingness to engage with members of the public — was perhaps their single most admirable feature. For my part, I think each of them helped me to see problems of disclosure from a government perspective, to understand what might be feasible and what was not, and to formulate proposals for change that could be acted upon by their respective bureaucracies.

Excessive compartmentalization of intelligence can be counteracted by the use of “portfolios” of compartmented programs, according to new intelligence community guidance.

Undue secrecy in intelligence is not only a barrier to external oversight and public accountability. It can also be an obstacle to effective mission performance. That is fortunate in a way since it provides a reason for officials to reconsider classification policy and an incentive for them to curtail unnecessary secrecy.

Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats, who has kept a comparatively low public profile lately, surfaced last month to issue new guidance that is intended in part as a way to curb internal IC secrecy.

The guidance discusses the creation and management of intelligence “portfolios.” This term refers to a collection of classified programs that overlap in some way and that are bundled together to facilitate information sharing and collaboration.

“Establishment of a Portfolio may be required in order to achieve unity of effort and effect against the highest priority requirements or when compartmentalization hinders or prevents access to information necessary for intelligence integration,” according to the new guidance. The practice has no bearing on public disclosure of intelligence information.

All portfolio personnel are to be “indoctrinated” (i.e. granted access) to all portfolio programs, in what amounts to a reversal of the compartmentalization process. See Intelligence Community Portfolio Management, Intelligence Community Policy Guidance 906.1, December 15, 2017.

The portfolio concept was previously defined in the 2015 Intelligence Community Directive 906.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence will convene a day-long “Intelligence Community Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency Summit” for IC employees on January 24.

The US Air Force last month issued updated policy guidance on its “special access programs” (SAPs). Those are classified programs of exceptional sensitivity requiring safeguards and access restrictions beyond those of other categories of classified information.

See Air Force Policy Directive 16-7, Special Access Programs, 21 November 2017.

The new Air Force policy makes provisions for internal oversight of its SAPs, as well as limited congressional access to SAP information under some circumstances.

Notably, however, the new Air Force directive does not acknowledge the authority of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) to review and oversee its SAPs.

That’s an error, said ISOO director Mark Bradley.

The executive order on national security classification (EO 13526, sect. 4.3) explicitly says that “the Director of the Information Security Oversight Office shall be afforded access to these [special access] programs.”

Mr. Bradley said that ISOO would communicate the point effectively to the Air Force.

“After early promises to be the most transparent administration in history, the Obama administration turned out to be one of the most secretive,” wrote Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan last year.

Speaking at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center last month, former ACLU litigator Jameel Jaffer didn’t go quite that far. He acknowledged that Obama had taken some small steps towards greater transparency, such as making White House visitor logs available and declassifying the Office of Legal Counsel memos on intelligence interrogation (the “torture memos”).

But overall, Obama was a disappointment, said Jaffer, a respected figure who now directs the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.

“Few people today–and certainly very few transparency advocates–believe that President Obama kept his promise,” he said.  See Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload, October 17, 2017.

That seems wrong.

A fair reading of the record shows that in dozens of areas of national security secrecy, the Obama Administration broke down longstanding barriers to public access and opened up previously inaccessible records of enormous importance and value. Some examples:

*    In 2010, the Obama Administration declassified the current size of the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal for the first time ever. Even during the heyday of the Energy Department Openness Initiative of the 1990s, only historical stockpile data from 30 years earlier was released.

*    The Obama Administration was also the first ever to publish the amount of the intelligence budget request for the following year. This information had been the subject of FOIA litigation in the Clinton Administration but without success. Remarkably, there is no statutory requirement to publish the budget request for the Military Intelligence Program. But the Obama Administration did so anyway.

*     A decade ago, the CIA had claimed in court that the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) was itself an “intelligence method” and therefore categorically exempt from disclosure. Obama rejected that view and ordered that no information be exempt from declassification “based solely on the type of document or record in which it is found.” Thousands of historical PDBs were declassified as a result.

*    Prior to the Obama Administration, one had to have “sources” simply to find out the names of the judges who sat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now the Court has its own website and it has never been more open to third-party oversight or participation.

*    The Obama Administration established a National Declassification Center to facilitate and streamline declassification. Amazingly, the Center undertook the successful declassification of a large collection of records from the US Embassy in Indonesia in the 1960s last year in response to a request from an individual member of the public.

These are all discrete policy actions that may be of interest to some people and not to others. Not everyone cares about nuclear weapons or intelligence or Indonesia or other such topics. But under Obama there was also a systemic contraction in the whole apparatus of government secrecy. Thus:

*    In 2014, the Obama Administration achieved the lowest number of “original classification decisions” (or newly-generated secrets) that had ever been reported by the Information Security Oversight Office. In 2016, the reported number of new secrets dropped lower still.

*    Not coincidentally, in 2015, the Obama Administration reduced the number of “original classification authorities” — i.e. officials who are authorized to create new secrets — to the lowest number ever reported.

*    The Obama Administration made a policy decision to shrink the size of the security-cleared population, both to reduce vulnerabilities and to conserve resources. The number of persons holding security clearances for access to classified information dropped accordingly from around 5.1 million in 2013 to 4.2 million in 2015.

Is all of that sufficient to justify a claim that the Obama Administration was “the most transparent in history”? Not necessarily. (And not only because “transparency” means different things to different people.)

One would also have to weigh the Administration’s failings, such as its (mis)handling of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on enhanced interrogation practices, among other unhappy episodes. And then one would then have to compare the composite record to that of other Administrations. But it is far from obvious that any other Administration has a stronger claim than Obama’s to being named “most transparent,” and neither Jaffer nor Sullivan has proposed one.

It is beyond argument that Obama established new benchmarks for disclosure of many types of national security information that had previously been withheld, and that his Administration imposed new constraints on the creation of classified information.

Ignoring or dismissing the Obama record of disclosure makes it impossible to inquire how such disclosures happened, and how they could be replicated and extended. Cynicism is a poor foundation for strategy.

The effort to establish a uniform policy for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is meeting opposition from some executive branch agencies who see it as unnecessary and unwelcome.

CUI refers to information that is unclassified but that requires protection for reasons other than national security– such as privacy, proprietary concerns, law enforcement sensitivity, and so on. In past years, more than 100 separate and sometimes conflicting policies for such information were put in place. The CUI program, established by President Obama’s executive order 13556 in 2010, was intended to simplify, standardize and streamline that profusion of security policies for unclassified information.

Some agencies, like Veterans Affairs and the Social Security Administration, are moving forward to adopt the new CUI policy.

Others, however, are not.

Earlier this month, officials from several large agencies — including CIA, DOJ, DHS and DOD — raised a whole series of objections to the CUI program in a letter to the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

The officials contended in the undisclosed letter that there are several unresolved issues that must be addressed before CUI implementation can go forward. These are said to include inadequately defined governance of the program, financial costs thought to be in the billions of dollars, gaps in coverage affecting certain types of information, and commingling of CUI and classified information that will make proper marking of documents excessively long and complicated.

But ISOO director Mark Bradley said that these issues had either already been addressed or could be resolved. He said ISOO would prepare a formal response to the agency complaints.

Another point of contention is the impact of the CUI policy on government transparency and whether it will enhance or impede public access to unclassified information.

One of the original objectives of the CUI program was to reduce controls on unclassified information by limiting their use only to those instances where they were required by law, regulation or agency-specific policy. Arbitrary or improvised prohibitions on disclosure (such as the open-ended “for official use only”) would be not be authorized.

But in a privately circulated white paper, former CIA classification official Harry Cooper said that the CUI approach would lead to more government secrecy, not less.

Cooper noted that there were now some 129 authorized categories and subcategories that could be used to withhold information as CUI based on more than 400 laws and regulations. (Agencies had originally submitted more than 2,200 proposed CUI categories and subcategories.) As recently as September 25, a new CUI subcategory was added for “Intelligence-Internal Data” to cover various types of unclassified CIA information that is “not intended to be disseminated beyond CIA channels” including names, titles, salaries, and more.

“The full implementation of CUI will likely cause an expansion of the use of [FOIA exemption] (b)(3) and as a result information that would have been released prior to CUI will now be protected from release,” Cooper wrote. “Without CUI there is no marking to identify specific laws blocking access and government reviewers often missed those obscure laws that could potentially block access.” See Controlled Unclassified Information: Government Bureaucracy Out of Control by Harry Cooper, July 2017.

ISOO director Mark Bradley disputed Cooper’s critique. He said that the CUI categories and subcategories are not equivalent to FOIA exemptions. And the CUI implementing directive makes it clear, he said, that CUI markings are not to be used as a basis for rendering FOIA decisions.

Bradley said that the CUI program should result in an increase in transparency by excluding unauthorized controls on information and by exposing the CUI decision-making process to public scrutiny. He noted that some agencies had urged that the CUI Registry — which lists all of the CUI categories and subcategories — should not be a public document. But that view was rejected by ISOO, especially since the contents of the Registry refer to public laws and regulations.

CUI has roots in the Obama Administration’s executive order 13556, and even further back in a 2008 memorandum from President Bush. So it is conceivable that the CUI policy could be modified or abolished by the Trump Administration.

But in a September 8 memo to agency heads on unauthorized disclosures, national security advisor H.R. McMaster referred to “the importance of protecting classified and controlled unclassified information” — which was understood as a White House endorsement of the CUI construct.

In the meantime, CUI is entering the implementation phase, ISOO director Bradley said. “It’s not going to go away. It’s not going to be reversed.”

It is entirely possible that there will be unintended consequences from CUI implementation, he allowed in an interview last week, “but we will deal with them. As we find problems, we will fine-tune and adjust.”

Changes in classification practices at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are expected to yield improvements in the quality of national security classification decisions and to lead to reductions in classification at NGA as well as other defense and intelligence agencies.

The most important innovation adopted by NGA is a requirement for a written justification for why each item of classified information needs to be protected, as well as how the information could be paraphrased or discussed in an unclassified manner.

NGA said it has prepared a new classification guide that includes three types of “enhancement statements” for each classification decision:

*    The “Value” statement explains why the information is being protected.

*    The “Damage” statement describes the potential impact to national security should an unauthorized disclosure occur.

*    The “Unclassified” statement outlines how a user can address the classified line item in an unclassified manner.

Notably, none of this explanatory information is required by the current executive order on classification. The order requires classifiers to be “able to” explain their classification decisions, but not to actually do so.

By contrast, the NGA formula is likely to promote a more thoughtful and limited approach to classifying national security information, said Mark Bradley, director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

“Including an unclassified paraphrase is especially useful for helping derivative classifiers understand how it may be possible to use the information in an unclassified context,” said Mr. Bradley. “That alone can certainly move the needle towards reducing overclassification.”

NGA said that as of June 2017 it had produced enhancement statements for 292 classified line items in its new consolidated security classification guide.

The new NGA policy was described in the Agency’s report to ISOO on the recently-completed Fundamental Classification Guidance Review. A copy of the report was obtained from NGA under the Freedom of Information Act.

*    *    *

Why would NGA voluntarily impose new requirements on its own classifiers beyond what the executive order mandates?

There are several factors at work. Of all U.S. intelligence agencies, “NGA has  a greater mission need to work more and more in an unclassified environment,” said Mr. Bradley. “This need is playing a central role in driving their new approach.”

Furthermore, under NGA director Robert Cardillo, “NGA’s leadership supports innovation. They realized that their classification guide process was too ‘old school’,” he said.

More specifically, “NGA took DNI Clapper’s [March 2016] memo on the FCGR process to heart.” (See “DNI Clapper Embraces Review of Secrecy System,” Secrecy News, April 6, 2016). And Mr. Bradley cited a visit to the NGA Director by the Public Interest Declassification Board, which he said also provided a useful impetus.

Overall, “the changes we are seeing at NGA are arcing more towards sharing than protecting. That could help shift the paradigm away from excessive secrecy and over-classification,” Mr. Bradley said.

The Agency itself declared that “NGA is leading the DoD and IC [Intelligence Community] in classification management transformation.”

NGA said that its use of enhancement statements to improve classification guides will soon be adopted throughout the Department of Defense, including all DoD intelligence agencies and military services, in a forthcoming revision of DoD manual 5200.45 on classification guidance.

But Mr. Bradley cautioned that “NGA’s model may not be all that easy to adapt to the rest of the IC.”

“NGA has a comparatively limited and well-defined mission with a significant need to share its information. Agencies most likely to benefit from NGA’s model probably include NRO and maybe NSA, [which are] IC agencies with similarly clearly-defined responsibilities and advanced existing classification management infrastructures already in place.”

On the other hand, “I suspect that applying NGA’s model to CIA, DIA, and the military intelligence services would be more challenging because of their decentralized management structures and technical limitations. And, of course, one would be silly to ignore the always-present institutional resistance to wholesale change,” Mr. Bradley said.

Although NGA’s new approach is mission-driven, it should have positive repercussions for public access to agency information by “enabling greater transparency and information sharing.” The new NGA classification guidance provides “better identification and protection of the truly important information — higher walls around fewer secrets,” NGA said.

NGA’s activity in this area is “extremely impressive, groundbreaking work,” said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, in feedback quoted by NGA. “Clearly, [it is] a possible example or model for how to achieve transformation, for the IC and nationally.”

The new NGA approach evolved from the second Fundamental Classification Guidance Review in 2016-2017 that was required by the 2009 executive order 13526. That Review process has served to streamline and update classification requirements government-wide.

In recent years there have been signs of a more focused and disciplined approach to classification in several corners of the national security bureaucracy. The volume of new national security secrets tabulated by agencies in each of the past three years is lower than ever previously reported by the Information Security Oversight Office.

The National Security Agency has declassified the finding aid for a collection of thousands of historically valuable NSA scientific and technical records that were transferred to the National Archives (NARA) last year.

Up to now the contents of the collection had been opaque to the public. As David Langbart of NARA described the collection to the State Department Historical Advisory Committee last year:

“These records mostly consist of technical, analytical, historical, operational, and translation reports and related materials. Most of the records date from the period from the 1940s to the 1960s, but there are also documents from the 1920s and 1930s and even earlier. The NSA reviewed the records for declassification before accessioning and most documents and folder titles remain classified. [. . .] The finding aid prepared by NSA was the only practical way to locate documents of interest for researchers, but it is 557 pages long and is classified.”

When confronted with this impasse last month, the National Security Agency to its credit moved to rectify matters by declassifying the finding aid, which is now available as a .pdf file here (or as an .xlsx file here).

Most of the folder titles (listed beginning on p. 13 of the .pdf file) deal with narrow, highly specialized aspects of cryptologic history prior to 1965. A few examples picked at random: German Signals Intelligence in World War II; A Compilation of Soviet VHF, UHF and SHG Activity by Area, Source and Service; Hungarian Army Communications; Description of Chinese Communist Communications Network; and so on. Those folders all remain classified. But armed with the titles and file locations of such records (and of thousands more), researchers can now pursue their declassification.

Release of the finding aid by NSA “should help interested researchers gain access to relevant material more readily,” said David J. Sherman of NSA, who facilitated disclosure of the document.

One of the innovations in the current executive order on national security classification, issued by President Obama in 2009, was to require agencies to perform a periodic review of all classification guidance to ensure that it is current, threat-based, and otherwise appropriate.

The second such Fundamental Classification Guidance Review (FCGR) has recently been completed with modest but positive results, as reported to the Information Security Oversight Office.

The Department of the Navy, for example, said that it had “achieved a reduction in the number of SCGs [security classification guides] from 936 to 421 or 55%, as a result of the FCGR.”

DARPA cancelled 29 of the 189 classification guides it reviewed. The Army eliminated 77 out of 486 guides.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence “[reduced] the number of restrictive NOFORN decisions from 95 to 15″ and declassified the “fact of” a specific counterterrorism network platform.

The Central Intelligence Agency “determined that the existing CIA National Security Classification Guide (NSCG) required greater detail to assist derivative classifiers in identifying and protecting information appropriately.” (More detail should lead to narrower, more precise classification judgments.)

The Defense Intelligence Agency said it will reduce the number of “original classification authorities” in the Agency who are empowered to create new secrets from 147 down to 21.

By themselves, the reported revisions to classification guidance are not likely to yield new public disclosures. In most cases, the cancelled classification guides were eliminated not because their subject matter was declassified but because they pertained to programs that were terminated or to technologies that were no longer in use.

In other words, the secrecy review was essentially performed as a housekeeping measure, to eliminate obsolete guidance and to streamline operations. It does not imply a broader transformation of classification policy.

Yet the fact remains that the cancelled guides can no longer be used to justify classification. Moreover, the review process entailed a wholesome reconsideration of the basis for current classification instructions that may have broader repercussions.

Following the first Fundamental Review in 2012, the total numbers of new secrets (“original classification decisions”) created by agencies in the last three years (2014-2016) have been the lowest ever reported by the Information Security Oversight Office.

This apparent reduction in the scale of national security secrecy is at odds with the view that government secrecy inexorably expands, that Obama-era secrecy was as extensive or even broader than that of the Bush Administration, and that agencies have no real incentives to reduce secrecy. Evidently, they do have such incentives, including the avoidance of financial and operational costs, the need to facilitate information sharing, and the obligation to comply with bureaucratic requirements (such as the FCGR) that may be imposed by senior leadership.

(It is possible that the reduction is merely apparent and not real. A retired intelligence community classification official said that the data on annual classification activity reported by agencies and compiled by ISOO is hopelessly inaccurate and does not correspond to actual classification practice at all. Consequently, he said, it cannot serve as the basis for any analytic conclusion or policy response. Maybe so. But assuming that the flimsiness of the data is roughly constant from year to year, the fact that the reported totals have declined sharply may still be meaningful.)

A detailed analysis of the 2017 Fundamental Classification Guidance Review will be provided by ISOO director Mark Bradley in the forthcoming FY 2018 Annual Report to the President.

Decreasing IC Classification Activities

Last year, then-DNI James Clapper asked Intelligence Community agency heads to use the occasion of the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review “to take a leading role in reducing targeted classification activities” and to answer several specific questions that he posed in a March 23, 2016 memo.

Last month, DNI Dan Coats provided the IC agency answers to Clapper’s questions. He reported:

*    Most IC agencies believe they can reduce the number of IC officials who have original classification authority, thereby helping to constrain future classification activity.

*    Agencies are split on the feasibility of undertaking new discretionary declassification activities. Some said they were already doing what they can, and others said current resources would not support new declassification initiatives.

*    The Confidential classification level can and probably will be eliminated from IC classification guidance, simplifying and streamlining the system. However, while some currently Confidential material would be downgraded to Unclassified, other such information will be upgraded to Secret.

*    An IC-wide classification guide may be achievable but only for certain common functions including intelligence budgeting and counterintelligence.

IG Studies on Classification Policy

The FY 2018 Intelligence Authorization Act that is pending in the Senate would require intelligence agency inspectors general to perform three studies on classification policy (section 308) including:

*    a review of classification marking practices

*    a study analyzing intelligence agency compliance with declassification procedures

*    a study on processes for identifying intelligence topics of public or historical importance that should be prioritized for declassification review.

The House Armed Services Committee took a retrospective look at US special operations forces earlier this year, thirty years after the establishment of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

“SOCOM has a lot of missions it is responsible for, and has had several new ones added to it,” said Rep. Elise M. Stefanik (R-NY) at a hearing earlier this year. “Are there any of those missions that should go away or be reassigned?”

SOCOM Commander Gen. Raymond A. Thomas was ready with the answer: “There are no missions that should go away or be reassigned.”

See Three Decades Later: A Review and Assessment of our Special Operations Forces 30 Years After the Creation of U.S. Special Operations Command, House Armed Services Committee, May 2, 2017.

Some other notable congressional hearing volumes that have recently been published include:

Crafting an Information Warfare and Counter-propaganda Strategy for the Emerging Security Environment, House Armed Services Committee, March 15, 2017

Examining the Costs of Overclassification on Transparency and Security, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, December 7, 2016

Last year executive branch agencies created the fewest new national security secrets ever reported, according to an annual report published today by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

The number of new secrets — or “original classification decisions” — was 39,240 in 2016, an all-time low. The previous low of 46,800 was set in 2014. By comparison, more than 230,000 new secrets a year were being generated a decade ago. Since such record-keeping began in 1980, the total number never dropped below 100,000 until 2012. See 2016 Annual Report to the President, Information Security Oversight Office, July 2017.

While interesting and welcome from an open government viewpoint, the reported reduction in new secrets cannot bear too much interpretive weight. The figures cited by ISOO represent a compilation of dozens of estimates provided by individual agencies, based on sampling methods that are inconsistent and not always reliable.

Moreover, this statistical approach to secrecy oversight implies that all classification decisions are of equal significance. In actuality, some secrets may be of profound importance — politically, morally, historically, or otherwise — while many other secrets (such as administrative or technical details) will have little or no public policy interest. A simple numerical count of the number of classification decisions does not capture their relative meaning or value.

Still, assuming that the uncertainties and the ambiguities in the data have been more or less constant over time, the reduction in new secrets to a record low level is likely to reflect a real reduction in the scope of national security secrecy in the Obama years.

Classification Costs at a Record High

Meanwhile, however, the annual costs incurred by the classification system reached record high levels in 2016, the ISOO report said.

“The total security classification cost estimate within Government for FY 2016 is $16.89 billion,” ISOO reported, compared to $16.17 billion the year before. Classification-related costs within industry were an additional $1.27 billion.

Classification Challenges

Because decisions to classify information often involve subjective judgments about the requirements of national security and the potential of particular information to cause damage, such decisions are sometimes disputed even within the government itself. The classification system allows for classification challenges to be filed by authorized holders of classified information who believe that the information is improperly classified.

Last year, there were 954 such classification challenges, the ISOO report said, about the same number as the year before. Classification of the information was overturned in only about 17% of those challenges, however, compared to over 40% that were overturned the year before.

The classification challenge procedure is a potentially important internal oversight mechanism that is not yet fully mature or widely utilized. For some reason, the majority of classification challenges (496) last year originated at US Pacific Command, while only a single one emerged from the Department of Justice. In fact, ISOO found that about a quarter of all agencies do not even have a classification challenge program, though they are supposed to.

If such challenges could be promoted and accepted as a routine element of classification practice, they could serve to invigorate classification oversight and to provide an useful internal self-check.

The ISOO annual report also presented new data on declassification activity, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, agency self-inspections, controlled unclassified information (CUI), and other aspects of national security information policy.

ISOO director Mark A. Bradley, whose tenure as director began this year, told the President that in the next reporting cycle, “ISOO will focus on improving our methodology in data collection and will begin planning and developing new measures for future reporting that more accurately reflect the activities of agencies managing classified and sensitive information.”

After nearly six months in office, President Trump has not yet issued a classified presidential directive on national security.

On June 16, Trump issued an unclassified National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) on US policy towards Cuba, reversing or limiting some of the steps towards normalization of relations with that country that were undertaken by the Obama Administration.

The version of the Memorandum that was published on the White House website was unnumbered, but a White House official said last week that it is formally designated as NSPM-5.

Since the first four Trump NSPMs are also unclassified public documents, this means that at least as of June 16 there were still no classified or unreleased presidential directives on national security.

That is unexpected, and it is a departure from past practice in previous Administrations.

The explanation for the lack of classified NSPMs is unclear.

It is possible that President Trump is using some other instrument for issuing policy directives on classified national security matters (though that would be at odds with the definition and purpose of NSPMs). Alternatively, he may have delegated certain aspects of national security decision making elsewhere, as with the authorization for the Secretary of Defense to determine troop levels in Afghanistan.

Or it could be that there just are no other Trump national security directives because there is no other Trump national security policy to speak of. The Administration may still be so understaffed that it is incapable of launching significant new policy initiatives.

The June 16 NSPM-5 directed the Secretary of State to publish it in the Federal Register. But three weeks later, even that simple task has still not been carried out.

The U.S. Air Force has upgraded the classification of information pertaining to nuclear weapons inspections performed by the Inspector General, reducing or eliminating public references to the outcome of such inspections.

Until recently, the IG weapons inspections could be described in unclassified reports. Now they will be classified at least at the Confidential level.

An Air Force nuclear surety inspection (NSI) “assesses a unit’s ability to accomplish its assigned nuclear weapons mission and produce reliable nuclear weapons in a safe and secure environment in compliance with applicable directives. Additionally, an NSI inspects a unit’s capability to safely and reliably receive, store, secure, assemble, transport, maintain, load, mate, lock/unlock, test, render safe and employ nuclear weapons.”

The inspections typically result in a “grade” indicating the level of compliance. Whether pass or fail, those grades, too, will now be classified.

The changes were made following the latest revision of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Instruction (CJCSI) 3263.05C, Nuclear Weapons Technical Inspections, issued on March 10, 2017. Though unclassified, the Instruction is “Limited” in distribution and is not publicly available.

Even those nuclear weapons inspections that produce a finding of full compliance cannot be disclosed, and from now on they also cannot be acknowledged in military decorations or unit awards.

“These changes are control measures put in place to prevent revealing potential vulnerabilities to adversary forces,” wrote Staff Sgt. Alexx Pons of Air Force Public Affairs. See “Nuclear inspection grade restricted in evaluation, decoration and award comments,” June 14, 2017.

The results of nuclear weapons inspections have been published for decades, noted Hans Kristensen of the Federation of American Scientists, without any reported adverse effect on national security. So an alternate explanation for the new classification policy seems wanted. “The change sure looks handy for preventing the public from knowing embarrassing information about when Air Force units fail nuclear inspections,” he said.