In January, the Department of Defense ordered the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) not to publish certain data on areas of Afghanistan that were held by insurgents.

“This development is troubling for a number of reasons, not least of which is that this is the first time SIGAR has been specifically instructed not to release information marked ‘unclassified’ to the American taxpayer,” the SIGAR said in its January 2018 report to Congress.

But the Department of Defense soon reversed course, saying it was an error to withhold that information.

Last week, the SIGAR published an addendum to its January report that provided the previously suppressed data. In addition, a detailed control map and the underlying data for each of Afghanistan’s 407 districts were declassified and published. See Addendum to SIGAR’s January 2018 Quarterly Report to the United States Congress, February 26, 2018.

The basic thrust of the new data is that Afghan government control of the country is at its lowest reported level since December 2015, while insurgency control is at its highest.

“The percentage of districts under insurgent control or influence has doubled since 2015,” the SIGAR addendum said.

The National Archives said last week that it will gather tens of millions of pages of classified historical records from Presidential Libraries around the country and will bring them to Washington, DC for declassification review.

“We are making this change to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the safeguarding and the declassification of this material and in light of resource challenges,” said NARA chief operating officer William J. Bosanko. “Researchers are expected to benefit from efficiencies we can gain in the declassification process.”

“It is important to stress that this change in physical location of the records is temporary and that the records will be returned to the Presidential Libraries as they are declassified,” he wrote in a March 1 message.

Is it really necessary to physically move the records to DC in order to declassify them? Isn’t there at least a subset of classified records at presidential libraries that could be readily declassified on site?

“My personal opinion is yes (although the size of the subset changes greatly from Library to Library),” replied Mr. Bosanko by email today.  “However, this comes back to age-old issues around declassification authority and third-agency referrals.  With the policies that are in place, in a practical sense, the answer is no (and, the status quo has not realized the sort of declassification I think is at the heart of your question).  And, bringing them here makes it much easier to address long-standing challenges such as certain topics that cut across more than one Administration.”

There are approximately 75 million pages of classified records at presidential libraries that will be affected by the move, Mr. Bosanko said. Duplicate copies will not be kept at the libraries during the declassification review.

“We are just starting the planning process and many details must still be worked out,” he wrote.

If Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee want to publicly release a classified memo that they prepared on alleged misconduct in the FBI, what could be wrong with that?

Quite a lot, actually. Even if the risks of disclosing classified information in this case are small (a point that is disputed), the selective disclosure of isolated claims is bound to produce a distorted view of events. The suppression of dissenting views held by Democratic members of the Committee only aggravates the distortion.

“Deliberately misleading by selectively declassifying is an established technique, and it is one that is both shady and dangerous,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) on the Senate floor on Tuesday.

“This business of selectively cherry-picking things out of classified information to spread a false narrative has a very unpleasant echo for me because this is what the Bush administration was up to when it was trying to defend the torture program. They selectively declassified, for instance, that Abu Zubaydah had been the subject of what they called their enhanced interrogation techniques program and that he had produced important, actionable intelligence. What they did not declassify was that all the actionable intelligence he gave them had been provided before they started on the torture techniques.”

Sen. Whitehouse said that the practice resembled Soviet and Russian information warfare activities that were used “to poison the factual environment.”

“You start with the selective release of classified material that the public can’t get behind because the rest is classified, the false narrative that the ranking member has pointed out that that creates, the partisan and peculiar process for getting there, the ignoring of warnings from their own national security officials about how bad this is, the convenient whipping up of all of this in far-right media at the same time, the amplification of that actually by Russian bots and other sources, and the fact that this is all pointed, not coincidentally, at the agency and officials who are engaged in investigating the Trump White House and the Trump campaign, it is so appallingly obvious what the game is that is being played here.”

Meanwhile, Sen. Whitehouse said, Congress has taken no action to protect against foreign interference in U.S. elections.

“We are warned that a hostile foreign power is going to attack our 2018 election. Where is the legislation to defend against that? Where is the markup of the legislation? Where is the effort to do what needs to be done to defend our democracy? Here we are just a few months out from the election. We are 9 months out. Do I have the math right? It is 9 months between here and there. Nothing.”

Yesterday, the FBI put out a brief statement noting that “we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

But as far as is known, no similar concerns have been expressed by intelligence community leaders.

“It is stunning to me,” Sen. Whitehouse said, “that we have heard nothing–at least I have heard nothing– […] from our Director of National Intelligence, DNI Coats, and I have heard nothing from CIA Director Pompeo for–how long it has been?”

Yesterday, coincidentally, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that DNI Coats had directed the declassification of classified intelligence records concerning the Tet Offensive launched by North Vietnamese forces in January 1968.

An ODNI posting said that it is part of a “New Transparency Effort To Share Historical Information of Current Relevance.”

Any declassification of historical information is welcome. But for all of its historical gravity, the Tet Offensive could hardly have less “current relevance.”

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.

The nominal deadline for release of the last remaining records concerning the assassination of President Kennedy under the terms of the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 is October 26, 2017.

Agencies have an opportunity to request postponement of release, beyond the deadline, of a few thousand records that are still being withheld, subject to Presidential approval. Officials would not say if any such requests have been forwarded to the White House, but so far none are known to have been approved by President Trump.

In a resolution introduced in the Senate last week, Senators Charles Grassley and Patrick Leahy called for full release of all remaining assassination records.

They urged the President of the United States to “reject any claims for the continued postponement of the full public release of those records.”

Further background from the Congressional Research Service can be found in President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection: Toward Final Disclosure of Withheld Records in October 2017, CRS Insight, May 26, 2017.

In an unusual assertion of congressional authority over national security classification policy, the Senate adopted a provision that would require the Secretary of Defense to declassify certain classified documents regarding military exposures to toxic releases.

The provision was authored by Senator Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and was included in the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 18 (HR 2810, sect. 1089), which was passed in the Senate on September 18.

The measure directs that “The Secretary of Defense shall declassify documents related to any known incident in which not fewer than 100 members of the Armed Forces were exposed to a toxic substance that resulted in at least one case of a disability.”

Though limited in scope and application, the provision is noteworthy because it does not simply declare a “sense of Congress” in favor of declassification or call for a “review” of classified records. It actually requires declassification to be performed.

The Moran legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), does allow for the possibility of exemption of some material from declassification, but only if it would “materially and immediately threaten the security of the United States.”

That is a far more stringent standard than is provided by the executive order on classification, which vaguely permits withholding of information whenever it “could be expected to cause damage to the national security.”

In effect, the Senate bill overrides the executive order with respect to the specified documents on toxic exposures by mandating declassification with new, narrower criteria for withholding.

This is not the first time that Congress has enacted such a legislative override of classification policy. It did so, most notably, in the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Some other attempts to legislate a new standard for declassification were initiated but did not advance into law, as in the case of the Human Rights Information Act.

Though rare, successful legislative action of this kind demonstrates that Congress can be an effective participant in determining the scope and performance of the classification system. More than that, Congress has the power to help to correct errors and abuses in classification policy.

This is one of those cases where congressional intervention was necessary, according to Sen. Moran.

“Without declassification of these documents, many of our veterans are left without proof of the exposure they suffered, preventing them from being able to establish their service-connected conditions and secure a disability rating that makes them eligible to receive the care and benefits they deserve to help them cope with the residual health damage,” his office said in a news release.

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.

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.”

Last year, the National Archives (NARA) acquired a large number of historically valuable National Security Agency records. But they remain inaccessible to researchers, at least for the time being.

David Langbart of NARA described the situation at a closed meeting of the State Department Historical Advisory Committee late last year. According to recently published minutes of that meeting:

“The [NSA] records consist of approximately 19,000 folders without any real arrangement. 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. Langbart concluded that 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.”

The National Archives confirmed that this description remains accurate today.

So not only are these thousands of half-century-old records still classified or otherwise unavailable, but the finding aid that would enable researchers to locate specific documents of interest is itself a classified document.

The Federation of American Scientists asked NSA officials to voluntarily declassify the 557-page finding aid as a first step towards making the NARA collection useful to researchers.

They agreed to do so.

“We can have a redacted version for you by September,” wrote Dr. David J. Sherman of NSA. “We of course will provide one to NARA as well.”

Dr. Sherman noted that the collection includes documents of widely varying complexity. “Judging by their titles, some almost certainly require significant training in mathematics and engineering to understand.  Others appear to have been written for more general audiences.”

Furthermore, although the collection as a whole is maintained as classified, “just under one third of the folders appear to be unclassified in full,” he estimated.

Under the circumstances, classifying the entire set of records along with its descriptive catalog was obviously not optimal, he agreed.

“I take the point about this foreclosing any possibility for researchers to know what might be available in the collection and agree it is something we should have addressed in this instance and need to fix in the future,” Dr. Sherman said.

Therefore, he added, “in any similar situations in the future — i.e. ones where we are transferring large, mixed collection such as this — we’ll make it standard practice to consider whether the percentage of unclassified materials is high enough to provide NARA with a redacted finding aid at the time of the transfer.”

The role of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown in managing the Pentagon, boosting the military and confronting the Soviet Union during the Jimmy Carter Administration is examined in a new Department of Defense historical volume that was declassified and published this month.

It was during Secretary Brown’s tenure that the Carter Administration reversed a decline in defense spending and began a military buildup that is usually associated with the Reagan Administration. Stealth aircraft, precision bombs, cruise missiles and other new weapons programs were championed by Brown, a physicist, and brought into production.

“Unlike previous secretaries of defense, Brown faced the Soviet Union at the apex of its Cold War military might,” wrote historian Edward Keefer in the new DoD volume. “Flush from new discoveries of oil and natural gas in an era of high energy prices, the Soviet Union of the Carter years came closer to matching the United States in strategic power than it had in any other period. By most reckonings, the Kremlin held advantages over the West in conventional weapons and forces in central Europe. Brown and his staff worked diligently and creatively to offset the formidable Soviet military challenge. Yet the achievements Brown amassed as secretary have been overshadowed by one horrendous failure, the Iran hostage rescue mission. As a result, history has paid scant attention to his successes. Similarly, it has ignored the foundation that the Carter administration built for the Reagan revolution in defense. This volume aims to remedy the oversight.”

“This is an authorized history, but not an official one,” wrote DoD Chief Historian Erin R. Mahan. “There is a distinction.” That is, it is based on authorized access to classified source materials and underwent internal peer review, but it represents the author’s own judgment.

Among other areas of friction and public controversy, Secretary Brown defended the nuclear weapon targeting policy set forth in Carter’s Presidential Directive 59. “To liberal arms control advocates, such as the Federation of American Scientists, PD 59 seemed warlike and dangerous,” the Pentagon history said.

See Harold Brown: Offsetting the Soviet Military Challenge, 1977-1981, Office of the Secretary of Defense, June 2017, 840 pages.

The new volume is the latest in a series of scholarly histories of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and one of several new publications from the OSD History Office.

The National Reconnaissance Office, the U.S. intelligence agency that builds and operates the nation’s spy satellites, says it is all for increased openness, within certain boundaries.

“The NRO takes very seriously its commitment to greater openness and transparency, and makes every effort, in all of its information review and release programs, to release as much information as we can while still protecting our sensitive sources and methods from harm,” the NRO wrote in a newly disclosed report.

But there are practical limits on what can be accomplished, NRO said:

“While the goal of increasing discretionary declassification decisions is a noble one, we believe that such an effort requires a program separate and distinct from the existing systematic, automatic, mandatory, and other release programs; that establishing a new program is counterproductive given our current resource constraints; and that such an endeavor is unnecessary given our current declassification efforts.”

See NRO Responses on Feasibility of Certain Classification Policy Reforms, February 28, 2017, released last week under the Freedom of Information Act. The NRO document was prepared in response to questions posed last year by then-Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, Jr.

While currently operational reconnaissance programs are excluded from declassification review, NRO says it “already examines all [other] classified material that comes up for review for declassification regardless of its age, or under what circumstances it has been requested. If we determine that we cannot articulate harm in release, we consider it for declassification and release.”

In sum, “while we do not look proactively for new items to declassify, we do take a forward-leaning approach to performing declassification reviews by going beyond the ‘can we protect this?’ question to asking ‘do we really need to protect this?'”

NRO said that it could do still more to increase disclosure by reviewing classification guidance, anticipating recurring requests, and improving classification management practices. “We believe these measures, over time, will help eliminate over-classification and make much more material available for public release,” NRO said.

Considering that even the name of the National Reconnaissance Office was considered classified information 25 years ago, until it was declassified by former NRO director Martin Faga in September 1992, the NRO has come quite some distance into the daylight.

It has a substantial presence online, with an electronic reading room featuring numerous declassified records of historical interest. NRO is also the first U.S. intelligence agency to successfully undergo a financial audit.

DNI Clapper had specifically asked last year whether intelligence agencies could do more, consistent with 32 CFR 2001.35, to “declassify information when the public interest in disclosure outweighs the need for continued classification.”

This is harder than it sounds, NRO replied. It presumes that the public interest in disclosure and the need for classification can each be measured, or “weighed,” and then meaningfully compared to determine which is the weightier factor. Neither of those presumptions may be correct. For agency officials, the decision whether or not to declassify is likely to be more of a judgment call than a calculation.

“The CFR does not provide a threshold to assist organizations in determining at what point ‘public interest in disclosure outweighs the need for continuing classification’,” NRO wrote. “The NRO would require clarification and further guidance to assist us in gauging when the public interest outweighs the need to protect our currently classified programs.”

In fact, it is probably not realistic to expect agencies such as NRO to second-guess their own classification decisions on behalf of the public interest. Rather, the authority to exercise a public interest override of classification decisions should be vested in a higher-level body such as the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel that would be empowered to consider and to act on broad national and public interests. If that were done, then new procedures would also be needed for interested members of the public to present a public interest argument to that higher-level body for its consideration.

The Trump Administration requested $57.7 billion for the National Intelligence Program in Fiscal Year 2018, up from a requested $54.9 billion in FY 2017.

The Administration requested $20.7 billion dollars for the Military Intelligence Program in FY 2018, up from a requested $18.5 billion in FY 2017. (The amounts actually appropriated in FY 2017 have not yet been disclosed.)

The intelligence budget request figures were published last week by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and by the Department of Defense.

The annual disclosure of the requested amount for the National Intelligence Program was mandated by Congress in the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2010. So disclosure is required regardless of the preferences of the current Administration. “As directed by statute,” wrote DNI Dan Coats this year in advance of his confirmation hearing, “I will ensure that the public release of figures representing aggregate funds requested by and appropriated for the IC is completed annually.”

Interestingly, however, there is no corresponding statutory requirement for disclosure of the requested amount for the Military Intelligence Program. The practice of voluntarily disclosing the MIP budget request was initiated by Gen. James R. Clapper when he was Under Secretary of Defense (Intelligence).

“I did that,” said then-DNI Clapper in December 2015. “I thought the public had a right to know.”