Over the objections of its authors, the Department of Homeland Security classified a 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences on the potential vulnerability of the U.S. electric power system until most of it was finally released yesterday.

The report generally concluded, as other reports have, that the electric grid is lacking in resilience and is susceptible to disruption not only from natural disasters but also from deliberate attack.

But even though the report was written for public release, the entire document was classified by DHS and could not be made available for public deliberation.  Amazingly, it took five years for the classification decision to be reviewed and reversed.  As Academy leaders explained in the Foreword to the report:

“DHS concluded that the report would be classified in its entirety under the original classification authority vested in the DHS undersecretary for science and technology. Because the committee believed that the report as submitted contained no restricted information, the NRC [National Research Council] requested the formal classification guidance constituting the basis for the classification decision. That guidance was not provided, and so in August 2010, the NRC submitted a formal request for an updated security classification review. Finally, in August 2012, the current full report was approved for public release, reversing the original classification decision, except that several pages of information deemed classified are available to readers who have the necessary security clearance.”

“We regret the long delay in approving this report for public release,” wrote Ralph J. Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences, and Charles M. Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering in the Foreword.

“We understand the need to safeguard security information that may need to remain classified,” they wrote. “But openness is also required to accelerate the progress with current technology and implementation of research and development of new technology to better protect the nation from terrorism and other threats.”

They said that a workshop was planned to address changes that have occurred since the report was completed in 2007.

See “Terrorism and the Electric Power Delivery System,” National Research Council, released November 14, 2012.  (More from Foreign Policy, NYT)

Classification policy at the Department of Homeland Security has become somewhat more streamlined lately as a result of the Obama Administration’s Fundamental Classification Guidance Review.

Of the Department’s 74 security classification guides, 45 were revised and 16 were cancelled.  Overall, 157 subtopics that had been classified — and that could be used to justify classification of DHS records — “were determined to no longer require classification,” according to the DHS final report on the Fundamental Classification Guidance Review of July 16, 2012.

In a new case of alleged mishandling of classified materials, a Navy contract linguist who served in Bahrain until earlier this year was charged with unlawful retention of national defense information after several classified documents were found in his possession.

But although James F. Hitselberger, an experienced Arabic translator, was charged under an Espionage Act statute (18 USC 793e), he is not suspected of espionage.  The government “concedes that Defendant… did not disseminate the classified information to a ‘foreign power’,” a Magistrate Judge noted on Monday when the case was unsealed.

Rather, Mr. Hitselberger told NCIS agents that “his sole purpose was to take the materials to his quarters to read” and he “claimed not to know that the documents… were classified, notwithstanding their clear markings.”

The case has a number of unusual features, beginning with the defendant himself, who is a peripatetic collector of rare documents. While at the University of Texas at Austin in the 1990s, he was said to have been “working on an open-ended Ph.D. in an unknown subject.”  His living quarters in Bahrain, in which a classified document was allegedly found in April of this year, were “extremely cluttered and contained hundreds of newspapers [and] numerous books.”

Remarkably, Mr. Hitselberger had donated many of his most valuable documentary discoveries over the years to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which actually maintains a James F. Hitselberger Collection. It notably includes political posters and leaflets that he gathered in pre-revolutionary Iran.

Unfortunately, according to a newly unsealed complaint, Hoover’s Hitselberger Collection also contained classified records that he had contributed.

“Agents visited the Hoover Archives and reviewed the collection.  In an area open to the public, the agents found a classified document titled Bahrain Situation Update dated February 13, 2012…. In a secure, non-public area of the Archives, agents also discovered two other documents marked SECRET.”

A disconcerted Hoover Institution archivist told Mr. Hitselberger in May by email that “in light of the FBI investigation of your collection here at Hoover, we will no longer accept additions to the collection, as we don’t want to risk receiving more classified material.”

In April of this year, Mr. Hitselberger was dismissed from his post in Bahrain and was expected to return to the United States.  Instead, however, he traveled for months through Germany, Sweden, Malta, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom, and was beyond the reach of U.S. authorities.

“Although the government was aware of Defendant’s whereabouts during that time, the countries would not extradite him [to the U.S.] because the offense charged was characterized as a ‘political offense’,” according to a November 5 memorandum of findings of fact by DC District Magistrate Judge Deborah A. Robinson.

But last month, when it was learned that he was traveling to Kuwait, the Government of Kuwait agreed to expel him into U.S. custody if he arrived there without a valid passport.  So the U.S. suspended his passport, and upon arrival placed him under arrest.

In traditional espionage cases, a suspected spy is sometimes identified by unexplained affluence or ostentatious behavior.  But, as noted, this is not an espionage case and there is no question of affluence.

To the contrary, the government and the court seemed disturbed by Mr. Hitselberger’s extraordinary frugality which, they suggested, might enable him to quietly vanish.

“Defendant has demonstrated his ability to live abroad and survive on his apparently modest means,” wrote Judge Robinson. “Defendant’s pattern of residing in, and relocating to, various countries without ascertainable income bespeaks his ability to live abroad undetected with limited resources.”

Mr. Hitselberger was ordered detained without bond.

The Department of Defense Inspector General (IG) announced that it will begin to review the Department’s classification practices, as required by the 2010 Reducing Over-Classification Act.

The review will evaluate the policies and procedures “that may be contributing to persistent misclassification of material.”  It will also address “efforts by the Department to decrease over-classification,” wrote Acting Deputy Inspector General James R. Ives in an October 3 letter sent to Department officials.

The new Inspector General review has the potential to thicken and enrich the oversight of national security classification policy.  The IG staff will have broad access to whatever classified Department information they require to perform their statutorily-mandated review.  Moreover, they typically have an investigative orientation that goes beyond routine monitoring.  And while the Information Security Oversight Office is responsible for secrecy oversight government-wide, the IG reviews (which are to be coordinated with ISOO) are to be focused, in-depth assessments of a single host agency and so they may be expected to provide new granularity as well as actionable findings.

Of course, there are limits to what the IG can achieve.  The IG review will at best evaluate the Defense Department’s compliance with executive branch classification policies;  it will not inquire into the necessity or wisdom of the policies themselves.  If the executive order on classification is based on outdated presumptions, or is otherwise misconceived– that is beyond the purview of the IG.

Still, this seems like an approach worth testing.  The use of Inspectors General to bolster classification oversight was advocated by the Federation of American Scientists at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee on “Classification of National Security Information” in July 2007.  Rep. Anna Eshoo, who chaired the hearing, welcomed the idea as “very helpful.”

The proposal for IG review was then embraced by Rep. Jane Harman, who incorporated it into her 2007 House bill on over-classification.  With the Senate sponsorship of Sen. Joe Lieberman, the Reducing Over-Classification Act was finally passed by Congress and signed by President Obama in October 2010.

The DoD IG had said last year that it intended to begin the classification review “immediately,” but that seems to have been a false start.  In any case, the first of two IG reviews in each agency must be completed by the end of September 2013.

The DoD Inspector General also announced another project to review interactions between DoD employees and the media concerning DoD classified programs.

For the second year in a row and for only the second time in the post-9/11 era, total intelligence spending declined last year to $75.4 billion, according to figures released yesterday by the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense (Bloomberg, Wash Times, Reuters).

Total spending had peaked in FY2010 at $80.1 billion, and declined in FY2011 to $78.6 billion.

“We are looking at some pretty steep budget cuts across the board in the Intelligence Community,” DNI James Clapper told the Senate Intelligence Committee last January.

“Never before has the Intelligence Community been called upon to master such complexity on so many issues in such a resource-constrained environment,” he said then. “We’re rising to the challenge by continuing to integrate the Intelligence Community, … taking advantage of new technologies, implementing new efficiencies, and, as always, simply working hard. But, candidly, maintaining the world’s premier intelligence enterprise in the face of shrinking budgets will be difficult. We’ll be accepting and managing risk more so than we’ve had to do in the last decade.”

But while intelligence budgets are shrinking, they remain very high by historical standards, having more than doubled over the past decade.

Total intelligence spending is comprised of two budget constructs:  the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP).  The large defense intelligence agencies — including NSA, NRO, and NGA — receive funding through both budget programs.

For the first time ever in FY2012, both the budget request for the NIP ($55 billion) and the subsequent budget appropriation ($53.9 billion) have been disclosed.  (The MIP request was disclosed for FY2013, but not for FY2012.)  This is something of a breakthrough in intelligence classification policy.

Hypothetically (or so it was long asserted), a hostile intelligence analyst could derive valuable insight from the gap between each year’s budget appropriation, or between the appropriation and the request, to the detriment of U.S. security.

“Disclosure of the budget request or the total appropriation reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security in several ways,” wrote Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet in 1999 in a successful effort to keep the budget secret at that time. “First, disclosure of the budget request reasonably could be expected to provide foreign governments with the United States’ own assessment of its intelligence capabilities and weaknesses. The difference between the appropriation for one year and the Administration’s budget request for the next provides a measure of the Administration’s unique, critical assessment of its own intelligence programs. A requested budget decrease reflects a decision that existing intelligence programs are more than adequate to meet the national security needs of the United States. A requested budget increase reflects a decision that existing intelligence programs are insufficient to meet our national security needs. A budget request with no change in spending reflects a decision that existing programs are just adequate to meet our needs.”

But this longstanding official position has now lost any semblance of cogency.

“In my view, this argument does not stand up to even a few minutes of serious analysis,” wrote former 9/11 Commission executive director (and Romney campaign adviser) Philip Zelikow in the latest issue of the CIA journal Studies in Intelligence.

But with serious analysis evidently in short supply, total intelligence budget secrecy remained the norm for many decades until recently.

As often happens, the Federal Bureau of Investigation invoked national security a few years ago to justify withholding certain information from a Freedom of Information Act requester named Deirdre McKiernan Hetzler.

But as rarely happens, a court last month critically assessed the FBI national security claim and ordered the Bureau to release some of the withheld information.

Ms. Hetzler, acting pro se (i.e. without an attorney), had requested records concerning her deceased father, who had once been the subject of an FBI investigation.  The FBI provided her with some records but withheld others, stating that they remained classified in order to protect an intelligence activity.

But after reviewing the withheld records in camera, Judge Michael A. Telesca of the Western District of New York determined that some of the information contained in them was not exempt from disclosure under FOIA.  The FBI had been withholding it under the FOIA’s national security exemption even though it was actually unclassified or declassified.

“The Court is not persuaded that Defendants [the FBI and the Justice Department] have carried their burden of showing that disclosure of this information could cause serious damage to national security,” Judge Telesca wrote in a September 6, 2012 opinion.  He therefore ordered the FBI to reprocess the request and to release the information to Ms. Hetzler as specified in his ruling.

The Court here acted as a check on the normally unconstrained official tendency to classify and withhold information.  That is what judicial review is supposed to do, though it doesn’t happen very often.

Earlier this year, Judge Richard W. Roberts of the DC District ordered the U.S. Trade Representative to release a classified document to the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) because he found that the document was not properly classified.

The USTR “failed to provide a plausible or logical explanation of why disclosure of [the document] reasonably could be expected to damage United States foreign relations,” he wrote in his opinion ordering release.

The government has appealed that ruling.  Judge Roberts “inappropriately second-guessed the Executive’s expertise in the uniquely sensitive area of foreign relations,” the government said in its September 17 appeals brief.

No, on the contrary, CIEL responded in its own brief to the appeals court this week, Judge Roberts did exactly what the FOIA requires.

“A district court reviewing [an agency claim that a document is classified and exempt from disclosure] must give substantial weight to the agency’s explanations, but must not simply acquiesce in the agency’s determination,” CIEL attorneys wrote.

“Congress explicitly ‘stressed the need for an objective, independent judicial determination, and insisted that judges could be trusted to approach the national security determinations with common sense, and without jeopardy to national security’,” they wrote, citing prior FOIA case law.

The document that is being contested in this case is a one-page memorandum that presents the US government’s legal interpretation of the phrase “in like circumstances.”

The government says that because the document was shared confidentially with other governments as part of a (now-concluded) free trade negotiation, its involuntary disclosure would undermine the confidentiality of diplomatic negotiations.

Judge Roberts said this argument was not compelling “since the United States would be revealing its own position only” and would not be disclosing foreign government information that had been provided in confidence.

Indeed, “There is no expectation that a government is required to keep its own negotiating positions confidential from its own citizens,” said former US trade negotiator Daniel Magraw in a statement cited by CIEL.

CIEL said that “Under USTR’s interpretation, USTR could withhold any document — even a document whose release would otherwise cause absolutely no harm — simply by entering into a confidentiality arrangement and arguing that the breach of that arrangement would undermine trust and cause damage to US foreign relations; the withholding would be insulated from judicial review.”

“Fortunately, FOIA limits what an agency can make confidential,” CIEL wrote in its appeals brief.

A date for oral argument before the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has not yet been set.

The U.S. Army has just published the 2013 edition of its annual Weapon Systems Handbook, which is filled with updated information on dozens of weapon systems, the military contractors who produce them, and the foreign countries that purchase them.

So one learns, for example, that the RQ-11B Raven Small Unmanned Aircraft System is marketed to Denmark, Estonia, Lebanon, and Uganda, while the United States sells artillery ammunition both to Israel and to Lebanon.

An appendix provides an informative breakdown of military industry contractors by weapon system and by the state where the contractor is located.

“The systems listed in this book are not isolated, individual products. Rather, they are part of an integrated Army system of systems designed to equip the Army of the future to successfully face any challenges,” according to the Handbook introduction.

“After 10 years of combat, today’s Army is significantly more capable than the Army of 2001. As we draw down from Iraq and Afghanistan, we must remain flexible, adaptable, and agile enough to respond and meet the needs of the combatant commanders.”

“Our objective is to equip and maintain an Army with the latest most advanced weaponry to win and return home quickly.”

The long-dormant Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) announced that it will hold its first public meeting next week and it invited members of the public to provide input to help shape the Board’s near-term agenda.

“In anticipation of setting the agenda of issues on which the Board will focus its attention, the Board would welcome the views of nongovernmental organizations and members of the public,” stated a notice in the October 23 Federal Register.

The PCLOB was created in response to a recommendation of the 9/11 Commission that “there should be a board within the executive branch to oversee… the commitment the government makes to defend our civil liberties.”

By statute, the PCLOB is mandated to “(1) analyze and review actions the executive branch takes to protect the Nation from terrorism, ensuring that the need for such actions is balanced with the need to protect privacy and civil liberties; and (2) ensure that liberty concerns are appropriately considered in the development and implementation of laws, regulations, and policies related to efforts to protect the Nation against terrorism.”

In response to the announcement of next week’s meeting, we wrote in to propose that the PCLOB should review the government’s problematic use of Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. “The use of Section 215, the so-called ‘business records’ provision, is the subject of intense and unresolved controversy that warrants the Board’s attention,” we suggested.

Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have stated that “most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act.”  If so, the members of the PCLOB can be stunned on behalf of most Americans by virtue of the security clearances and right of access that they possess.

For background on the origins and development of the PCLOB, see Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board: New Independent Agency Status, Congressional Research Service, August 27, 2012.

This morning former CIA officer John Kiriakou pleaded guilty to one count of disclosure of information identifying a covert agent, a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

“When KIRIAKOU disclosed the identity of Officer A to Journalist A, KIRIAKOU acted willfully in that defendant knew the disclosure was illegal,” according to a Statement of Facts approved and signed by Mr. Kiriakou today.

Under the terms of a plea agreement, the parties agreed that a prison term of 30 months would be “the appropriate sentence in this case.”  Other charges against him, including several counts under the Espionage Act, were dismissed.

By foregoing a trial, Mr. Kiriakou loses an opportunity to try and persuade a jury that his motives were benign, and that the harm to national security resulting from his disclosure was negligible and insignificant.  But he gains an early resolution of the case, which could otherwise drag on for months and years, as well as a sentence that would likely be much shorter than if he were to be found guilty at trial.

(FBI news release).

In the world of security clearances for access to classified information, the term “reciprocity” is used to indicate that one executive branch agency should ordinarily recognize and accept a security clearance that has been granted by another executive branch agency.

This is not just a nice, cost-efficient thing to do, it is actually a requirement of law.  Under the 2004 intelligence reform law, “all security clearance background investigations and determinations… shall be accepted by all agencies.”

This requirement for mutual recognition and acceptance applies equally to the higher order clearances of the intelligence community, where reciprocity is intended to promote employee “mobility” throughout the intelligence system, according to the 2009 Intelligence Community Directive 709.

So possessing a clearance from one agency should simplify the process of access approval at another agency.  But the opposite is not supposed to be true.  If an agency refuses for some reason to recognize the clearance granted by another agency, that refusal is not supposed to incur loss of clearance in the original agency.

Officially, such “negative reciprocity” is not an authorized, legitimate security clearance practice.  And yet there are signs that it is being adopted within the Department of Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals (DOHA), which rules on contested security clearance cases.

A new paper by attorney Sheldon I. Cohen describes a series of DOHA rulings in which a perverse form of negative reciprocity has been used to justify the denial or revocation of a security clearance, to the obvious detriment of due process.

“While the burden of proof has always been placed on the employee by the DOHA Appeal Board to show why he or she should be granted a security clearance, until now there was a modicum of a right to confrontation, and a right to challenge the evidence presented by the government,” Mr. Cohen wrote.

But in a ruling he describes, “anonymous redacted reports and other agency’s decision are enough to deny or revoke a DoD clearance regardless of contrary evidence.”

In a series of recent decisions, the DOHA Appeal Board “has accepted unsigned, unsworn, summary statements from unidentified persons in government agencies [that are] in direct conflict with live testimony at a hearing to deprive or revoke security clearances of government contractor employees.”

To avoid or limit the fallout of negative reciprocity, Mr. Cohen advises DoD employees and contractors to immediately appeal any adverse clearance decision, “at least to get [their] side of the issues on the record.”  Left unchallenged, it appears that adverse decisions by other agencies will be presumed reliable by DOHA and that any later attempt to rebut them “will most probably be rejected.”

See “Has the Defense Office of Hearings and Appeals Become a Star Chamber Court?” by Sheldon I. Cohen, October 19, 2012.

The Department of Defense last week published a three-volume “DoD Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) Administrative Security Manual,” DoD Manual 5105.21, October 19, 2012.

A massive quantity of historical intelligence satellite imagery from the KH-9 HEXAGON program is being declassified and will be made public in a series of releases that are scheduled over the coming year, intelligence community officials say.

Declassification of intelligence satellite imagery languished for years after President Clinton ordered the release of product from the Corona, Argon and Lanyard missions in the 1995 executive order 12951.  Although the Clinton order also required the periodic review of imagery from other missions, that requirement was effectively ignored by intelligence agencies and neglected by congressional oversight.

But in a May 2010 memorandum Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair ordered the “re-establishment” of the declassification review of intelligence imagery — though it had never been officially disestablished — with a particular focus on imagery from satellite systems that were deemed obsolete.

In January 2011, DNI James R. Clapper formally declared that the KH-9 HEXAGON program was obsolete, and that declassification review of all program imagery should therefore commence.  KH-9 HEXAGON was operational from 1971 to 1984.

“The process to declassify imagery pursuant to EO 12951 began shortly after DNI Blair’s May 26, 2010 memorandum and has been ongoing, in earnest, with the goal of releasing as much imagery as possible to the public, consistent with national security,” said Michael G. Birmingham of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “Accordingly, The KH-9/HEXAGON system was declared obsolete in January 2011 and a phased declassification of its imagery has ensued.”

More than two years after the Blair memorandum, however, next to nothing has yet been made public.

“The notable challenges to this effort are the sheer volume of imagery and the logistics involved in cataloging the imagery and moving it to archive,” Mr. Birmingham told Secrecy News.

“For context, and to grasp the scope of the project, the KH-9/HEXAGON system provided coverage over hundreds of millions of square miles of territory during its 19 successful missions spanning 1971-1984.  It is a daunting issue to address declassification of the program specifics associated with an obsolete system such as the KH-9, which involves the declassification of huge volumes of intelligence information gathered on thousands of targets worldwide during a 13 year time period.”

Daunting or not, the large bulk of the KH-9 imagery is expected to be released, with only perhaps 5% or so remaining classified.

“There is a schedule of multiple deliveries with final delivery of imagery scheduled for September 2013,” Mr. Birmingham said.

Within the intelligence community, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is the executive agent for imagery declassification.  NGA public affairs did not respond to questions about its declassification program.  [Correction:  The comments provided by Mr. Birmingham were coordinated with NGA public affairs and represent a joint response to our inquiry from ODNI and NGA.]

We were sad to learn that Professor Anna K. Nelson, a tenacious and effective advocate for improved public access to national security records, passed away last month.

For decades, Prof. Nelson argued for improved declassification practices in almost every venue imaginable, from congressional hearings to the most obscure and transient advisory bodies.  As a professor of history at American University, she insisted that government records were public property and that access to such records was one of the foundations of good citizenship.

Among many other posts, she served as a presidentially-appointed member of the JFK Assassination Records Review Board, which was tasked to oversee the declassification of records concerning the assassination of President Kennedy.  Because of the perseverance of Dr. Nelson and her colleagues, that Board was uniquely productive in overcoming longstanding barriers to declassification, particularly those pertaining to intelligence agency records.

Nevertheless, she was habitually pessimistic about the prospects for meaningful secrecy reform.

“Given past performance, it is highly unrealistic to assume that agencies, particularly Defense and the CIA, will be completely forthcoming or that the Archives will ever question agency decisions,” she wrote in a 2000 letter to Congress. “Agency declassification of selected, heavily redacted records will not serve the public interest. It will only breed more suspicion.”

Prof. Nelson also spoke out in defense of robust investigative reporting on national security matters.  In 2008, for example, she submitted a declaration of behalf of New York Times reporter James Risen, arguing that a grand jury subpoena against him in the pending leak case against former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling should be quashed.

“If Mr. Risen and other investigative journalists are unable to report effectively on matters of intelligence, the historical record will be incomplete, if not erroneous,” Dr. Nelson wrote.

“Although our own books and articles are stuffed with footnotes, we historians understand that investigative journalists, as observers of the present, must protect their sources. If they do not, the American people will never learn about corruption, incompetence, excessive government secrecy, flaws in homeland security, or disastrous decisions made by policy makers who are advised by their intelligence chiefs,” she wrote. “We must depend upon journalists and journalists must be permitted to depend upon confidential sources.”

The most fundamental purpose of national security policy is not to keep the nation safe from physical attack but to defend the constitutional order.  At least, that is what President Reagan wrote in a Top Secret 1986 directive.

“The primary objective of U.S. foreign and security policy is to protect the integrity of our democratic institutions and promote a peaceful global environment in which they can thrive,” President Reagan wrote in National Security Decision Directive 238 on “Basic National Security Strategy,” which was partially declassified in 2005.

In a list of national security objectives, the directive does note the imperative “to protect the United States… from military, paramilitary, or terrorist attack.”

But that is not the primary objective, according to the Reagan directive.  Defense of the Constitution evidently takes precedence.

The first purpose of national security policy is “to preserve the political identity, framework and institutions of the United States as embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution,” President Reagan wrote.

This is a remarkable statement, for several reasons.  First, it recognizes that the political identity and institutions of the United States are not simply a given, but that they are vulnerable to many types of threats and must be actively defended and sustained.  This task is not normally assigned the urgency or the priority given to “national security.”

Second, the directive distinguishes between constitutional governance and physical security. Not every measure intended to promote security is constitutional.  And not every act in defense of democratic self-governance is likely to promote public safety.  (The American Revolution was not calculated to increase “homeland security.” Quite the opposite.)  Sometimes a choice between the two is required.  President Reagan indicated what he thought the choice should be.

And third, the directive is remarkable because its rhetoric was so imperfectly realized by the Reagan Administration (and egregiously defied in the Iran-Contra Affair) and has been largely abandoned by its successors.

“Defending our Nation against its enemies is the first and fundamental commitment of the Federal Government,” wrote President George W. Bush in his 2002 National Security Strategy, skipping over President Reagan’s “primary” objective.

Likewise, “As President, I have often said that I have no greater responsibility than protecting the American people,” President Obama wrote in his National Strategy for Counterterrorism.

The Reagan directive invites reflection on what U.S. national security policy would look like if it were truly structured above all “to protect the integrity of our democratic institutions.”

In a section of the directive that was only classified Confidential, President Reagan contrasted the U.S. with the Soviet Union, which was described as its polar opposite.

“Our way of life, founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual, depends on a stable and pluralistic world order within which freedom and democratic institutions can thrive.  Yet, the greatest threat to the Soviet system, in which the State controls the destiny of the individual, is the concept of freedom itself.”

“The survival of the Soviet system depends to a significant extent upon the persistent and exaggerated representation of foreign threats, through which it seeks to justify both the subjugation of its own people and the expansion of Soviet military capabilities well beyond those required for self-defense,” President Reagan wrote.

Numerous Presidential directives from the Reagan Administration have been declassified in recent years and have released by the Reagan Library, though others still remain partially or completely classified. Many of the declassified directives provide a fascinating account that enlarges and enriches the public record of events of the time.

Only last year, for example, a 1985 directive (NSDD-172) on “Presenting the Strategic Defense Initiative” was finally declassified.

This year, NSDD 159 on “Covert Action Policy Approval and Coordination Procedures” (1985) was declassified.

NSDD 207 on “The National Program for Combatting Terrorism” (1986) was declassified in 2008.  Among other things, that directive ordered the Attorney General to “Review the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and determine whether terrorist movements or organizations are abusing its provisions.”