Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works
Although people have been complaining about abuse of the national security classification system for decades, such complaints have rarely been translated into real policy changes.
More than half a century ago, a Defense Department advisory committee warned that “Overclassification has reached serious proportions.” But despite innumerable attempts at corrective action over the years by official commissions, legislators, public interest groups and others, similar or identical complaints echo today. What is even more interesting and instructive, however, is that a few of those attempts did not fail. Instead, they led to specific, identifiable reductions in official secrecy, at least on a limited scale.
For example, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) that was created in 1995 has consistently overturned the classification of information in the majority of documents presented for its review. And the Fundamental Classification Policy Review that was performed by the Department of Energy in 1995 eliminated dozens of obsolete classification categories following a detailed review of agency classification guides. These and just a few other exceptional efforts demonstrate that even deeply entrenched secrecy practices can be overcome under certain conditions.
In an effort to identify some of those conditions, I wrote a paper entitled “Reducing Government Secrecy: Finding What Works” (pdf). It has just been published in the Yale Law and Policy Review, volume 27, no. 2, Spring 2009.
Among other things, the experience of the ISCAP underscores the importance of extending declassification authority beyond the agency that imposed the classification in the first place. It would be useless to restore “the presumption against classification” in cases of “significant doubt,” as President Obama suggested on May 29, if that presumption applied only when such doubt arose in the mind of the classifier. But if classification were to be overruled by doubt in the minds of other persons — ISOO overseers, Inspector General auditors, judges in FOIA proceedings, and others — significant changes would be enabled.
However, systemic classification reform simply will not happen without careful independent review of agency classification guides, which specify exactly what information is to be classified. The DoE Fundamental Classification Policy Review proves that such a review, including public participation and input, is both possible and highly effective. It needs to be replicated at other classifying agencies.
The White House has announced an online process for receiving public comments and recommendations for changes to classification and declassification policies. Discussion of declassification policy begins today here.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]