Decades-​​Old Docs Reclassified

Phew. I was wor­ried there, for a sec­ond, that some evil-​​doer might learn our country’s most sen­si­tive secrets. Like the CIA’s 1948 plan to drop leaflets behind the Iron Curtain. Or an English trans­la­tion of a news­pa­per arti­cle on China’s nukes — from Belgrade, 1962.
Luckily, we won’t have to worry about those breaches in secu­rity any more. Thanks to some intre­pid intel­li­gence agency bureau­crats, the New York Times reports, 55,000 “his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments that were avail­able for years, includ­ing some already pub­lished by the State Department and oth­ers pho­to­copied years ago by pri­vate his­to­ri­ans… have been remov[ed] from pub­lic access.”

The [pro­gram] began in 1999… But because the reclas­si­fi­ca­tion pro­gram is itself shrouded in secrecy gov­erned by a still-​​classified mem­o­ran­dum that pro­hibits the National Archives even from say­ing which agen­cies are involved it con­tin­ued vir­tu­ally with­out out­side notice until December. That was when an intel­li­gence his­to­rian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of doc­u­ments he had copied years ago had been with­drawn from the archives’ open shelves.
Mr. Aid [who has put his ver­sion of the whole affair online, and posted some of the reclas­si­fied papers] was struck by what seemed to him the innocu­ous con­tents of the doc­u­ments mostly decades-​​old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclas­si­fied doc­u­ments had been pre­vi­ously pub­lished in the State Department’s his­tory series, “Foreign Relations of the United States.“
“The stuff they pulled should never have been removed,” he said. “Some of it is mun­dane, and some of it is out­right ridicu­lous.“
After Mr. Aid and other his­to­ri­ans com­plained, the archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, which over­sees gov­ern­ment clas­si­fi­ca­tion, began an audit of the reclas­si­fi­ca­tion pro­gram, said J. William Leonard, direc­tor of the office.
Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after review­ing 16 with­drawn doc­u­ments and con­clud­ing that none should be secret.
“If those sam­ple records were removed because some­body thought they were clas­si­fied, I’m shocked and dis­ap­pointed,” Mr. Leonard said in an inter­view. “It just bog­gles the mind.”

“It is impor­tant to under­stand that there is no rig­or­ous, con­sen­sual def­i­n­i­tion of what con­sti­tutes clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion,” Steven Aftergood notes in today’s Secrecy News. “Instead, in a prac­ti­cal sense, clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion is what­ever the exec­u­tive branch says it is.”

In 1997, the Central Intelligence Agency declas­si­fied the total intel­li­gence bud­get for that year ($26.6 bil­lion). But intel­li­gence bud­get fig­ures from three, four and five decades ear­lier remain clas­si­fied. Why? Because the CIA says so!
One might argue that it should be the other way around — bud­get fig­ures from the remote past should be declas­si­fied while more recent fig­ures should per­haps be clas­si­fied. But such logic is for­eign to CIA clas­si­fi­ca­tion pol­icy, and to the clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tem as a whole.

“90 per­cent” of what’s cur­rently clas­si­fied is being wrongly kept from the pub­lic, Rep. Chris Shays, chair­man the national secu­rity panel of the House Committee on Government Reform, once told me. “I’ve read sup­pos­edly clas­si­fied doc­u­ments where page after page after page didn’t tell me any­thing I didn’t already know.“
Now, some might argue that it’s still bet­ter to err on the side of keep­ing things clan­des­tine — that the risk of releas­ing one impor­tant secret is so great, it out­weighs any poten­tial ben­e­fit of mak­ing the infor­ma­tion free.
Those peo­ple would not include some of the country’s top cur­rent and for­mer spies, how­ever. They argue that, by keep­ing a gazil­lion doc­u­ments under wraps, spooks and cops and sol­diers are pre­vented from shar­ing infor­ma­tion. And that’s not a good thing, when you’re try­ing to track down ter­ror­ists.
“Our secrecy sys­tem is all about pro­tect­ing secrecy offi­cers, and has noth­ing to do with pro­tect­ing secrets. It’s a self-​​licking ice-​​cream cone,” said Rich Haver, Donald Rumsfeld’s for­mer spe­cial assis­tant for intel­li­gence. “We’re com­part­men­tal­iz­ing the shit out of things. It’s caus­ing a total melt­down of our intel­li­gence processes.“
UPDATE 4:08 PM: Shays is going to hold a hear­ing on this next month. “Secrets are kept to pro­tect the national secu­rity,” he said in news release, “not to pre­vent embar­rass­ment or pro­tect Cold War bureau­crats from history’s judg­ment. When many knowl­edge­able voices, includ­ing the 9/​11 Commission, have called for greater open­ness and infor­ma­tion shar­ing, our poli­cies on cre­ation and han­dling of sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion are mov­ing in exactly the oppo­site direc­tion. That threat­ens national secu­rity.“

UPDATE 4:15 PM: 1442 days ago, when the bioweapons-​​watchers Sunshine Project filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the National Academies of Science about some sup­pos­edly “non-​​lethal” weapons research, the group fig­ured it would get a speedy response. After all, there’s a law that “when NAS does a study for the gov­ern­ment, doc­u­ments that are deposited in the Public Access Records File are pub­lic.” The Sunshine Project is still wait­ing. It’s one of the group’s “Top 10 Freedom of Information Failures,” pub­lished today.
(Big Ups: Nick)

February 21st, 2006 | Cloak and Dagger | 18637 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2006/02/21/decades-old-docs-reclassified/Decades-Old+Docs+Reclassified2006-02-21+14%3A40%3A10murdoc You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.