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Not Classy, Just Overclassified

“Unless secrecy is reduced, it cannot be protected.”

Then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) 30 years ago on his Commission on Government Secrecy report.

While it’s making headlines and giving headaches to Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence, the discovery of private possession of highly classified governmental documents is nothing new. “On a winter day in 1984, a briefcase stuffed with classified government documents showed up at a building in Pittsburgh, borne by someone who most certainly wasn’t supposed to have it… That someone was 13-year-old Kristin Preble. She had taken the papers to school as a show-and-tell project for her eighth-grade class. Her dad had found them in his Cleveland hotel room several years earlier and had taken them home as a souvenir…

“Teacher Jim DeLisio’s eyes popped when he saw the warnings on the documents inside. Among them: ‘Classified, Confidential, Executive’ and ‘Property of the United States Government.’” Associated Press January 30th. That middle school student only got a B on her presentation. Washington Post OpEd writer, Fareed Zakaria (January 26th) notes the obvious, that the “The system is out of control.” His analysis presents some staggering facts about our proclivity to over-classify:

“One 2004 essay put the number of classified pages in existence at about 7.5 billion. In 2012, records were classified at a rate of 3 per second, making for an estimated 95 million classifications that year alone. Today, no one knows how frequently information is classified. And as of 2019, more than 4 million people were eligible to access classified information, about one-third for top secret records, the highest general designation…

“In 1998, then-Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who served for years on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence beginning in 1977, wrote a book titled ‘Secrecy: The American Experience.’ In it, he lamented the rise of the ‘culture of secrecy’ within the U.S. government, which he believed was both bad for foreign policy and dangerous to democracy. On the first point, Moynihan argued that many of the government’s biggest mistakes were a result of its reluctance to share information and subject its analysis to outside criticism.

“Remember that the intelligence community was largely created to assess one question — the nature of the Soviet threat. It got this wrong. In the late 1950s, for example, it claimed that the Soviet Union was significantly ahead of the United States in missile technology and deployment, a very consequential but totally false assertion. More broadly, it got the state of the Soviet economy in the 1980s dead wrong, claiming it was sturdy when, in fact, it was collapsing. After the Cold War, in the late 1990s, the intelligence community’s central directive was to establish whether Saddam Hussein was trying to develop weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It got that wrong, as well.

“Moynihan argued that secrecy had become a form of regulation and bureaucratic control. People in government viewed information as power, didn’t want to share it, and developed elaborate mechanisms to horde it. They covered up mistakes, embarrassments and illegal activities by classifying the problem away…

“This problem has become much, much worse in the digital era. Timothy Naftali, a New York University scholar and former director of the Nixon Library, told me, ‘We now have a tsunami of classified documents — tens of thousands of emails, PowerPoints, all kinds of stuff — all stored somewhere in the cloud, but we still have a tiny staff of people at the National Archives for the declassification process.’ He estimated that it could take five years for a request to declassify a single document to even make it to the agency that has to decide whether to do so. Another scholar, Matthew Connelly of Columbia University, points out that the U.S. government spends about $18 billion a year on classifying and protecting information and just $100 million on declassification.”

When I was a 17-year-old working in an overseas US Embassy communications office in the 1960s, I was a complete security violation. Too young to receive any security clearance and operating without FBI clearance, I was charged with dropping off and picking up the diplomatic pouch from an exhausted US Air Force 2nd lieutenant at the local airport. On the tarmac with a huge local driver at 6 AM on a Sunday (no one else wanted to do it). But what really shocked me was the use of this “for classified materials only” system by local CIA staff to ferry their personal belongings, even laundry, in this sacred “pouch” (just a really tough duffle bag with a lead seal).

David Lauter, writing for the January 30th Los Angeles Times, embellishes: “[I]n 2017, officials made 49 million classification decisions, either on paper or, increasingly, by electronic means, according to the government’s Information Security Oversight Office, which was created 45 years ago by President Carter to set policy for management of the classification system… That was the last annual estimate: The number has grown so big, officials have given up trying to count… How much of that really requires secrecy?... One estimate came from former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean after he chaired the commission that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.. ‘Three-quarters of what I read that was classified shouldn’t have been,’ Kean said…

“Other former senior officials have put the share of unnecessary classification even higher, noting that a lot of what appears in classified documents involves information routinely published by news organizations such as this one… And as many national security experts say, the system contains huge incentives for over-classification and essentially none for openness… ‘There’s not much punishment for over-classification,’ said Scott Amey, general counsel to the Washington-based Project on Government Oversight. ‘There’s is a lot for inadvertent release.’… An official who improperly releases a sensitive document could be fined, fired or prosecuted. One who needlessly blocks public access faces no real penalty… Moreover, while most documents are supposed to become unclassified after 25 years, in practice, agencies routinely get extensions. The system for declassifying documents over time is hamstrung by understaffing and has never become a serious priority.

“[Yale Law School professor Oona Hathaway, a former special counsel to the Defense Department] has proposed flipping the system to automatically declassify documents after 10 years, with a few narrowly specified exceptions to protect intelligence sources and methods. If an agency wanted to keep something under wraps longer, it would have to prove the need for secrecy, rather than have the burden of proof fall on advocates of open government… Another potential reform would be to hold officials accountable for the amount they classify.

“Proposals for fundamental reforms like that have gone nowhere in the past. Just as national security officials have huge incentives to over-classify, elected officials have incentives to avoid challenging them… Few politicians want to run the risk of appearing complacent about security.” We could also require multiple levels of officials to classify anything. Even trying to get an older document declassified can take years. The current system obviously does not work, there are too many people with access to just about anything classified at any level, and the costs of maintaining this system are beyond justification. And exactly how much of this secret information… still is?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you want to empower a bureaucrat, give him or her a rubber stamp that reads “top secret” and a nice cover envelope.