Sensational as these cases are, though, they are far from representative of the actual flaws plaguing our nation’s system for keeping national security secrets.
The real problem is that the system is overwhelmed by a growing mountain of classified material. Too much information is classified, and too much of what’s classified is classified at too high a level of secrecy. Meanwhile, the declassification of documents for which secrecy is no longer necessary proceeds in dribs and drabs. This is counterproductive for officials who need to use the information in real time, while also discouraging accountability, oversight and serious historical analysis.
In 2012, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an advisory body within the National Archives, reported that procedures “for classification and declassification of national security information are outmoded, unsustainable and keep too much information from the public.” Back then, the government classified petabytes — a million gigabytes — of data annually. By 2019, it was up to petabytes every month. In 2020, the PIDB warned of an “explosion” of digital data. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said last year that “deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner.”
Last year, the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonprofit headed by former Defense Department official Henry Sokolski, published a report calling overclassification an “epidemic.” The problem stretches over the entire life span of programs and documents, from the moment they are first stamped secret, to when the information is needed for government operations, to the end stage of declassification. At the outset, too much is overclassified out of unwarranted fear by officials that they will let out something sensitive — often, it could be protected at lower levels of classification. At the end, in declassification, government officials face no penalty for keeping them secret and few incentives to unseal them.
Officials who make classification decisions frequently operate in apparent ignorance of what’s already public. The National Security Archive, a nonprofit affiliated with George Washington University, pointed out in December that Defense Department objections led to the withholding of key parts of a Kissinger-to-Nixon memo that had been published in full by the State Department nearly 10 years earlier.
Mr. Sokolski points out that overclassification can hinder the proper use of information: Air Force, Army, Navy and intelligence community officials, he reports, have experienced dysfunction caused by overclassification, especially information put into highly classified special access programs, or SAPs. In Afghanistan, units on the battlefield often resorted to using commercial imagery because they were unable to access the excessively classified material. Moreover, he says overclassification has weakened oversight by Congress, inspectors general and congressional staff.
A prime cause of the overclassification epidemic, according to his report, are vague and conflicting classification guidelines and authorities. The government maintains more than 2,000 security classification guidebooks, including more than 400 for the Army alone, the report says.
How to fix this is coming into focus — slowly. About seven years ago, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency realized it needed to get data to the battlefield more quickly. It reduced the agency’s 65 guidebooks into a single guidebook, and made it clear that officials should assess whether classification would hinder missions and information-sharing when making decisions. Unfortunately, this agency’s example stands alone. It should be replicated throughout the government.
Another fix: rationalize the classification process into two tiers, “secret” and “top secret,” with appropriate protections and guidelines that will also prevent labeling as “classified” material that does not need to be protected. Artificial intelligence could help sort material more consistently.
Congress also needs to act. It created the Public Interest Declassification Board more than two decades ago to advise the president on these difficult issues. The board needs a budget and its own staff, which it still lacks.
The broken declassification system hurts national security and hampers American democracy. Repair is long overdue.
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