"Top Secret" shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe.My experience from forty some years ago is that what was TOP SECRET in the morning may be unclassified by the evening. On the other hand, some things are held as TOP SECRET for a very long time.
The Obama Administration becomes the latest to make an effort to cut through the mountain of previously classified information that should be declassified and released to the general public, to include release to interested researchers in the areas of history and political science (and given the age of some of this, maybe even archeology).
The President issued, as of 29 December 2009, two Executive Orders with regard to Classified National Security Information.
There is the "Executive Order - Classified National Security Information". This is the big picture EO.
And here is the Executive Order - Original Classification Authority, which states who has "original authority" to classify something. For example, the Secretary of the Treasury can classify something as TOP SECRET.♠ The Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency may only classify information up to SECRET (which is lower than TOP SECRET).♥
The President also issued a Memorandum giving some direction regarding how to get ahead of this backlog of material that should have been declassified by now.
Under the direction of the National Declassification Center (NDC), and utilizing recommendations of an ongoing Business Process Review in support of the NDC, referrals and quality assurance problems within a backlog of more than 400 million pages of accessioned Federal records previously subject to automatic declassification shall be addressed in a manner that will permit public access to all declassified records from this backlog no later than December 31, 2013.This Memorandum, "Presidential Memorandum - Implementation of the Executive Order, 'Classified National Security Information'", can be found here.
While it took a long time for the Administration to get these directives out, they are now heading in the proper direction. And, 31 December 2013 isn't far off and 400 million pages is a lot to review and release. At two minutes a page, that is 13 million hours of reading, or 1.6 million man-days, more if you allow for breaks.
Regards — Cliff
♠ For instance, his Income Tax Returns.
♥ On the other hand, avoiding a FOIA Request works just as well. For example, all those FOIA requests with regard to Climate Change data to NASA or the British CRU.
..And good luck to the folks that actually have to slog through all this to determine what can be downgraded. The classification system is never easy but I always erred in the direction of overclassifying if in ANY doubt, because I figure that's what keeps you out of trouble.
ReplyDeleteI got a chance to review a bunch of old—late 1940s and early 1950s—lectures to National War College, for declassification. I tried to err on the side of declassification, in that the Peoples' right to know seemed more important than the danger that some enemy might actually learn something useful.
ReplyDeleteI think of classification as very important, but a possible impediment. For example, that recent flap over the insurgents being able to download the video from our drones. The price of doing business so that our friends and allies can also download that video without compromising our special encryption systems.
I remember one day in Italy when John Thomas, who sat at the desk next to me in the NATO AIRSOUTH Headquarters came in from a trip inspecting some Italian F-104 fighter wing and saying, "Isn't a low altitude beam shot the worst approach for the SPARROW missile?" I agreed that it was. That is what the Italians were doing, since that is what they had done with the F-86 and its 2.75 inch FFARs. A call to the Military Assistance Group in Rome was of NO value in fixing this. I set to work to get the needed information released to the Italians and it took months. I even submitted a second request, based on another source—and that one came through first.
I think that this is definitely a case of where you stand is based upon where you sit. If I was in, say the US Navy Submarine business, I would probably not tell my wife what I had for breakfast, even if she prepared it.
Regards — Cliff