Obama Issues New Executive Order for Classified Documents

President Obama's recent executive order and accompanying presidential memorandum declares that "no information may remain classified indefinitely." The executive order is part of an overhaul of the executive branch's system for protecting classified national security information.

The executive order requires agency heads to conduct a periodic review of the agency's classification guidelines to ensure that classified information that no longer requires protection can be declassified.

Obama also eliminated a 2003 rule by the Bush administration that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Under the Obama rule, spy agencies who object to a decision will have to appeal to the president.

Obama also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to streamline the process of declassifying historical documents and set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million page backlog of such records, including archives relating to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.

For more information, see the New York Times article here.

Release of CIA torture report delayed

The ACLU is challenging the delayed release of the CIA's 2004 inspector-general report, The Washington Independent reported. The 200-page report, which is supposed to be declassified as part of an FOIA lawsuit agreement, will not be released before Aug. 31, according to the Justice Department. The ACLU says that the CIA and Justice Department have missed three deadlines already for the disclosure during the five months they've had to review the report.

Word’s coming now that the Obama administration is seeking to withhold the CIA’s 2004 inspector-general report on the implementation of its former “enhanced interrogation regime” until August 31. The ACLU, which had an agreement with the administration to declassify the report as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is going to challenge the administration’s efforts. More soon.

Update: Just got a hold of the court documents. Check them out after the jump.

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.

More here.

NFOIC Summit: Public access threats

Richard J. H. Varn, director of the Coalition for Sensible Public Records Access and the chief information officer for the City of San Antonio, spoke on the threats to and values of public access. Here's part one of notes on his 2009 NFOIC Summit session:

Threats to public access:

• Identity theft and security: The problem with identity theft is not with public records. It would flourish even if all access was cut off. A social security number is only worth about 10 cents on the black market. Concerns over identity theft, however, had led to more restrictions to public access than any other issue in the past couple decades. When public identifiers are not made public, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one person from another. It leads to more false positives and false negatives.
• Implementing public policies by redacting the truth: Because people with criminal records have difficulty finding jobs, apartments, etc., there has been a trend to expunge convictions from public records. However, this doesn't hide the fact that someone has been convicted. It's still in the police blotter archives, and a fellow co-worker could definitely reveal a prior conviction that another employee tried to hide. Redaction doesn't solve the problem. What would solve it is an employability of felons act. Facts can still be acted on. These people need rights.
  
• Increased fees beyond marginal cost and self-funding portal: Florida, for example, passed a cost increase to help solve its budget problems.
• Security concerns lead to overclassification.
  
• Coalition failures: Exemptions for media aren't enough. Citizens should have rights to the same information, and coalitions should champion for them. These citizens who request records are, after all, sometimes valuable sources.
• Private technology, public business: Using private e-mail accounts to conduct public business is ever increasing.
• New technology, same old issues: Just because it's Twitter or the latest social networking fad doesn't mean anyone is excused from providing access and charging only marginal costs.
• Enforcement failures: Obviously, many state coalitions are struggling to add teeth to their state's FOI laws.

Obama orders review of classification system

President Barack Obama ordered national security adviser James L. Jones to suggest revisions to the existing presidential order on national security classification, the AP reported. Jones is also tasked with deciding whether a National Declassification Center should be created to address the backlog of 51 million pages scheduled for declassification. Obama also called for a government-wide task force to standardized the stamps used on controlled but unclassified documents. There are currently 107 different stamps and 130 different procedures for appying them.

Expanding his drive to open government, President Barack Obama is ordering two studies of whether the government is classifying too much information and using too many different ways to keep it from public view.

He wants the answers in just 90 days, and it's no secret which way he's leaning.
In a memo Wednesday, Obama ordered national security adviser James L. Jones to consult relevant agencies and recommend revisions in the existing presidential order on national security classification that lays out the rules under which agencies can stamp documents confidential, secret or top secret.

More here.

Doe v. Doe

The Atlantic tells the ultimate anecdote concerning government secrecy:

Sometimes, plaintiffs's names are protected from disclosure. Sometimes, evidence is placed under seal. Sometimes, entire cases are sealed. Sometimes, the agencies being sued by unnamed deferents are themselves classified. Such is the case with Jane Doe. v. Doe Agency. (Given the involvement of lawyer Mark Zaid, the case appears to have something to do with the Able Danger collection program, a Department of Defense special access program.)

More here.

Bill aims to correct overclassification of records

Almost a third of the 362,000 FOIA requests made last year have yet to be processed due to overclassification, according to a New York Times editorial. A recently introduced bill would require the "national archivist to prescribe how and what to classify, with particular emphasis on cutting back categories and ending the pro forma withholding of nonsensitive information requested by the public."

By last count, the federal government employs 107 different categories of restricted information — one off-limits category zanily pronounces, “sensitive but unclassified.” This muddle of mislabeling seems designed not to protect legitimate secrets but to empower bureaucrats. The end result has been to greatly blunt the Freedom of Information Act’s mandate to let the public in on the business of government, plain and simple.

The House has just approved a measure to end this plague of pseudoclassification. Its backers say it is not just a boon for the public, but an attempt to promote “a common language within government.” There are so many taboos that agencies are even having trouble understanding one another’s rubber-stamp restrictions.

“Official use only” has been slapped wholesale on documents, even though there’s no common standard for what that means. The House measure would correct that by having the national archivist prescribe how and what to classify, with particular emphasis on cutting back categories and ending the pro forma withholding of nonsensitive information requested by the public.

More here.

Navy decides to close inspection reports

Inspection reports on the Navy's ships, aircraft carriers and submarines are now classified information, the Navy Times reported. The reason for the change is not yet known.

The Navy has classified regular reports about the material condition of its fleet, an about-face from when the reports were accessible as public documents under the Freedom of Information Act.

The reports, filed by the Board of Inspection and Survey, or InSurv, contain the findings of meticulous, days-long inspections that cover every detail of the workings of surface ships, aircraft carriers and submarines.

In December, InSurv president Rear Adm. Raymond Klein decided the reports were to be classified, said Linda Alvers, the FOIA coordinator for Fleet Forces Command. She said she did not know why. Also unclear was whether the classification order applied only to InSurvs performed after December, or whether it included reports from before then.

More here.

'Secrecy is for losers'

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter looks back at the history of White House secrecy as openness morphs from "geeky" to "hip." He calls for a mandate that all of the government's private sector contracts be made public, which he says will lead to competitors racing to "convince the government they can do the same things cheaper."

For a long time now, there's been too much secrecy in this city." Those were the most important words President Obama spoke on his first full day in office. Obama then signed executive orders to shift the balance back toward openness in government. At least in theory, the burden of proof will move from those who would release information to those who would classify it. It's significant Obama led off this way. He went right after not just George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, but an eternal bureaucratic impulse. Will Obama's emphasis on discipline and control eventually lead him to share that impulse? We'll see.

Thomas Jefferson argued that "information is the currency of democracy," and for generations peacetime America respected the principle. Believing, as Secretary of State Henry Stimson did, that "gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail," the nation chose not to even have an intelligence service until World War II. Then came the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 and the National Security Act of 1947, which essentially said that a certain constantly expanding category of information was "born classified." That means no formal process for assessing if something should be secret or not—just an officious bureaucrat with a big stamp.

More here.

Coverage of 2008 Secrecy Report Card continues

The 2008 Government Secrecy Report Card released Tuesday by OpenTheGovernment.org was covered by media outlets across the country.

Read more:

• 'That's classified': Shining a light on Washington's growing reliance on secrecy; U.S. News & World Report
• Curtailing open government; Las Vegas Sun
  
• US government secrecy continues to rise: annual report; JURIST
• Lipstick on the Constitution?; OpEdNews.com
• Federal secrecy on the rise, even about honeybees; Politics on the Hudson from The Journal News/LoHud.com
• Open government must be preserved; MassLive.com from The Republican (Mass.)
  

Report reveals government secrecy is costing $9.5 billion

A national security expert writes in a new policy brief what all journalists have been arguing: government secrecy does not increase national security and Bush's policies of over-classifying documents as confidential should be stopped.

In the seven years since the September 11 terrorist attacks, there has been a dramatic escalation in federal government secrecy. This increase in information classification comes with a staggering price tag -- a record high of $9.5 billion in 2006 -- and is taking place in the face of almost universal agreement that classifying information is not enhancing national security.

In "Reinventing Transparent Government," a new policy brief for The Century Foundation, Patrick Radden Keefe, fellow and expert on national security and civil liberties issues, calls for rolling back the secrecy of the Bush years and restoring transparency and accountability to American government.

More here.

Read the full brief here.

Report indicates government secrecy is on the rise

OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of individuals and organizations, including NFOIC, released the 2008 Government Secrecy Report Card today.

While the number of FOIA requests received increased, an increase was also noticed in the number records classified as confidential.

Read the full report here.

An AP story reported:

Government secrecy is on the rise by almost every measure, according to a report by a coalition of government oversight groups.

They said the U.S. is classifying more records as top secret or otherwise confidential and employing fewer workers who make federal documents available publicly.

"The open society on which we pride ourselves has been undermined and will take hard work to repair," said the report, described as a "secrecy report card" by OpenTheGovernment.org. It cited 14 different measurements to quantify government secrecy, including patents hidden from the public, secret court approvals for surveillance in sensitive terrorism and espionage investigations and the expanding use of informal labels to keep documents from being disclosed.

More here.

Additional coverage of the 2008 Government Secrecy Report Card:

• Report: Competition down, secrecy up; Federal Computer Week
• New report tracks increase in government secrecy; Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press
• Government's secrecy grade: Unsatisfactory; OMB Watch
• Government secrecy on the rise: Think Progress
  

House Moves to Open Homeland Security A Bit...

Congress on Thursday will take a major step in rolling back the tide of secrecy that has swept through government since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, with the House Homeland Security Committee poised to pass two bills making the Homeland Security Department more transparent.

Both bills are expected to pass the committee easily: One would crack down on too-frequent use of classification, while the other would go after "pseudo-classification" - the new labels such as "for official use only" that have popped up to keep even unclassified documents out of the hands of the public and other government agencies.

"This is more than Congress has been able to do in seven years," said Rep. Jane Harman, California Democrat and the bills' chief sponsor, who said the bills are the result of an alliance of open-government advocates and those who think the government needs to share more information within its agencies for national security reasons.

Rep. Jane Harman, California Democrat, is the chief sponsor of two bills aimed at cracking down on overclassification and pseudo-classification within government agencies.

"The dirtiest four-letter word in government is spelled T-U-R-F, and overclassification and pseudo-classification are ways to protect T-U-R-F," Mrs. Harman said.

The Sept. 11 commission blamed a lack of information-sharing among agencies for intelligence failures before the attack, and Republicans and Democrats both want to make sure that new turf battles won't produce a similar breakdown.

A Homeland Security official said late Wednesday that the department opposes both bills.

More here.