Setec Astronomy

Slate's Jack Shafer notes an underreported speech by Bush's secrecy czar, who says that many agencies classify documents (or fail to) without much discernible rhyme or reason. Every time we hear reports of some document or another being de-classified "in response to critics" or some such thing, I invariably wonder: "If it's not too vital to national security to be released for purely political reasons, why exactly was it classified in the first place? Wouldn't it be wacky if transparency were, like, the default?"

Comments

[Mother]

It has to do with cattle mutilations.

And JFK.

But mostly its about the cows.

Seriously.

[Czar]

I wish people would stop using my name as a title.

[PapayaSF]

Part of this is because those of us on the outside tend to think that the classified/unclassified distinction is a clear and rational one, but in reality it's often a judgment call. And if you compare the judgments of different people in different bureaucracies, you'll find a wide range. To put it mildly.

[Ruthless]

How come employees have been keeping secrets from their employers?

Pee the weeple demand to know ASAP.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Loose lips sink ships.

[Kevin Carson]

"If it's not too vital to national security to be released for purely political reasons, why exactly was it classified in the first place?"

Anybody see the Peter Jennings special on Gitmo last night? Especially that part about the Kuwaiti guy, whose father claims he was in Afghanistan doing educational work with children.

I get the feeling that before long, we're going to be asking "If he's not too dangerous and menacing to be released for purely PR reasons, why exactly was he held for over 2 years in the first place?"

The answer, in both cases, is that bureaucrats do stupid and corrupt things when they aren't accountable to anyone. And the classification system and Gitmo are both utter wet dreams for those who lust after total, unaccountable authority.

[Matt Welch]

The "default" has been, since an October 2001 (I believe) directive from John Ashcroft to all federal agencies, to err on the side of not responding to Freedom of Information Act requests. The number of documents classified annually has gone up from 8 million to 11 million to 14 million from fiscal 2001-2003, while the number of documents declassified over the same time has dropped from 100 million to 44 million to 43 million (I could be off a million or two on the last two numbers). Ex-presidents now have a veto on presidential records being released (instead of the fairly automatic declassification after 12 years), a decision which has (among other things) effectively tripled the response time to presidential-records FOIA requests (to up to four years). Expanding Executive Privilege has been a strong priority for Bush and Cheney from day one. Government-document watchdog groups from the right and left both describe the Bush Administration as the most secretive since (at least) Nixon's. And anyone familiar with the "National Security" justification for keeping secrets from taxpayers will tell you, if they are being honest, that the vast majority of cases where this has been invoked -- including the very first one -- had absolutely nothing to do with National Security.

Sorry for the humorless facts; spending three weeks in a place that hasn't yet processed its vast police-state archives has a way of draining the fun out American expansion of secrecy.

[James]

There's an amusing story about official secrecy that comes out of the USSR: two men working for a machine-tool design bureau were sent to Paris to attend a Western trade show and see what the capitalists were up to. More interested in seeing the sights, they dropped in to pick up brochures to take home, where they were ordered to write a report on their visit.

Finding the brochures of little use, they wrote a 400-page brief mostly using Western trade magazines as a reference and turned it in. Unfortunately, the KGB rep at the bureau sent back a note saying that according to a recent decree, all such reports relating to foreign travel were now secret. They were ordered to copy the report longhand into a "secret notebook" and turn it in to the "secret steno pool," this after the report had already been seen and transcribed by the "open" steno lady. All this so the KGB woman would not get in trouble with her superiors for lax supervision of security at the machine tool works.

After several days of memo-passing and bickering, they agreed to evade the regulations by simply stamping every page "secret" to make it appear as though the proper regulations had been followed. It no doubt sits even now in the archive of the Federal Security Bureau, available to anyone with the proper clearances and awaiting official declassification .

[Ed Martin]

To say that something is classified doesn't tell me anything. To classify means to place in a class. A class of what? I'm classified(questionably by some) as a human being. To say that these documents are classified is incomplete for meaning and begs the question: as a document?, as a banana? What? A classified piece of paper could be public, secret, or toilet paper. Who knows? When anyone says you can't see something because its classified, just tell them "That's right, its classified as a public document, therefore I can see it."

[chap]

Look, guys, I have a reeeeeally simple answer.

I work in a job that involves a security clearance and have seen this from that side.

If someone in my job releases something clasisifed accidentally, then their career is done after a big investigation--or they go to jail. (Or people die. Happens, you know.)

If they accidentally overclasify something, nothing near as bad happens. Maybe the information can't get to where it needs to. Once or twice I might hear of someone getting embarrassed.

You do the risk analysis here.

The process also supports overclassification. If I have five thousand Power Point slides, I either:
(1) make a guess about the classification of each one and individually classify each slide,
(2) give it to somebody who is an expert at it (providing I can find one, and providing I have the time to do so, or providing that person is there), or
(3) put a little classification marking for the highest level for the whole brief on my master slide.

If I have an email program that makes me put a classification on every email, then I will err on the side of caution and not accidentally underclassify the email.

So there is an organizational imperative, and a process imperative that makes it inconvenient for someone on the outside wanting the information. To change this, you have to change both of these

This is not hard to figure out once you get away from the black helicopter mindset.

This is too long for a comment--sorry--so I crossposted this on my blog.

[Josh]

Whether it makes you happy or not, Ed, the word "classified" has more than one widely agreed-upon meaning. Such is language.

[Rick Barton]

The sad descent toward authoritarianism in this country is somehow having its amusing moments. I didn't see that one coming.