Even the Most Transparent Administration Ever Knows It's Not the Most Transparent Administration Ever
The Department of Justice's inspector general has looked into the agency and confirmed in an audit what most people suspect: The DOJ is a disaster area when it comes to properly determining what should and shouldn't be kept classified, and obviously not in the public's favor. Slate reports:
President Obama has claimed his administration is the most transparent in history. But excessive secrecy is still a problem within the Justice Department, according to a new internal audit.
Earlier this week, the DOJ's inspector general published a report reviewing how the department has been classifying information. The secrecy review, which involved the IG's office conducting more than 100 interviews with officials from agencies including the FBI and the DEA, found that there was a "persistent misunderstanding and lack of knowledge of certain classification processes." The audit criticized what it described as "deficiencies" in how the DOJ classifies information: In a review of a sample of documents, unclassified information was wrongly designated secret in several instances.
The overclassification of information has become a major issue for the U.S. government since 9/11, with a spike in sensitive national security-related programs leading to spiralling secrecy. In the realm of surveillance, in particular, extreme secrecy has become commonplace, with the DOJ and FBI often heavy-handedly redacting or withholding large portions of documents in response to Freedom of Information Act requests. According to the Information Security Oversight Office, in 2012 alone, executive branch agencies issued more than 95 million "classification decisions." That's a 3 percent increase on the figure for 2011 (92 million), and a 25 percent rise on the figure for 2010 (77 million).
The report mentions that officials seem to have a blasé approach to classification and found 357 errors in 141 documents.
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