The current veil ofWashington secrecyis hurting us, athome and abroad.
Is America ‘Drowning In A Sea Of Faux Secrets’?By Cliff MontgomeryA March 14th, 2006 hearing before the Subcommittee on National Security, entitled “Drowning in a Sea of Faux Secrets: Policies on Handling of Classified and Sensitive Information,” presented several forceful arguments against the growing cloak of unneeded and dangerous secrecy occurring under the Bush Administration.Subcommittee Chairman Christopher Shays (R-CT) presented an introduction to the hearing which was not discussed in any detail by the corporate press, but which definitely deserves a better hearing. We present much of his introductory statement below:“It has been said, bureaucracies always seek the path of least disclosure. During the Cold War, the innate tendency to excessive secrecy was useful against the monolithic threat of Soviet military and industrial espionage. But today, against the polymorphic perils of stateless terrorism, the reflexive concealment of broad categories of official information harms more than enhances national security.”Unreformed habits of secrecy blind us to the dispersed shards of information that, if linked, could reveal the enemy’s shadowy plans.”Recent reports of a secret program to re-classify previously declassified documents reflect the stubborn refusal of many cold warriors to move from the ‘need to know’ to the ‘need to share’ security paradigm. Operating since 1999, the program culled materials from public archives that had already been viewed, copied, or republished. Claiming the bureaucratic ‘equities’–code for ‘turf’–had been ignored in the rush to declassify, the re-classifiers have taken tens of thousands of pages from the open files in what I would refer to as an arrogant and futile attempt to unwrite history.”Many of the documents deal with issues having no current security implications. As a result, obvious non-secrets, like the stunning wrong estimate in 1950 that the Chinese would not enter the Korean War, are once again stamped ‘secret’. This absurd effort to put the toothpaste back into the tube persists, despite the growing consensus supported by testimony before this subcommittee that from 50 to 90 percent of the material currently withheld should not be classified at all.”The inbred penchant for over-classification has also spawned a perverse offspring in the form of a vast and rapidly growing body of pseudo-secrets withheld from public view in the name of national and homeland security.”As this subcommittee learned in two previous hearings on post-September 11th barriers to information sharing, what is not classified can still be kept from the public through the use of ‘Sensitive But Unclassified‘, designated as SBU, designations, like, for instance, ‘For Official Use Only’, [FOUO], or ‘Official Use Only’, [OUO], and there are countless others.”The unchecked proliferation of documents bearing these and other access restriction labels is choking what the 9/11 Commission said should be, must be free-flowing pathways for critical information about an adaptable, decentralized foe.”After our hearing last year, Mr. Waxman and I asked key cabinet departments how many documents they had shielded with SBU markings over the past 4 years. Claiming the task so burdensome and the numbers so large, they could not even venture an estimate.”At the same time, we asked the Government Accountability Office [GAO] to examine policies and procedures on FOUO and OUO documents at the Department[s] of Defense and Energy, respectively. Stamping something ‘For Official Use Only’ should only mean someone has determined the information may meet the limited criteria for exemption from automatic public release under the Freedom of Information Act [FOIA]. But increasingly in this security-conscious era, SBU designations are being misused as an unregulated form of ‘classification light’.”In a report released today, GAO finds a lack of clear standards governing the use of the FOUO and OUO labels. Almost anyone can apply the ‘Official Use Only’ restriction, and no one can make it go away unless someone happens to request the document under the FOIA–but then they have to know the document exists.”Against a rising tide of global terrorism, we are drowning in a sea of our own faux secrets, hiding public information from its real owners, the public, behind spurious FOUO and OUO labels. To right the balance between the public’s right to know and countervailing public interest in security and privacy, the habits of secrecy must give way to the culture of shared information.”Our discussion today is timely. This is, and I kid you not, Sunshine Week 2006, the second annual observance by organizations and individuals seeking greater openness in government. At the same time, policies and procedures on classification, reclassification, and designation of sensitive but unclassified material appear to be rushing headlong in the opposite direction.”
