Security Restrictions on Information
The federal government spends billions of dollars protecting information that should never have been classified and information that no longer needs to be classified. Additionally, the federal government has greatly expanded its ability to control unclassified, public information through vague restrictions that give government officials wide latitude to declare information beyond the public's reach. Such unchecked secrecy threatens accountability in government.On May 27, President Obama issued a Presidential Memorandum directing his Administration to conduct a review of classified information and controlled unclassified information (CUI) policies. Classified information and CUI present very different problems for the government, and must be governed by very different policies. That being said, it is impossible to effectively address the two policies in isolation. Government control of information in the security arena has been compared to a balloon: if you squeeze it on one end, it expands on the other. It is argued that strengthening regulations on CUI, for example, in absence of policies to address classification abuses could lead to increases in over-classification, and vice versa.
In its Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States the 9/11 Commission cited the necessity of preventing over-classification by the Federal Government. Over-classification hinders information sharing and causes the government to needlessly spend billions of taxpayer dollars protecting information that should never have been classified. Over-classification also leads to disrespect of the system and leaks to the press and public suspicion.
President Obama's memo directed the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, General James L. Jones, to submit recommendations to the President within 90 days. At the request of General Jones, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) launched a process to gather public input on classification and declassification policies to inform the review. The PIDB gathered this input through a combination of a public hearing at NARA and an online Declassification Policy Forum. The 90 day deadline passed with no announcement of any recommendations, and no indication of when recommendations will be released.
President Obama's May 27 memo directed his Administration to conduct a review of classified information and controlled unclassified information (CUI) policies. The policies to be reviewed were instituted in response to a memorandum from President Bush that creates a tiered system of designations that relate primarily to the allowable dissemination of documents and establishes a framework for designating, marking, safeguarding, and disseminating designated information.
The Obama memo called for the establishment of an inter-agency task force chaired jointly by the representatives of the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security and including representatives from agencies inside and outside the Information Sharing Environment which was directed to present recommendations to the President on how to proceed with respect to the CUI Framework within 90 days. During the review process, President Obama directed agencies to continue to implement the CUI Framework.
As with recommendations on classification policy, the 90 day deadline passed with no announcement of any recommendations, and no indication of when recommendations will be released. The inter-agency review task-force has conducted the review largely behind closed doors. The task force set up meetings with representatives of stakeholder communities. While these meetings did include at least one session with representatives of public interest organizations, the task force has not made any significant effort to gather public input. Given the opaque nature of the process, there is little indication of the substance of the final set of recommendations that will be given to the President.
Analyses and Reports
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