February 13, 2024
Authors: The Washington Post Editorial Board
A special counsel investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified material has ended with the release of an unflattering report replete with references to his bad memory — and illustrated with photographs of sensitive files lying around his Delaware garage. Mr. Biden was politically damaged but not criminally charged. Next come legal proceedings against former president Donald Trump, who has been charged by a different special counsel with carelessly stashing secret documents — and resisting official requests to return them.
Sensational as these cases are, though, they are far from representative of the actual flaws plaguing our nation’s system for keeping national security secrets.
The real problem is that the system is overwhelmed by a growing mountain of classified material. Too much information is classified, and too much of what’s classified is classified at too high a level of secrecy. Meanwhile, the declassification of documents for which secrecy is no longer necessary proceeds in dribs and drabs. This is counterproductive for officials who need to use the information in real time, while also discouraging accountability, oversight and serious historical analysis.
In 2012, the
Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an advisory body within the National Archives, reported that procedures “for classification and declassification of national security information are outmoded, unsustainable and keep too much information from the public.” Back then, the government classified petabytes —
a million gigabytes — of data annually. By 2019, it was up to petabytes every month. In 2020, the PIDB
warned of an “explosion” of digital data. Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence,
said last year that “deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner.”
Last year, the
Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, a nonprofit headed by former Defense Department official Henry Sokolski, published a
report calling overclassification an “epidemic.” The problem stretches over the entire life span of programs and documents, from the moment they are first stamped secret, to when the information is needed for government operations, to the end stage of declassification. At the outset, too much is overclassified out of unwarranted fear by officials that they will let out something sensitive — often, it could be protected at lower levels of classification. At the end, in declassification, government officials face no penalty for keeping them secret and few incentives to unseal them.
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