Although government investigations are still underway, several things are clear following the recent, massive social media leak of top secrets. The Pentagon must tighten its reigns on who has access to sensitive intelligence. Our government must also review how it screens which officials should see what.
As I make clear in the attached piece, “To Keep Top Secrets Secret, We Need Fewer of Them,” that The National Interest just posted, though, this is not enough. In addition, our government must stop over-classifying so many documents. This bad practice makes it impossible to keep tabs on secrets that truly are top secret.
Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence emphasized this point late last week. He announced that his committee would be marking up legislation that would crack down on over-classification.
In this regard, NPEC has already made its own recommendations in its report, “Over-classification: How Bad Is It, What’s the Fix?” First, our government currently has over 2,000 classification guidebooks and over 1,400 original classification authorities. Because nobody can read or follow all these guides, they don’t. Instead, they over-classify things they shouldn’t.
The fix here is to whittle these numbers down as the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) successfully did in 2016. It boiled down the 65 guidebooks it was using to one. Fortunately, one senator, Mike Rounds of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, noticed and has asked the Pentagon to report on what it is doing to promote the NGA example.
Second and related, Congress should fund and staff out the entity it created 20 years ago to address these matters — The Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB). It has never done this, almost did so last year, but still needs to get on with it.
If Congress does, it could then close in on my center’s third recommendation — have the PIDB oversee government bidding on research to automate the classification and declassification process. The current backlog of documents to review is overwhelming. If our government can reduce the massive amount of contradictory and vague classification guidance it operates under, though, it would have a fighting chance to cut down on this backlog. It also could stem the current over-classification epidemic, which is generating far more “top secrets” than we can ever hope to track and that, more important, are no such thing.
April 25, 2023
Author: Henry Sokolski
To Keep Top Secrets Secret, We Need Fewer of Them
Late last week, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Mark Warner described how over-classification of national security-related information is a key and neglected factor behind the latest, disturbing intelligence leak. “We need frankly a system that limits classification to really important documents and then have a process to declassify when appropriate.” His argument: fewer secrets shared with fewer officials are essential to keep our secrets secret.
He’s on to something. Just before the New York Times first revealed that top secret documents had been posted on social media, my nonprofit released a major study on over-classification. Those in the “know” understand that over-classification is bad but insist officials can’t help themselves: the penalties for letting a document leak far outweigh any professional rewards that might come from making secret information more available.
That’s the conventional wisdom. It’s also dead wrong. In fact, effective national security organizations have strong incentives not to over-classify. There are effective ways to avoid doing so, and one of the most important U.S. intelligence agencies—the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)—has done it.
To read the full article, click here.