[iw] - Fwd: White House launches new war on secrecy

[Richard Forno]

Forwarded message:

> From: Mark
> White House launches new war on secrecy
>
> The National Security Council has initiated a behind-the-scenes effort 
> to rein in the classification system. But that means digging in for an 
> overdue brawl with spy agencies.
>
> By BRYAN BENDER
>
> 08/23/2022 05:00 AM EDT
>
> https://www.politico.com/news/2022/08/23/white-house-war-on-secrecy-00053226
>
> The government keeps way too many secrets, the Biden administration 
> asserts. The sprawling spy community — made up of 18 separate 
> intelligence agencies — sees it quite differently.
>
> But despite differing worldviews, the White House is quietly gearing 
> up to try to pierce the veil, according to eight government officials 
> and secrecy experts and internal documents. And it is enlisting a 
> leading advocate for greater government transparency in the effort.
>
> The National Security Council initiated a review this summer to 
> determine how to overhaul the elaborate and often arbitrary 
> classification system that Democrats and Republicans contend is 
> undermining democracy and national security.
>
> The initiative comes amid extraordinary scrutiny over the proper 
> management of classified documents as the Justice Department 
> investigates former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling 
> sensitive national secrets after leaving the White House.
>
> The Biden administration believes that reforming the classification 
> system is needed to more broadly share intelligence between government 
> agencies and with allies to more effectively combat potential enemies, 
> particularly Russia and China’s aggressive disinformation campaigns.
>
> Top military officials, for example, have called for loosening some 
> restrictions on foreign threats — gathered by human spies, 
> satellites or other collection tools — so that more government 
> agencies, contractors and foreign governments can better coordinate 
> military and diplomatic responses.
>
> It’s also about making the national security bureaucracy more 
> transparent to the American people, particularly past government 
> actions — including potentially illegal activities — that have 
> been shielded from the public for decades.
>
> “It’s in our nation’s best interest to be as transparent as 
> possible with the American public regarding U.S. government records 
> and activities,” said an administration official privy to the review 
> process. “We will look at how technological advancements can speed 
> declassification … and permit greater information sharing.”
>
> It remains to be seen how willing President Joe Biden is to go to 
> battle with the CIA, the Pentagon and other intelligence agencies that 
> have resisted his predecessors’ attempts or watered down their 
> executive orders to compel them to share more information with other 
> agencies and the American public.
>
> “Modifications to the declassification executive orders generally 
> happen at gunpoint for the intelligence agencies,” said Kel 
> McClanahan, executive director of National Security Counselors, a 
> non-profit public interest law firm that specializes in national 
> security cases and has advised intelligence agencies. “The same 
> people who screamed bloody murder before will be arguing against 
> it.”
>
> The year-long review marks the first such attempt to rein in the 
> classification system in more than a decade, after what insiders and 
> oversight authorities say has been frustratingly little progress since 
> the Obama administration took on the task.
>
> The National Archives and Records Administration estimates that 
> government agencies create petabytes — or millions of gigabytes — 
> of classified information each year, a trend that has only increased 
> in the decades since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the 
> United States led already tight-lipped agencies to clamp down more.
>
> Tens of billions of dollars are spent on classifying information, 
> while only a fraction is dedicated to declassifying information.
>
> “We believe there is immense potential to improve government 
> efficiency and transparency simultaneously within this 
> effort,” stated an internal June 2 memo from Yohannes Abraham, the 
> executive secretary of the National Security Council.
>
> A major focus, he said, is “revising or replacing” Executive 
> Order 13526 that was issued by President Barack Obama in 2009 setting 
> the parameters for classified national security information.
>
> Up for review are the criteria for classification, how much is spent 
> on declassification, and a reconsideration of what qualifies for the 
> highest levels of protection, such as “special access programs,” 
> the memo added.
>
> The review is also scrubbing Executive Order 13556 governing 
> “controlled unclassified information” that Obama also signed in 
> 2010 — but was also widely considered to have fallen short of the 
> goal of forcing into public view more government files.
>
> ‘Extremely good news’
>
> Helping to advise the effort is a critic of what many consider to be 
> an epidemic of over classification, current and former officials said.
>
> John Powers is the associate director for classification management at 
> the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives 
> and Records Administration, which advises the president on the 
> security classification system and has been advocating for reducing 
> secrecy.
>
> Powers also worked at the National Security Council from 2015 to 2018.
>
> The National Security Council did not respond to multiple requests for 
> comment on Powers’ role. But the administration official confirmed 
> he “is part of the team that is working on this.”
>
> Powers did not respond to several requests. But he told POLITICO in 
> an interview last year that he believes “the classification system 
> is a beast at this point.”
>
> “It’s 80 years old and we’re still trying to turn a battleship 
> but we haven’t turned it,” he said. “And our national security 
> threats are really completely different now and we have not reacted in 
> a way we should.”
>
> His role in the effort is seen by advocates for government 
> transparency as signaling a strong desire for reform.
>
> “Not only is he bullish on transparency, but he knows the system 
> from the inside,” said Steven Aftergood, who ran the Project on 
> Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists from 1991 
> to 2021. “And he has a sense of where change is feasible and where 
> things that sound like good ideas might not be quite realistic.”
>
> The nation’s top intelligence official also believes the current 
> system shields far too much information than necessary.
>
> Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, who oversees all spy 
> agencies, testified to Congress in May the system also hampers 
> Washington’s ability to share information more widely inside the 
> government and with allies to confront quickly evolving threats.
>
> Over classification, she said, “is a challenge from a democratic 
> perspective but it’s also a challenge from a national security 
> perspective, because if we can’t share information as easily as we 
> might otherwise … if it were appropriately classified, that 
> obviously affects our capacity.”
>
> The Biden administration took unprecedented steps to declassify 
> information about Russian activities in the weeks leading up to its 
> February invasion of Ukraine, despite pushback from leading 
> elements in the spy community.
>
> “I think there are lessons to be learned from Ukraine,” Haines 
> told the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I do think it has helped 
> other people understand the value of ensuring we are classifying 
> things at the appropriate level. And how declassification can support 
> foreign policy in different ways. And that’s all to the good.”
>
> Top military officers have also been pressing in recent years for 
> ways to share more classified intelligence with allies.
>
> Haines has assured senators that she is taking steps on her own “to 
> improve the declassification process,” as she wrote in a January 
> letter to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.), who 
> have been pressing Biden for reforms.
>
> “The failures of the current obsolete system have been extensively 
> documented,” they wrote to the president in May, urging him to 
> “begin the process of updating the executive order governing 
> classification and declassification.”
>
> “We spend $18 billion protecting the classification system and only 
> about $102 million … on declassification efforts,” Sen. Elizabeth 
> Warren (D-Mass.) said in an exchange with Haines at the May hearing. 
> “That ratio feels off in a democracy.”
>
> “It is a very challenging issue,” Haines acknowledged. “There 
> are technical aspects, there are cultural aspects to it.”
>
> Haines’ office declined a request to discuss her expectations for 
> the new NSC initiative. But her role in the process is another hopeful 
> sign for open government advocates.
>
> She has “such influence over how the rest of the government 
> operates,” said Lauren Harper, director of public policy at the 
> National Security Archive at George Washington University. “I think 
> that will give a lot of momentum if they are the ones pushing for good 
> classification reform.”
>
> ‘An imperative’
>
> Aftergood, McClanahan and Harper are among a coalition of experts in 
> national security law and government secrecy that is calling for a 
> series of landmark changes in the new executive order.
>
> Among their top priorities are requiring that secret documents be 
> declassified after 40 years and that major new investments be made in 
> technology to help review, process and make available declassified 
> documents.
>
> They are also advocating for more specific steps, such as mandating 
> unclassified summaries be released of the president’s daily 
> intelligence briefing, releasing all or portions of the classified 
> legal opinions from the Justice Department’s Office Of Legal 
> Counsel, and the collection and release of the CIA’s files on the 
> torture program it initiated after the 9/11 attacks.
>
> Powers has also been working closely with the Public Interest 
> Declassification Board, the bipartisan advisory panel also housed at 
> the National Archives that has been hammering Biden to declassify more 
> secrets.
>
> It has recently lobbied for the release of records related to the 
> 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy and environmentally 
> disastrous nuclear tests during the Cold War that continue to make 
> generations of Pacific Islanders ill.
>
> The members, who are appointed by the president and Congress, told 
> Biden last year that “our classification and declassification 
> system is in crisis and near failure.”
>
> “Modernizing this system is an imperative for our national security 
> and for our democracy to operate effectively in the digital age,” 
> they wrote.
>
> The board’s 2022 priorities include “increasing government 
> transparency, prioritizing the declassification of historically 
> significant records, reducing overclassification, [and] developing new 
> policies and practices for modernizing the classification and 
> declassification system.”
>
> But previous efforts have made little impact, according to board 
> member Benjamin Powell, a former general counsel in the Office of the 
> Director of National Intelligence during the George W. Bush 
> administration.
>
> For example, while the 2009 executive order “provides the authority 
> for agencies to establish declassification centers, agencies have 
> generally chosen not to establish such centers,” he said at a 
> public meeting of the board on Friday.
>
> Those are considered particularly important for coordinating the 
> review of classified documents for public release, which often 
> requires multiple agencies to sign off.
>
> “The tools that we have to increase public transparency need to be 
> modernized,” the board’s chair, Ezra Cohen, who served as the 
> Pentagon’s acting undersecretary for intelligence in the Trump 
> administration, said at Friday’s public hearing. “Some of this can 
> be solved through technology, but there are also major systematic 
> changes that need to be made.”
>
> A new presidential order with teeth is seen as the best lever to force 
> greater transparency.
>
> “Every aspect of [the classification system] is being looked at to 
> try to make it more understandable, more accessible, and make sure 
> that we get more things that should be in the public domain at the 
> earliest possible time,” said John Tierney, another member of the 
> Public Interest Declassification Board and a former Democratic chair 
> of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s national 
> security panel who has been briefed on the progress.
>
> Some of the key questions that need to be addressed, he said, range 
> from “are matters over classified and what leads to that” to 
> whether current classification levels — such as secret, top secret 
> and other designations that further limit access — are “too 
> numerous and should they be narrowed down and focused?”
>
> The pushback
>
> But like others, he is anticipating a major clash with the CIA, 
> Pentagon and other national security agencies.
>
> “The intelligence community in particular routinely pushes back on 
> any effort to restrict or narrow their discretionary authority over 
> classification matters, and would no doubt do so here as well,” said 
> Bradley Moss, an attorney who has sued spy agencies to release 
> documents under the Freedom of Information Act. “No real overhaul 
> has happened since the Clinton administration. Both Presidents Bush 
> and Obama made minor revisions on the periphery but nothing more.”
>
> “FBI and CIA in particular are always very conscious of sources and 
> methods and trying to protect those,” Tierney added. “They define 
> those rather broadly,” including “documents that are very old, 
> about people who may be long dead. And the question is ‘who are we 
> protecting?’”
>
> Aftergood said he was a bit disappointed that the memo kicking off the 
> White House effort doesn’t lay out a clearer vision — and send a 
> stronger message of intent.
>
> “It did not send clear performance goals or objectives,” he said. 
> “It didn’t say, ‘how can we reduce the volume of classified 
> information by 50 percent?’ It didn’t say, ‘How can we 
> accelerate the declassification of historical documents?’
>
> “I thought it was a missed opportunity,” he added.
>
> But the pressure is also growing from Congress. “The complex 
> interagency process necessary to achieve this long-overdue reform 
> demands active leadership from the White House,” Moran and Wyden 
> told Biden.
>
> “Everybody recognizes there is a lot of slack in the system and the 
> scope of classification is unnecessarily broad and that the 
> declassification process is cumbersome and slow,” Aftergood said.
>
> But he expects a nasty brawl that could also spill out into public 
> view. “Some of those differences will not be ironed out,” he said. 
> “There are fundamental inconsistencies between a broad vision of 
> open government and the priorities of the national security agencies. 
> There is only limited middle ground.”
>
> “I am hopeful,” Harper added. “But it really does require folks 
> in leadership positions like at the National Security Council and the 
> close circle around President Biden really pushing this stuff. 
> Fundamentally it is important to our democracy to have these things 
> work properly.”
>
>   
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