Was the reclassification of government documents by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) improper? A newly released audit report (conducted by NARA's Information Security Oversight Office) shows that over a third of the documents did not meet the standard for continued classification.
The background of the story involves the controversial new Archivist of the United States, Dr. Allen Weinstein, and the complaints made by a group of historians and researchers in February, 2006 to the Archive's Information Security Oversight Office. The group claimed that historical documents from the 1950s to the 1990s were being taken off the open shelves at the Archives. Some of these documents had been for sale available to the public for years, prompting a Washington Post article about "trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube."
Dr. Weinstein's response was exemplary. He declared a moratorium on any further reclassification efforts at the Archives, and promised this audit to:
- Identify the number of records withdrawn from the open shelves over the past several years
- Identify who initiated the withdrawal action
- Identify the authorization and justification for the withdrawal.
- Through a statistically significant sample, determine the appropriateness of the classification action (i.e. was the action in accordance with the terms ; and limitations of E.O. 12958 (as amended) and does the information; satisfy the standards for continued classification)
- Examine the effectiveness of internal processes and procedures and make improvements where required.
While the audit was taking place, there was more news. In April 2006, a secret Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) dated 2002, between the Archives, the Air Force, the CIA and others, surfaced. Then a second MOU, dated 2001, surfaced. While a recent NARA press release defends the classified MOUs as furthering valid NARA goals regarding the utility of written procedures, Dr. Weinstein promises that secret MOUs will not be utilized in the future.
Today, the results of the NARA audit were released, and Dr. Weinstein held a press conference to discuss the results. The audit revealed a number of unrelated efforts to reclassify documents, resulting in the removal of at least 25,315 publicly available records, dated 1999 - 2005. A sample of about 5% of these (1,353), showed that only 64% met the standards for continued classification. According to the press release:
The audit also found that in attempting to recover records that still contained classified information, there were a number of instances when records that were clearly inappropriate for continued classification were removed from public access. ISOO concluded that 24% of the sampled records fell into this category, and an additional 12% were questionable. In one re-review effort, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) withdrew a considerable number of purely unclassified records in order to obfuscate the classified equity that the agency was intent on protecting. In addition, at least 167 records, or 12% of the total records sampled by ISOO, had been declassified properly initially but were later improperly reclassified.
Even when a withdrawn record met the standard for continued classification, in a number of instances we believe insufficient judgment was applied to the decision to withdraw the record from public access. In many of these instances, withdrawal did little to mitigate the potential damage to national security especially if the record had been published elsewhere. At times, withdrawal could actually serve to exacerbate the potential damage by drawing undue attention to the record. Furthermore, a significant number of records that were withdrawn had actually been created as unclassified documents but were subsequently classified by CIA at the time of re-review (often 50 years later) solely because they contained the name of a CIA official in the list of individuals provided a copy.
The Archivist has a check list of next steps. Affected agencies have agreed to interim protocol guidelines that require a document requestor to be informed when records are withdrawn from public access at the National Archives due to classification action. NARA wants to create a pilot National Declassification Inititative with an executive-wide set of procedures. NARA will work with the agencies involved to restore improperly removed documents to the Archives. The two MOUs will be replaced with the interim protocol guidelines.
NARA has a full page of information about the audit at its NARA and Declassification page.
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