<http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20041215-075709-5911r> United Press International: Report: Govt secrecy hurting warfighters By Shaun Waterman UPI Homeland and National Security Editor Published 12/15/2004 8:19 PM WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 (UPI) -- The current system for protecting government information is outdated, almost unworkable and makes the "information flow to the war fighter ... excessively constricted," according to a report prepared for the Department of Defense by a secretive scientific advisory panel. The panel, known as the Jason Group, reviewed the system used to classify sensitive government information at the request of the Office of Defense Research and Engineering in the Pentagon. The group concluded that the classification system is so unwieldy -- especially in battlefield situations -- that it is often bypassed altogether by frustrated military personnel and "ought to be radically changed." "Users," the report stated, "see an overly rigid, out of date, bureaucratic structure of information classification ... and an individual clearance process that is glacially slow, and under which large numbers of fighting men and women are, in practical terms, unclearable." As a result, the report said, "under-classification of documents -- often quietly justified as necessary for ease in transporting documents between meeting sites -- is a well known practice." For example, the report said that imagery from the top-secret Predator unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle is unclassified, with troops relying on "an ad hoc system of operational practices" to protect it. "The current situation of out of date or operationally unimplementable rules, combined with widespread violation of those rules, is a bad place to be," concludes the report, a copy of which was obtained by United Press International from the Federation of American Scientist's Project on Government Secrecy. J. William Leonard, the federal government's secrecy watchdog, agreed in broad terms with the report's critique. "I drawn a vast distinction between the tactical military environment and the bureaucracy here in Washington," Leonard, who runs the Information Security Oversight Office, told UPI. "Under certain circumstances," like an imminent threat of terrorism, or on the battlefield, "there can be greater damage caused by classifying and not sharing information." Leonard said that amendments to the classification system after Sept. 11, 2001, had given more flexibility to agencies to share classified information -- even with people not authorized to see it -- under such emergency circumstances. Even in day-to-day operations, he said, "The system provides a degree of flexibility to agencies. But," he added, "there is very little realization of this. I'm concerned that not enough use is made of this flexibility." But the report pointed out that this flexibility is very hard to calibrate. "In the present system there is no way to turn up or down the knob that governs the tradeoff between security and operational needs. There is no way, in time of war or in a particular area of operations, to 'moderately increase' all players' access to secret information ... there are too few steps between highly secret and totally open," it stated. The report pointed out that the current system was devised in the 1940s and has remained basically unchanged since, despite the enormous revolution in information wrought by the advent of personal computers and the Internet. "The classification system is a product of the industrial age, not the information age we live in now," Leonard said. "It is a document-centered system," Leonard continued. "We need a new framework for guarding national security information that is more suited to the information age and accounts for the huge changes there have been in the last 60 years." The Jason Group report concluded with a call for just such a system, one based on transactional risk -- that is the chance that any given transaction will be compromised, rather than on assigning a level of classification to a document based on the potential damage caused by disclosure. "It is obvious that the one-time display of a classified document on a (secure) computer terminal to a (cleared) individual -- which we can call 'soft access' -- is inherently less risky than providing that same individual with a paper copy of the same document -- 'hard access.'" But Leonard pointed out that the current government rules only tell agencies what they can classify, not what they must keep secret. Each government agency uses the rules as the basis for its own classification guidance. "A lot of the concepts and recommendations of the report could be implemented to some extent under the current system, if agencies issued new classification guidance that took more account of the changed circumstances we now find," he said. Such calls may fall on more fertile ground than they have in the past. Porter Goss, now the director of the central intelligence and the man charged with managing the whole classification system, told UPI last year that over-classification was a persistent problem in U.S. intelligence agencies. "The problem is, it's a ratchet," he said. "It only turns one way. There are very serious consequences for failure to classify sensitive information. There tend to be no adverse consequences -- at least not to someone's career -- of classifying something that doesn't need to be classified." The Jason Group report is the latest in a series of recent critiques of the classification system, but the first to identify under-classification as a problem. Most previous critiques have focused on the reverse problem. For instance, the Sept. 11 commission found in its final report that "current security requirements nurture over-classification" -- making documents secret when they do not really need to be -- and found that, in turn, to be a barrier to the information sharing between agencies and with local law enforcement that is vital to the fight against terrorism. The commission's Chairman Tom Kean, the former GOP governor of New Jersey, has said that one of the great surprises of the unprecedented access he and his fellow commissioners were given to highly classified government documents was finding out how much of it he already knew from reading the newspapers. In a similar vein, the official in charge of information security at the Pentagon told a congressional panel Aug. 24 that at least half of the information the U.S. government classifies every year should not be kept secret. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Counter Intelligence and Security Carol Haave testified before a House panel led by Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn. Shays called the system for safeguarding the nation's secrets "incomprehensibly complex" and "so bloated it often does not distinguish between the critically important and the comically irrelevant." The panel heard examples of information that was classified by one agency, then released by another; information that was redacted from one part of a document by an agency, but published in another part of the same document; and information that an agency insisted should be classified until it was pointed out it was available on the agency's own Web site. -- ----------------- R. A. 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