Report: Govt secrecy hurting warfighters

[R.A. Hettinga]

<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information is outdated, almost unworkable and makes the "information flow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 "Users," the report stated, "see an overly rigid, out of date,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 "The current situation of out of date or operationally unimplementable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.


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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
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