I agree with the editors of the Washington Post. The federal classifies too much, declassifies too little, and doesn’t do a particularly good job of keeping its secrets. It needs reform.
The 2020 report recommended that a new high-level executive be appointed to oversee the effort, and a new national declassification system be created that would work toward timely release of information. Technology must be used to modernize the aging systems, the report found, and the government ought to deploy the tools of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud storage and retrieval to build a modern system with automation. Not everyone is sold on the automation concept, but it deserves exploration. The slow, page-by-page declassification process is broken.
So far, Ms. Haines said, current priorities and resources for fixing the classification systems “are simply not sufficient.†The National Security Council is working on a revised presidential executive order governing classified information, and we hope the White House will come up with an ambitious blueprint for modernization.
The nation needs to guard its secrets to function properly. But over-classification is counterproductive and adds to public distrust. A big improvement would be to simplify the classification process into two tiers, “secret†and “top secret,†with appropriate protections and guidelines that will also prevent labeling as “classified†material that does not need to be protected. In the words of one chair of the Public Interest Declassification Board, Nancy E. Soderberg, “Transformation is not simply advisable but imperative.†She was right about both the need and the urgency. That was nearly 10 years ago.
As a college chum of mine once wisecracked, the best way to protect your secrets is not to have any. I’m skeptical that the moves proposed by the editors would materially improve matters. When did adding another level of bureaucracy ever make an organization more secure? I’m also skeptical about the federal government’s ability to manage technology. By its very nature the government bureaucracy is standards-based and standards are inherently retrospective in nature. Technology just moves too fast for a standards-based system to keep up with.
This is just a really difficult problem and this sounds like just another in a long history of proposals based on wishful thinking.
Given the breadth and scope of intelligence and national security information produced – much of it being combined products that use many sources, it’s not really possible to automate a lot of it.
And what a lot of people don’t understand is that in the vast majority of cases information is classified not because the information itself is secret, but because the sources and methods used to obtain that information are secret.
One of my jobs used to be “sanitizing” intelligence to provide information at lower classification levels (including unclassified) by altering the information to disguise the source. That has to be done by hand and with oversight. The same goes for declassifying information.
That said, the procedures and especially IT systems make everything more difficult. This was making the rounds among my Air Force friends today which sums up how dorked up DoD IT is.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/military-computer-problems-air-force/
Intelligence IT systems are no better. And they are frequently balkanized because no one has figured out multi-level security yet, so systems are air-gapped. At one point I had four computers under my desk – one for a special program, one for the Top Secret network, one for the Secret/Confidential network, and one for the Unclassified network. And down the hall in a separate secure room were two more special project systems that were air-gapped and had their own encryption. And there were other systems for specialized functions.
Jeez, thinking about all this now reminds me of how frustrating it was.