Questions for the State Dept. After News it Launched a Pilot Program for Declassification Work, Anniversary of Rosenberg Execution for Espionage, and More: FRINFORMSUM 6/23/2023

State Department Launches AI Pilot Program for FOIA Processing

Federal News Network reports that the State Department is “experimenting with automation” to improve its FOIA work. Of specific interest is a pilot program that has “trained a machine learning model on years of humans reviewing and declassifying records” to improve the agency’s declassification processing. “The model is now as accurate as human FOIA professionals about 97-99% of the time,” and has saved the agency, according to Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Global Information Services Eric Stein, half a year’s worth of work.

This is good news. Embracing machine learning will be critical for agencies as their FOIA backlogs grow and incoming records requests deal with ever-larger pools of electronic responsive records. However, the article begs several important questions. 

One critical question for the State Department is whether the AI pilot is helping FOIA officers search for responsive records, or is it performing redactions after a document has been deemed responsive to a request? Another key question is at what stage in a FOIA request does a machine model base its learning? Is it based on responses that have been appealed and litigated, or primarily on initial determinations? Because agencies release more information on appeal roughly a third of the time, and because an independent, inter-agency body overrules agency declassification decisions 70% of the time, the stage during the administrative process that machine learning is based on is an extremely important one. Hopefully the State Department will provide more details soon – and engage requesters in the process.

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Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers

The recent death of Daniel Ellsberg, whistleblower and leaker of the Pentagon Papers, closes an extraordinary chapter in American history, and begs the question of how far the nation has come in its treatment of whistleblowers and its ability to rein in the national security apparatus. 

The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967, was commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara to help document the Vietnam War. The voluminous study was compiled by 36 analysts, including then-Rand Corporation analyst Ellsberg, who leaked portions of the report to the New York Times in 1971. The disclosure caused a furor, enraged the Nixon administration (and prompted the establishment of the “White House Plumbers”), and led to a seminal Supreme Court ruling on the freedom of the press.

Despite the attention the leak garnered, and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, much of the report stayed secret. The National Security Archive filed both FOIA and Mandatory Declassification Review (MDR) requests for the report in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s. 

Yet the full version of the Pentagon Papers, nearly 7,000 declassified pages, wasn’t made public until the 40th anniversary of the 1971 leak, when the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and its National Declassification Center (NDC) released the complete version, minus eleven words the government maintained must stay secret. 

The National Security Archive’s John Prados commemorated the 2011 release by publishing declassified records that were “central to the larger story of the Pentagon Papers.” These records include, but are not limited to, a set of the legal briefs that were filed with the Supreme Court, and declassified text that was compiled by the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR). The INR’s “study had a stature similar to that of the Pentagon Papers and deserves to be examined alongside it. The State Department Papers never leaked and thus are hardly known. They will be completely new to most readers.”

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – Executed 70 Years Ago as Spies

On June 19, 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted of espionage for the Soviet Union. The grand jury testimonies from the trial, one of the most sensational flash points of the early Cold War, have been a focus of Archive release efforts for years. 

In 2008, the Archive and leading U.S. historical associations won the opening of the majority of witness statements before the grand jury, including those of Julius and Ethel, which collectively “cast significant doubt on the key prosecution charge used to convict Ethel Rosenberg at the trial and sentence her to death.” The notable exception from the release was the grand jury testimony of Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass. 

Greenglass objected to the release of his testimony in 2008, seven years after being paid to sit with reporter Sam Roberts, who was then working on a book that would be titled, “The Brother: The Untold Story of Atomic Spy David Greenglass and How He Sent His Sister, Ethel Rosenberg, to the Electric Chair.” During the paid sessions, Greenglass admitted that, “he had lied on the witness stand about the single most incriminating evidence against his sister — that she typed his handwritten notes for delivery to the Soviets. Without that testimony, Ethel Rosenberg might well have never been convicted, much less executed.”

In 2015 the Archive, together with the historical associations, finally won a petition for the release of David Greenglass’s testimony. In the 2015 ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein dismissed the Government’s argument that the release would rekindle apathy towards the Greenglass family, and found, “The requested records are critical pieces of an important moment in our nation’s history. The time for the public to guess what they contain should end.” The testimony released in 2015 suggested Greenglass did in fact commit perjury on the witness stand. 

Read the Greenglass testimony here. More information about the lawsuit can be found on our website.  

In Brief

• Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) member Ezra Cohen recently joined Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (NPEC) director Henry Sokolski to discuss overclassification. Discussion points were drawn from NPEC’s recent paper, “Over-classification: How Bad Is It, What’s the Fix?” The video broadcast can be found on YouTube.