Opinion U S government secrets system mired in crisis washingtonpost com opinions 2024 02 13 classified-secrets-system-crisis Editorial Board February 13 2024 Opinion It’s no secret that the nation’s classification system is broken By the Editorial Board Boxes stacked in a storage closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington in March 2021 Justice Department AP A special counsel investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified material has ended with the release of an unflattering report replete with references to his bad memory — and illustrated with photographs of sensitive files lying around his Delaware garage Mr Biden was politically damaged but not criminally charged Next come legal proceedings against former president Donald Trump who has been charged by a different special counsel with carelessly stashing secret documents — and resisting official requests to return them Sensational as these cases are though they are far from representative of the actual flaws plaguing our nation’s system for keeping national security secrets The real problem is that the system is overwhelmed by a growing mountain of classified material Too much information is classified and too much of what’s classified is classified at too high a level of secrecy Meanwhile the declassification of documents for which secrecy is no longer necessary proceeds in dribs and drabs This is counterproductive for officials who need to use the information in real time while also discouraging accountability oversight and serious historical analysis In 2012 the Public Interest Declassification Board PIDB an advisory body within the National Archives reported that procedures “for classification and declassification of national security information are outmoded unsustainable and keep too much information from the public ” Back then the government classified petabytes — a million gigabytes — of data annually By 2019 it was up to petabytes every month In 2020 the PIDB warned of an “explosion” of digital data Avril Haines the director of national intelligence said last year that “deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security as well as critical democratic objectives by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner ” 1 3 Last year the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center a nonprofit headed by former Defense Department official Henry Sokolski published a report calling overclassification an “epidemic ” The problem stretches over the entire life span of programs and documents from the moment they are first stamped secret to when the information is needed for government operations to the end stage of declassification At the outset too much is overclassified out of unwarranted fear by officials that they will let out something sensitive — often it could be protected at lower levels of classification At the end in declassification government officials face no penalty for keeping them secret and few incentives to unseal them Officials who make classification decisions frequently operate in apparent ignorance of what’s already public The National Security Archive a nonprofit affiliated with George Washington University pointed out inDecember that Defense Department objections led to the withholding of key parts of a Kissinger-to-Nixon memo that had been published in full by the State Department nearly 10 years earlier Mr Sokolski points out that overclassification can hinder the proper use of information Air Force Army Navy and intelligence community officials he reports have experienced dysfunction caused by overclassification especially information put into highly classified special access programs or SAPs In Afghanistan units on the battlefield often resorted to using commercial imagery because they were unable to access the excessively classified material Moreover he says overclassification has weakened oversight by Congress inspectors general and congressional staff A prime cause of the overclassification epidemic according to his report are vague and conflicting classification guidelines and authorities The government maintains more than 2 000 security classification guidebooks including more than 400 for the Army alone the report says How to fix this is coming into focus — slowly About seven years ago the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency realized it needed to get data to the battlefield more quickly It reduced the agency’s 65 guidebooks into a single guidebook and made it clear that officials should assess whether classification would hinder missions and information-sharing when making decisions Unfortunately this agency’s example stands alone It should be replicated throughout the government Another fix rationalize 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 Artificial intelligence could help sort material more consistently Congress also needs to act It created the Public Interest Declassification Board more than two decades ago to advise the president on these difficult issues The board needs a budget and its own staff which it still lacks 2 3 The broken declassification system hurts national security and hampers American democracy Repair is long overdue The Post’s View About the Editorial Board Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution as determined through discussion among members of the Editorial Board based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom Members of the Editorial Board Opinion Editor David Shipley Deputy Opinion Editor Charles Lane and Deputy Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg as well as writers Mary Duenwald Shadi Hamid David E Hoffman James Hohmann Heather Long Mili Mitra Eduardo Porter Keith B Richburg and Molly Roberts 3 3