An intelligence watchdog claimed no documents have been classified in order to prevent embarrassment to the government or to delay the release of information unrelated to national security at five intelligence agencies.
Charles McCullough, the Intelligence Community Inspector General, discovered holes in training programs for officials that decide whether to classify government documents but still decided no information had been kept secret unnecessarily.
His assessment appears to contradict that of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, who said during his 2010 Senate confirmation hearing that the intelligence community tends to overclassify information as a matter of practice.
“I will tell you, my general philosophy is that we can be a lot more liberal, I think, about declassifying, and we should be,” Clapper said in the hearing.
McCullough’s office analyzed classification reports from the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and National Reconnaissance Office to conclude the practice had not been used inappropriately.
Classification had never covered up wrongdoing, prevented embarrassment to an agency or official or stifled competition by making secret documents that otherwise posed no threat to national security, McCullough said.
Even so, the IG discovered less than half of all intelligence officials with the authority to classify attended some forms of training that were supposed to occur every other year.
Only 20 percent of contractor employees and 70 percent of government intelligence staff completed initial classification training between January 2012 and April 2014, the IG found.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence requires new classifying officers to take two online training courses, one of which is called “Staying Out of Trouble on the Internet,” the report said.
Agencies reported 58,794 original classification decisions in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. The Information Security Oversight Office touted that as a 20 percent decrease in the number of classification decisions over the previous year.
In 2003, agencies made 234,052 original classification decisions, or roughly four times more than the classification decisions made a decade later.
Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, said the drop in original classification decisions isn’t necessarily indicative of a commitment to greater transparency.
“You can have fewer decisions that cover more material depending on the rules for classifying at each agency,” Sanchez said. The decrease in the number of classification decisions, while “significant,” is difficult to interpret without context. “If you have an administration that has announced that it wants to be transparent, there are certainly plenty of ways for an agency to give the president what he wants without changing all that much, actually,” Sanchez said.
He called the watchdog’s sweeping claim that no reports had been improperly classified “silly,” pointing to the often broad interpretations of classification guidelines that allow documents to be kept secret with “only the most tenuous” national security justification.
“How do you establish whether a document containing something embarrassing was classified because it was embarrassing or just because they don’t need very much of an excuse to classify things?” he said.
Government officials can find a national security pretext for classifying just about any record that could damage their agency’s reputation if released, Sanchez said.
