SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2003, Issue No. 21
March 11, 2003
** DRAFT EXECUTIVE ORDER ON SECRECY ADVANCES
** IN PRINT
DRAFT EXECUTIVE ORDER ON SECRECY ADVANCES
A new draft executive order on national security classification
and declassification policy began circulating for official
comment this week. An early assessment offered by one agency
official who favors public access to government information, is
that "It could be a lot worse."
When finalized, the new executive order will replace President
Clinton's 1995 executive order 12958, which dramatically
accelerated the declassification process and which has now
yielded close to a billion pages of historically valuable
declassified documents.
In recent decades, whenever the Presidency shifted from one party
to another, the new President would issue an executive order on
secrecy policy to serve as the foundation of the classification
system. Typically, and at least rhetorically, the orders issued
by Democratic presidents (e.g., Clinton's EO 12958) have
emphasized disclosure, while those of Republican presidents
(e.g., Reagan's EO 12356) have stressed secrecy.
The Bush Administration initiative to craft a new executive
order, which began in August 2001, has therefore been a source
of anxiety for those who feared that the Administration's
predilection for official secrecy would lead to dramatic changes
in classification policy. But that may not turn out to be the
case.
The new draft order "amounts to amendments to the Clinton order,
rather than an entirely new Bush order," according to the
official.
A number of changes have been made, but they are "quite modest,
quite supportable" the official said. "If you parsed it out,
you would find things you didn't like. But I question whether
those things make a lot of real world difference anyway."
Executive orders on classification define top level information
policies, but they cannot prevent officials from making
unwarranted or irrational classification decisions.
There is a loose deadline of April 17, 2003 for issuance of the
new order, because that is the date on which 25 year old
classified files that are replete with intelligence information
or multi-agency "equities" are due to be automatically
declassified, pursuant to Executive Order 13142. The new Bush
order is expected to defer that April 17 deadline.
The text of the new draft executive order was not immediately
available.
IN PRINT
"Protecting secrets when appropriate, disclosing secrets when
proper, and managing secrecy are all normal parts of the
democratic process," writes Bruce Berkowitz of the Hoover
Institution. "The same principles that are used to strike a
balance among competing interests in a democracy can be used to
oversee intelligence secrets as well."
See "Democracies and Their Spies," by Bruce Berkowitz, Hoover
Digest, Winter 2003:
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest/031/berkowitz.html
In the USA Patriot Act's provisions for electronic
surveillance,
"too much has been left to executive branch discretion,"
according to an analysis in the Duke Law Journal. "Americans
should be concerned that privacy may be unnecessarily threatened
as a result."
See "The Patriot Act's Impact on the Government's Ability to
Conduct Electronic Surveillance of Ongoing Domestic
Communications" by Nathan C. Henderson, Duke Law Journal,
October 2002:
http://www.law.duke.edu/shell/cite.pl?52+Duke+L.+J.+179
A 1966 study performed for the Defense Department
evaluated, and
rejected, the hypothetical use of tactical nuclear weapons in
Vietnam. A declassified copy of that study, and related
analyses that draw lessons for today, may be found here:
http://www.nautilus.org/VietnamFOIA/
The personal files of British agents of the World War II
Special
Operations Executive are among the releases announced by the UK
Public Record Office this month. See:
http://www.pro.gov.uk/releases/r2003.htm
_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
Federation of American Scientists.
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