by Matt Barr

Examining the rising tide of secrecy

Matt Welch at Hit & Run alerts us to testimony before a House Subcommittee today by Thomas Blanton, director of The National Security Archive. I agree wholeheartedly with this part of his presentation and think it's a crucial point:

[T]he only part of our national security apparatus that actually prevented casualties on 9/11 was the citizenry -- those brave passengers on Flight 93 who figured out what was going on before the Pentagon or the CIA did, and brought their plane down before it could take out the White House or the Capitol.

Look at the case of the Unabomber, the Harvard-educated terrorist who blew up random scientists with letter bombs. Years of secret investigation turned up nothing but rambling screeds against modernity and the machine, and only after the madman threatened more violence unless his words were published, did the FBI relent and give the crank letter file to the newspapers. The Washington Post and the New York Times went in together on a special section to carry the 35,000 words in 1995, but the key paper was the Chicago Tribune, read at the breakfast table in a Chicago suburb by the bomber's brother, who said, sounds like crazy Ted, guess I'd better call the cops.

How did we catch the Washington sniper? The police had been chasing a white van for weeks with no luck, and finally changed the description to a blue sedan based on an eyewitness report. They refused to give out the license plate number (because the sniper would then change the plates, of course); but finally an unnamed police official took it upon herself to leak the license number at midnight, local radio and TV picked it up, and a trucker was listening who saw a blue sedan in a rest area in western Maryland. He checked the plate number, and bingo, within three hours of the leak they arrested the sniper. Openness empowers citizens.

The entire 9/11 Commission report includes only one finding that the attacks might have been prevented. This occurs on page 247 and is repeated on page 276 with the footnote on page 541, quoting the interrogation of the hijackers' paymaster, Ramzi Binalshibh. Binalshibh commented that if the organizers, particularly Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, had known that the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been arrested at his Minnesota flight school (he only wanted to fly, not to take off or land) on immigration charges, then Bin Ladin and KSM would have called off the 9/11 attacks. And wisely so, because news of that arrest would have alerted the FBI agent in Phoenix who warned of Islamic militants in flight schools in a July 2001 memo that vanished into the FBI's vaults in Washington. The Commission's wording is important here: only "publicity" could have derailed the attacks.

Read the whole thing. What struck me as a little specious, though, was a graph (slide 4 of Blanton's presentation) entitled Rise and Fall of Declassification:

In context, it's meant to make the powerful point that declassification measured in millions of pages has fallen dramatically over the last decade. It has, but because of things like this:

An executive order signed in early November [1994] by President Clinton has triggered the declassification of 43.9 million government records in the largest single declassification action ever, according to the Secrecy & Government Bulletin, a publication of the Washington, D.C.-based Federation of American Scientists.

The order requires the National Archives and Records Administration to declassify in bulk and without review most World War II records, and an even greater number of records amassed by the government since 1945, including nearly 6 million Army records on the Vietnam conflict.

Acting Assistant Archivist Michael Kurtz told the Bulletin, "There are a lot of routine records and there are some of tremendous historical value," but he said that, more importantly, "we have finally completed the World War II historical record and we have begun to fill in the blanks in post-war history."...

President Clinton in April 1993 ordered a review of classification procedures, promising a new executive order limiting the kinds of records that the government can classify and putting a ceiling on the number of years records will retain their classified status.

And this:

Executive Order 12958. EO 12958 took effect in FY 1996. Since that time, Executive Branch Agencies have declassified 720 million pages of classified information. The government declassified 127 million pages in FY 1999 alone. The number of "original classification authorities" decreased by 57, to 3,846. Steve Garfinkle, Director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) believes this is about as low as the Government can go.

In other words, that great big spike includes millions of pages that hadn't been eligible for automatic declassification but which were older than 25 years old when the declassification process was reformed, which now, being declassified, can't be declassified again. In the years after the federal franchise was extended to women, 18-year-olds, D.C. residents, and so on, there was a spike of new voters, but sadly, that spike petered out after an election or two. Is that because election requirements were becoming more strict again?

More niggling is the issue with the first slide, Rising Tide of Secrecy:

The trough coincides with Clinton's efforts at reform. But what else, besides the onset of the second Bush administration, has happened between 1994 and now? The ubiquity of e-mail and other written media, which has displaced conversations on the phone and more comprehensive, less seat-of-the-pants written communication. It's obvious that there has been an increase in substantive classification decisions since 2001 (read Blanton's remarks, too) -- but the upward trend is surely fed by the advent of new technologies for communicating, not just a redefinition of what should and shouldn't be classified.

(Are you like me, and do you wonder what kinds of things the Clinton administration ordered classified at the very end of his second term? Even if you're not that cynical, you should at least wonder if a bunch of stuff that wasn't classified during the mid-90s when reform was underway was classified all in one fell swoop as Clinton was getting ready to leave Washington. Note too the spike in pages declassified at the onset of the Bush administration.)

In any event, Blanton is absolutely right that an informed citizenry is important for our defense. It also happens to be an ideal we should strive for in the least hazardous of times. But a critical look at the graphs Blanton displayed for the Subcommittee today isn't necessarily the best evidence that more is being kept from us than ever. There's more, and better, and less misleading evidence of that (Blanton's own remarks, this, and this, for starters).

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