I'm forwarding the latest edition of Secrecy News, which provides
several links to articles about the NARA "reclassification" story. The
Slate article is especially interesting, see link below for those who
didn't see it last week. I'm following this story with great interest,
not only because I used to work at NARA, but because my late twin
sister, Eva, was a supervisory archivist and a team leader in NARA's
records declassification unit. She worked there from 1983 until her
death in December 2002.
Maarja
See Secrecy News, below:
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2006, Issue No. 27
February 27, 2006
Secrecy News Blog: http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/
Support Secrecy News:
http://www.fas.org/static/contrib_sec.jsp
** FUROR OVER RECLASSIFICATION GROWS
** RESISTANCE TO ONLINE SECRECY BUILDS
** CDC POLICY ON "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED"
FUROR OVER RECLASSIFICATION GROWS
Anyone can purchase a copy of the 1958 Department of Defense
"Emergency Plans Book," an early cold war description of response
planning for a nuclear attack on the United States. It is
available for sale through Amazon.com and elsewhere under the
somewhat lurid title "The Doomsday Scenario" (Motorbooks
International, 2002).
But don't look for it at the National Archives, where author L.
Douglas Keeney originally obtained it in 1997, because it is no
longer there. It is among the thousands of government documents
that have been reclassified and withdrawn from public access.
"When I returned in 2005 for another round of research in the
Secretary of the Air Force Files, RG [record group] 340, the
boxes were decimated," Mr. Keeney told Secrecy News. "100% of
the documents I retrieved 9 years ago were gone."
In their place, he found a "withdrawal notice" of the sort that
has been quietly proliferating at the National Archives. An
official stamp ironically certifies that the withdrawal notice
itself is declassified and may be safely disclosed. See:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2006/02/reclassified.pdf
The documents in this case were removed from public access in
1997, near the beginning of the ongoing reclassification process
that has undermined the integrity of the National Archives.
If it cannot be halted and reversed, bureaucratically-driven
reclassification threatens to reduce the Archives to a mere
repository of officially-sanctioned history.
"Those who control the past control the future, Orwell famously
wrote in '1984'," recalled Fred Kaplan in an article in Slate
that supplied some of the back story of the reclassification
initiative.
See "Secret Again: The absurd scheme to reclassify documents" by
Fred Kaplan, Slate, February 23:
http://www.slate.com/id/2136480/
The continuing assault on history was also reported in "U.S.
reclassifies government memos" by Andrea Mitchell, NBC News,
February 24:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11546531/
"This effort to stuff this harmless toothpaste back into the tube
would be funny if it weren't so emblematic of a disturbing new
culture of government secrecy," a Washington Post editorial
opined. See "Classifying Toothpaste," February 27:
http://tinyurl.com/hykqx
RESISTANCE TO ONLINE SECRECY BUILDS
Confronted by a government that seems intent on erecting
unnecessary new barriers to public access, members of the public
are not entirely without resources to oppose such barriers, and
even to overcome them.
"Decrying secrecy, citizen groups fight back" is the thrilling
headline of a story by reporter Aliya Sternstein in Federal
Computer Week today (2/27/06) which explores the withdrawal of
government information from the world wide web, and the public
response.
"More federal agencies are taking data off the Web, while
citizens seek ways to restore public access," as described in
the article. See:
http://www.fcw.com/article92400-02-27-06-Print
"The concerted use of the Freedom of Information Act by public
interest groups and their constituents" offers one way of
recovering public access to official information that has been
removed from government websites, advises law professor and
librarian Susan Nevelow Mart in a new paper.
See "Let the People Know the Facts: Can Government Information
Removed from the Internet Be Reclaimed?", Law Library Journal,
Volume 98, No. 1 (2006):
http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v98n01/2006-01.pdf
CDC POLICY ON "SENSITIVE BUT UNCLASSIFIED"
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has updated
and revised its policy on "sensitive but unclassified" (SBU)
information, the increasingly common twilight category of
information that is neither classified nor publicly released.
"Marking information SBU does not automatically qualify it for a
public release exemption," the CDC policy observes. (There is
no "SBU exemption" to the Freedom of Information Act.)
On the other hand, "the absence of the SBU or other related
marking does not necessarily mean the information should be
publicly released."
"Therefore, all information should be reviewed and approved prior
to its public release," the CDC instructs.
A copy of the revised SBU policy was posted on the CDC intranet
and obtained by Secrecy News. See:
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/cdc-sbu-2006.html
The Government Accountability Office will publish a major report
on the use of Sensitive But Unclassified control markings next
month.
_______________________________________________
Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the
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Project on Government Secrecy
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