Part-Time Policy Wonk

NARA released the results of their audit on reclassification yesterday:

Under the provisions of Executive Order (E.O.) 12958, as amended, "Classified National Security Information" (the Order) and in response to a request from the Archivist of the United States as well as a group of concerned individuals and organizations, the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) performed an audit of all re-review efforts undertaken since 1995 by agencies in their belief that certain records at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) had not been properly reviewed for declassification, but had been made available to the public. The audit found a total of ten unrelated efforts to identify such records, which resulted in the withdrawal of at least 25,315 publicly available records; approximately 40 percent were withdrawn because the reviewing agency purported that its classified information had been designated unclassified without its permission and about 60 percent were identified by the reviewing agency for referral to another agency for declassification or other public disclosure review.

In reviewing a sample consisting of 1,353 of the withdrawn records, we concluded that 64 percent of the sampled records did, in fact, contain information that clearly met the standards for continued classification. Much of this information had been declassified in the early years of implementation of the current framework before agencies had in place all of the required procedures and training. Agency declassification guidance was, at times, misconstrued and agency declassification personnel did not always recognize information that needed to be reviewed by other agencies. While these problems have been largely addressed over the years, we have concluded that more needs to be done.

The audit also found that in attempting to recover records that still contained classified information, there were a significant number of instances when records that were clearly inappropriate for continued classification were withdrawn from public access. We concluded that 24 percent of the sampled records fell into this category, and an additional 12 percent were questionable. In one re-review effort, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) withdrew a considerable number of purely unclassified records in order to obfuscate the classified equity that the agency was intent on protecting. Included in the inappropriate category above, at least 12 percent of the records sampled had apparently been properly declassified, but were later improperly reclassified.

The National Security Archive issued their response:

Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs reacted by stating, "We are stunned to learn that this program is even larger than we were previously told. For the last two months we thought only 9,500 records were reclassified. In fact more than twice that number were reclassified, and we now know that re-reviews happened at Presidential libraries as well as at NARA and that between 24 and 36 percent of those should not have been reclassified."