Before I go any further, I should point out that intelligence organizations never “produce information”. They collect information and produce intelligence.

Secrets are required to be kept compartmentalized because nobody can possibly grasp the depth of importance behind each issue. The amount of intelligence data is unfathomable.

At the “top” there are a few people who are responsible for classifying each piece of intelligence data. This provides centralized control of intelligence community operations and allows the entire community to move in a single direction even though they are comprised of thousands of individuals. If you gave control to declassify documents to many individuals control would be lost.

If you don’t believe that, consider what happened recently with the army intel analyst and wikileaks. Perhaps that information seems, on the surface to be of imperative interest to the American people, but the American people aren’t trained analysts. Foreign governments, however, do have analysts standing by. When information like that is released, they go to work producing intelligence reports on our way of waging war. When they understand that, they can figure out how to counter it.

Releasing our intelligence prematurely can cost lives. Lives I’d rather were not lost.

Of secrecy relevance, I think a sign of progress would be to establish a common access level and list — maybe Confidential — for everybody, everywhere in DHS and related agencies with no questions asked about sharing information with anybody on the list. Failing to share information should be the default sin, rather than the opposite.

Also, organizations producing information at higher classifications should be obliged to push as much down to the common level as soon as possible. I’ve taken part in several such exercises while in the government, and can testify that it generally isn’t all that hard to capture the essence of Top Secret RUFF ZARF UMBRA GAMMA ETC. documents in material meant to be shared with those holding lower clearances.

Similarly, there should be single-point-of-contact authorities in the centers who could authorize release of Confidential information to whomever seemed appropriate: small-town cops, hospitals, fire-fighters or even (gasp!) the press. Maybe there could be a similar DHS official in Washington who could unilaterally and immediately declassify any relevant information.