Congressional Record: May 7, 1997 (Senate)
Page S4106-S4115



          STATEMENTS ON INTRODUCED BILLS AND JOINT RESOLUTIONS


      By Mr. MOYNIHAN (for himself and Mr. Helms):

  S. 712. A bill to provide for a system to classify information in the
interests of national security and a system to declassify such
information; to the Committee on Governmental Affairs.


                   THE GOVERNMENT SECRECY ACT OF 1997

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join with my colleague
from North Carolina, Senator Helms, in introducing the Government
Secrecy Act of 1997. Congressmen Larry Combest of Texas and Lee
Hamilton of Indiana are introducing companion legislation in the House
of Representatives this afternoon. The four of us, along with eight
other distinguished individuals, served for the past 2 years on the
Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy.
  Earlier today, the four of us testified together at a hearing of the
Committee on Governmental Affairs called by Chairman Thompson to review
the Commission's report, issued in March. The legislation that we
introduce today is intended to implement one of the core
recommendations of that Commission: The need for a statute establishing
the principles to govern the classification and declassification of
information. The remarks that follow track my testimony before the
Governmental Affairs Committee this morning.
  We begin by defining our subject. "Secrecy is a form of government
regulation." It can be understood in terms of a now considerable
literature concerning how organizations function. Begin with the German
scholar Max Weber, writing eight decades ago in his chapter
"Bureaucracy" in "Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft" (Economy and
Society):

       Every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the
     professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and
     intentions secret. Bureaucratic administration always tends
     to be an administration of "secret sessions"; in so far as
     it can, it hides its knowledge and action from criticism. The
     pure interest of the bureaucracy in power, however, is
     efficacious far beyond those areas where purely functional
     interests make for secrecy. The concept of the "official
     secret" is the specific invention of bureaucracy, and
     nothing is so fanatically defended by the bureaucracy as this
     attitude, which cannot be substantially defended beyond these
     specifically qualified areas.

  Normal regulation concerns how citizens are to behave. As the
administrative state developed in the United States, beginning with the
Progressive Era at the turn of the century and expanding greatly under
the New Deal, legal scholars began to ask just what these new rules
were. Were they laws? If not, then what? In 1938, Roscoe Pound,
chairman of the American Bar Association's Special Committee on
Administrative Law and former Dean of the Harvard Law School, attacked
those "who would turn the administration of justice over to
administrative absolutism . . . a Marxian idea," and inveighed against
those "progressives, liberals, or radicals who desire to invest the
National Government with totalitarian powers in the teeth of
constitutional democracy . . ."
  We managed to get a handle on that system, in no small measure
through the efforts of Erwin Griswold, also a dean of the Harvard Law
School, and others who decried the fact that administrative regulations
equivalent to law had become increasingly important to everyday life
and yet were not available to the public. One year after Professor
Griswold published a seminal article calling for the publication of
such rules and regulations, Congress enacted the Federal Register Act
of 1935. Eleven years later, in 1946, working from the recommendations
made in 1941 by the Attorney General's Committee on Administrative
Procedure, chaired by Dean Acheson, Congress enacted the Administrative
Procedure Act.
  Thus, today our system of public regulation is public indeed.
Regulations are both widely accessible and subject to the APA's set of
procedural requirements--bringing a degree of order and accountability
to this regime.
  Secrecy, by contrast, concerns what citizens may know, but the
citizen does not know what may not be known. Our Commission states:

       Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in
     other areas. What is different with secrecy is that the
     public cannot know the extent or the content of the
     regulation.

Thus, secrecy is the ultimate mode of regulation; the citizen does not
even know that he or she is being regulated. It is a parallel
regulatory regime with a far greater potential for damage if it
malfunctions.
  Flowing from this understanding of secrecy as regulation is the
recognition that, to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart's opinion in the
Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. We
state:

       The best way to ensure that secrecy is respected, and that
     the most important secrets remain secret, is for secrecy
     to be returned to its limited but necessary role. Secrets
     can be protected more effectively if secrecy is reduced
     overall.

  It is time to reexamine the foundations of that secrecy system. The
Information Security Oversight Office report to Congress last week
estimated the direct costs of secrecy at $5.2 billion in 1996 alone.
The same Office reports that in 1995 we had 21,871 original new top
secret designations and another 374,244 derivative top secret
designations. Meaning that, in a single year, roughly 400,000 new
secrets were created at the Top Secret level alone--the disclosure of
any one of which would cause exceptionally grave damage to the national
security.
  It is also time to examine the appropriateness of security
arrangements

[[Page S4111]]

put in place during an earlier age, when the perceived threats were so
different from those of today. In 1957, the only previous commission
established by the Congress to examine the secrecy system--the
Commission on Government Security--issued a report that, for any number
of reasons--in particular the fact that its core recommendation that
amounted to prior restraint of the press--did nothing to change the
prevailing mode. Although the Commission did understand classification
as a cost; its report ``stresses the dangers to national security that
arise out of overclassification of information which retards scientific
and technological progress, and thus tend to deprive the country of the
lead time that results from the free exchange of ideas and
information."
  When the Commission on Government Security presented its report to
President Eisenhower and the Congress, we still were consumed with
concerns about a Federal Government infiltrated by ideological enemies
of the United States. Today, the public and its representatives have
few such concerns; indeed, today it is the U.S. Government that
increasingly is the object of what Edward Shils in 1956, in ``The
Torment of secrecy," termed the ``phantasies of apocalyptic
visionaries."
  We are not proposing putting an end to secrecy. It is at times
terribly necessary and used for the most legitimate reasons. But
secrecy need not remain the only norm: We must develop a competing
culture of openness, fully consistent with our interests in protecting
national security, but in which power is no longer derived primarily
from one's ability to withhold information.
  I am struck in this regard by a most remarkable letter that I
received on March 25 from George F. Kennan, professor emeritus at the
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in response to our
Commission report. As lucid and thoughtful as ever at age 93, Professor
Kennan builds a compelling case for the proposition that much of our
secrecy system arose out of our efforts to penetrate the obsessively
secretive Soviet Communist regime of the Stalin era. And that the
system we put in place remains largely intact today, even as that
adversary has disappeared. Professor Kennan writes:

       It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience,
     first as a government official and then in the past 45 years
     as an historian, that the need by our government for secret
     intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been
     vastly over-rated. I would say that something upwards of 95%
     of what we need to know about foreign countries could be very
     well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly
     legitimate sources of information open and available to us in
     the rich library and archival holdings of this country.

  I ask unanimous that the full text of Professor Kennan's letter be
inserted in the Record.
  I should note further that Professor Kennan's conclusion about the
share of information available from open sources also has been reached
by other notable observers of the secrecy system--the estimable George
P. Shultz among them.
  Developing a culture of openness within the Federal Government
requires that secrecy be defined in statute. A statute will not put an
end to overclassification and needless classification, but it will help
by ensuring that the present regulatory regime cannot simply continue
to flourish without any restraint. Classification should proceed
according to law; classifiers should know that they are acting lawfully
and properly. We need to balance the possibility of harm to national
security against the public's right to know what the Government is
doing, or not doing. We should establish by statute that secrecy
belongs in the realm of national security and must serve that interest
alone. It should not be employed as a badge of office or a status
symbol.
  Thus we propose this statute, the Government secrecy Act of 1997. As
noted, Representatives Combest and Hamilton are cosponsoring a
companion measure in the House of Representatives. This legislation--
defining the principles and standards to govern classification and
declassification, and establishing within an existing agency a National
Declassification Center to coordinate responsibility for declassifying
historical documents--is drawn directly from the Commission's
recommendation for such a statute, as set out in the summary and in
chapter I of our report.
  I look forward to reviewing the legislation, as well as the other
findings and recommendations of the Commission, with Members of this
body, as well as our colleagues in the House of Representatives,
executive branch officials, and interested persons outside of
Government, in the weeks ahead.
  I send the bill to the desk and ask unanimous consent that it be
printed in the Record and be referred to the appropriate committee.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:

                                 S. 712

       Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of
     the United States of America in Congress assembled,

     SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

       This Act may be cited as the "Government Secrecy Act of
     1997".

     SEC. 2. PURPOSE.

       It is the purpose of this Act to promote the effective
     protection of classified information and the disclosure of
     information where there is not a well-founded basis for
     protection or where the costs of maintaining a secret
     outweigh the benefits.

     SEC. 3. FINDINGS.

       The Congress makes the following findings:
       (1) The system for classifying and declassifying national
     security information has been based in regulation, not in
     statute, and has been governed by six successive Executive
     orders since 1951.
       (2) The Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government
     secrecy, established under Public Law 103-236, issued its
     report on March 4, 1997 (S. Doc. 105-2), in which it
     recommended reducing the volume of information classified and
     strengthening the protection of classified information.
       (3) The absence of a statutory framework has resulted in
     unstable and inconsistent classification and declassification
     policies, excessive costs, and inadequate implementation.
       (4) The implementation of Executive orders will be even
     more costly as more documents are prepared and used on
     electronic systems.
       (5) United States taxpayers incur substantial costs as
     several million documents are classified each year. According
     to figures submitted to the Information Security Oversight
     Office and the Congress, the executive branch and private
     industry together spent more than $5.2 billion in 1996 to
     protect classified information.
       (6) A statutory foundation for the classification and
     declassification of information is likely to result in a more
     stable and cost-effective set of policies and a more
     consistent application of rules and procedures.
       (7) Enactment of a statute would create an opportunity for
     greater oversight by the Congress of executive branch
     classification and declassification activities, without
     impairing the responsibility of executive branch officials
     for the day-to-day administration of the system.

     SEC. 4. CLASSIFICATION AND DECLASSIFICATION OF INFORMATION.

       (a) Classification For National Security Reasons.--The
     President may, in accordance with this Act, protect from
     unauthorized disclosure information in the possession and
     control of the executive branch when there is a demonstrable
     need to do so in order to protect the national security of
     the United States. The President shall ensure that the amount
     of information classified is the minimum necessary to protect
     the national security.
       (b) Procedures for Classification and Declassification.--
       (1) In general.--The President shall, to the extent
     necessary, establish categories of information that may be
     classified and procedures for classifying information under
     subsection (a). The President shall, concurrently with the
     establishment of such categories and procedures, establish,
     and allocate resources for the implementation of, procedures
     for declassifying information previously classified.
       (2) Publication of categories and procedures.--
       (A) The President shall publish notice in the Federal
     Register of any categories and procedures proposed to be
     established under paragraph (1) with respect to both the
     classification and declassification of information, and shall
     provide an opportunity for interested agencies and other
     interested persons to submit comments thereon. The President
     shall take into account such comments before establishing the
     categories and procedures, which shall also be published in
     the Federal Register.
       (B) The procedures set forth in subparagraph (A) shall
     apply to any modifications in categories or procedures
     established under paragraph (1).
       (3) Agency standards and procedures.--The head of each
     agency shall establish standards and procedures for
     classifying and declassifying information created by that
     agency on the basis of the categories and procedures
     established by the President under paragraph (1). Each agency
     head, in establishing and modifying standards and procedures
     under this paragraph, shall follow the procedures required of
     the President in paragraph (2) for establishing and modifying

[[Page S4112]]

     categories and procedures under that paragraph.
       (c) Considerations in Determining Classification and
     Declassification.--
       (1) In general.--In determining whether information should
     be classified or declassified, the agency official making the
     determination shall weigh the benefit from public disclosure
     of the information against the need for initial or continued
     protection of the information under the classification
     system. If there is significant doubt as to whether
     information requires such protection, it shall not be
     classified.
       (2) Written justification.--
       (A) Original classification.--The agency official who makes
     the decision to classify information shall identify himself
     or herself and shall provide in writing a detailed
     justification for that decision.
       (B) Derivative classification.--In any case in which an
     agency official classifies a document on the basis of
     information previously classified that is included or
     referenced in the document, that agency official shall
     identify himself or herself in that document.
       (d) Standards for Declassification.--
       (1) Initial classification period.--Information may not
     remain classified under this Act for longer than a 10-year
     period unless the head of the agency that created the
     information certifies to the President at the end of such
     period that the information requires continued protection,
     based on a current assessment of the risks of disclosing the
     information, carried out in accordance with subsection
     (c)(1).
       (2) Additional classification period.--Information not
     declassified prior to or at the end of the 10-year period
     referred to in paragraph (1) may not remain classified for
     more than a 30-year period unless the head of the agency that
     created the information certifies to the President at the end
     of such 30-year period that continued protection of the
     information from unauthorized disclosure is essential to the
     national security of the United States or that demonstrable
     harm to an individual will result from release of the
     information.
       (3) Declassification schedules.--All classified information
     shall be subject to regular review pursuant to schedules each
     agency head shall establish and publish in the Federal
     Register. Each agency shall follow the schedule established
     by the agency head in declassifying information created by
     that agency.
       (4) Assessment of existing classified information.--Each
     agency official responsible for information which, before the
     effective date of this Act--
       (A) was determined to be kept protected from unauthorized
     disclosure in the interest of national security, and
       (B) had been kept so protected for longer than the 10-year
     period referred to in paragraph (1),
     shall, to the extent feasible, give priority to making
     decisions with respect to declassifying that information as
     soon as is practicable.
       (e) Reports to Congress.--Not later than December 31 of
     each year, the head of each agency that is responsible for
     the classification and declassification of information shall
     submit to the Congress a report that describes the
     application of the classification and declassification
     standards and procedures of that agency during the preceding
     fiscal year.
       (f) Amendment to Freedom of Information Act.--Section
     552(b)(1) of title 5, United States Code, is amended to read
     as follows:
       "(1)(A) specifically authorized to be classified under the
     Government secrecy Act of 1997, or specifically authorized,
     before the effective date of that Act, under criteria
     established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the
     interest of national security (as defined by section 7(6) of
     the Government secrecy Act of 1997), and (B) are in fact
     properly classified pursuant to that Act or Executive
     order;".

     SEC. 5. NATIONAL DECLASSIFICATION CENTER.

       (a) Establishment.--The President shall establish, within
     an existing agency, a National Declassification Center, the
     functions of which shall be--
       (1) to coordinate and oversee the declassification policies
     and practices of the Federal Government; and
       (2) to provide technical assistance to agencies in
     implementing such policies and practices, in accordance with
     this section.
       (b) Functions.--
       (1) Declassification of information.--The Center shall, at
     the request of any agency and on a reimbursable basis,
     declassify information within the possession of that agency
     pursuant to the guidance of that agency on the basis of the
     declassification standards and procedures established by that
     agency under section 4, or if another agency created the
     information, pursuant to the guidance of that other agency on
     the basis of the declassification standards and procedures
     established by that agency under section 4. In carrying out
     this paragraph, the Center may use the services of officers
     or employees or the resources of another agency, with the
     consent of the head of that agency.
       (2) Coordination of policies.--The Center shall coordinate
     implementation by agencies of the declassification policies
     and procedures established by the President under section 4
     and shall ensure that declassification of information occurs
     in an efficient, cost-effective, and consistent manner among
     all agencies that create or otherwise are in possession of
     classified information.
       (3) Disputes.--If disputes arise among agencies regarding
     whether information should or should not be classified, or
     between the Center and any agency regarding the Center's
     functions under this section, the heads of the agencies
     concerned or of the Center may refer the matter to the
     President for resolution of the dispute.
       (c) National Declassification Advisory Committee.--
       (1) In general.--There is established a 12-member National
     Declassification Advisory Committee. 4 members of the
     Advisory Committee shall be appointed by the President and 2
     members each shall be appointed by the majority and minority
     leaders of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of
     Representatives, and the minority leader of the House of
     Representatives.
       (2) Membership.--The members of the Advisory Committee
     shall be appointed from among distinguished historians,
     political scientists, archivists, other social scientists,
     and other members of the public who have a demonstrable
     expertise in declassification and the management of
     Government records. No officer or employee of the United
     States Government shall be appointed to the Advisory
     Committee.
       (3) Duties.--The Advisory Committee shall provide advice to
     the Center and make recommendations concerning
     declassification priorities and activities.
       (d) Annual Reports.--The Center shall submit to the
     President and the Congress, not later than December 31 of
     each year, a report on its activities during the preceding
     fiscal year, and on the implementation of agency
     declassification practices and its efforts to coordinate
     those practices.

     SEC. 6. INFORMATION TO THE CONGRESS.

       Nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the
     withholding of information from the Congress.

     SEC. 7. DEFINITIONS.

       As used in this Act--
       (1) the term "Advisory Committee" means the National
     Declassification Advisory Committee established under section
     5(c);
       (2) the term "agency" means any executive agency as
     defined in section 105 of title 5, United States Code, any
     military department as defined in section 102 of such title,
     and any other entity in the executive branch of the
     Government that comes into the possession of classified
     information;
       (3) the term "Center" means the National Declassification
     Center established under section 5(a);
       (4) the terms "classify", "classified", and
     "classification" refer to the process by which information
     is determined to require protection from unauthorized
     disclosure pursuant to this Act in order to protect the
     national security of the United States;
       (5) the terms "declassify", "declassified", and
     "declassification" refer to the process by which
     information that has been classified is determined to no
     longer require protection from unauthorized disclosure
     pursuant to this Act; and
       (6) the term "national security of the United States"
     means the national defense or foreign relations of the United
     States.

     SEC. 8. EFFECTIVE DATE.

       This Act shall take effect 180 days after the date of the
     enactment of this Act.
                                                                    ____

                                     Institute for Advanced Study,


                                 School of Historical Studies,

                                    Princeton, NJ, March 25, 1997.
     Senator Daniel P. Moynihan,
     Russell Senate Office Building,
     Washington, DC.
       Dear Senator: Thank you for your note of the 7th, and for
     the copy of your recent talk at Georgetown, which I have read
     with deep appreciation.
       There are several points you touched on in that talk which,
     were we sitting at leisure around a fireside, I would like to
     pursue. I cannot treat them all here. But there is one matter
     on which you did not specifically mention but which lies
     close to the subject you had in mind, and on which I am moved
     to say a word. It is a matter on which I have long looked
     for, but never found, a suitable chance to comment publicly.
       It is my conviction, based on some 70 years of experience,
     first as a government official and then in the past 45 years
     as an historian, that the need by our government for secret
     intelligence about affairs elsewhere in the world has been
     vastly over-rated. I would say that something upwards of 95%
     of what we need to know about foreign countries could be very
     well obtained by the careful and competent study of perfectly
     legitimate sources of information open and available to us in
     the rich library an archival holdings of this country. Much
     of the remainder, if it could not be found here (and there is
     very little of it that could not) could easily be non-
     secretively elicited from similar sources abroad.
       In Russia, in Stalin's time and partly thereafter, the
     almost psychotic preoccupation of the Communist regime with
     secrecy appeared to many, not unnaturally, to place a special
     premium on efforts to penetrate that curtain by secretive
     methods of our own. This led, of course, to the creation here
     of a vast bureaucracy dedicated to this particular purpose;
     and this latter, after the fashion of all great bureaucratic
     structures, has endured to this day, long after most of the
     reasons for it have disappeared. Even in the Soviet time,
     much of it was superfluous. A lot of what we went to such
     elaborate and dangerous means to obtain secretly would have
     been here for the having, given the requisite quiet and
     scholarly analysis of what already lay before us.

[[Page S4113]]

       The attempt to elicit information by secret means has
     another very serious negative effect that is seldom noted.
     The development of clandestine sources of information in
     another country involves, of course, the placing and the
     exploitation of secret agents on the territory of that
     country. This naturally incites the mounting of a substantial
     effort of counterintelligence on the part of the respective
     country's government. This, in turn, causes us to respond
     with an equally vigorous effort of counterintelligence in
     order to maintain the integrity of our espionage effort.
     But for a variety of reasons, this competition in
     counterintelligence efforts tends to grow into dimensions
     that wholly overshadow the original effort of positive
     intelligence procurement that gave rise to it in the first
     place. It takes on aspects which cause it to be viewed as
     a game, played in its own rights. Unfortunately, it is a
     game requiring such lurid and dramatic character that it
     dominates the attention both of those that practice it,
     and of those in the press and the media who exploit it.
     Such is the fascination it exerts that it tends wholly to
     obscure, even for the general public the original reasons
     for it. It would be interesting to know what proportion of
     the energies and expenses and bureaucratic involvement of
     the C.I.A. is addressed to this consuming competition, and
     whether one ever stacks this up against the value of its
     almost forgotten original purposes. Do people ever
     reflect, one wonders, that the best way to protect against
     the penetration of one's secrets by others is to have the
     minimum of secrets to conceal?
       One more point. At the bottom of the whole great effort of
     secret military intelligence, which has played so nefarious a
     part in the entire history of great-power relationships in
     this passing century, there has usually lain the assumption
     by each party that if it did not engage to the limit in that
     exercise the other party, working in secret, might develop a
     weapon so devastating that with it he could confront all
     others with the demand that they submit to his will "or
     else".
       But this sort of anxiety is now greatly outdated. The
     nuclear competition has taught us that the more terrible the
     weapons available, the more suicidal becomes any conceivable
     actual use of them. With the recognition of the implications
     of this simple fact would go a large part of the motivation
     for our frantic efforts of secret intelligence. In this
     respect, too, this is really a new age. It is time we
     recognized it and drew the inescapable conclusions.
       There may still be areas, very small areas really, in which
     there is a real need to penetrate someone else's curtain of
     secrecy. All right. But then please, without the erection of
     false pretenses and elaborate efforts to deceive--and
     without, to the extent possible--the attempt to maintain
     "spies" on the adversary's territory. We easily become
     ourselves, the sufferers from these methods of deception. For
     they inculcate in their authors, as well as their intended
     victims, unlimited cynicism, causing them to lose all
     realistic understanding of the interrelationship, in what
     they are doing, of ends and means.
       Forgive me for burdening you with this outburst. I am not
     unloading upon my friends, in private letters, thoughts I
     should probably have brought forward publicly long ago. I
     have to consider that this is the only way I can put some of
     these thoughts into words before, in the case of a person 93
     years of age, it becomes too late.
       Warm and admiring greetings.
           Very sincerely,
                                                    George Kennan.

  Mr. HELMS. I am pleased to join Senator Moynihan today in introducing
a bill that would for the first time place in statute the Government
system for the classification of information. To date this has been
accomplished solely through Executive order.
  The statute is based on the recommendations contained in the report
of the Commission to Protect and Reduce Government secrecy chaired by
my colleague Pat Moynihan, the senior Senator from New York. The
secrecy Commission achieved a unified report of recommendations--a feat
that should not be underrated, especially in Washington.
  The Commission, by law, had the twin goals of studying how to protect
important Government secrets and simultaneously reducing the amount of
classified documents and materials. All Commissioners began their
deliberations with the premise that Government secrecy is a form of
regulation that, like all regulations, should be used sparingly, and
certainly never for the goal of keeping the truth from the American
people. Commissioners also began the process recognizing that over-
classification can actually weaken the protections of those secrets
that truly are in our national interest.
  All the same I am obliged to begin with a reiteration of the
obvious--that the protection of true national security information
remains vital to the well-being and security of the United States. The
end of the cold war notwithstanding, the United States continues to
face serious and long-term threats from a variety of fronts. While
Communist and anti-American regimes, such as North Korea, Cuba, Iran,
and Iraq, continue to wage a war of espionage against the United
States, new threats have arisen as well.
  Most alarming, perhaps, is the growing trend of espionage conducted
not by our enemies but by American allies. Such espionage is on the
rise especially against U.S. economic secrets. According to a February
1996 report by GAO, classified military information and sensitive
military technologies are high priority targets for the intelligence
agencies of U.S. allies.
  At first blush, a push to reduce Government secrecy may seem at odds
with these increasing threats. I am convinced it is not. The sheer
volume of government secrets--and their cost to the taxpayers and U.S.
business--is staggering. In 1996 the taxpayers spent more than $5.2
billion to protect classified information. We know all too well from
our own experiences that when everything is secret nothing is secret.
  secrecy all too often then becomes a political tool used by executive
branch agencies to shield information which may be politically
sensitive or policies which may be unpopular with the American public.
Worse yet, information may be classified to hide from public view
illegal or unethical activity. On numerous occasions I, and other
Members of Congress, have found the executive branch to be reluctant to
share certain information, the nature of which is not truly a national
secret, but which would be potentially politically embarrassing to
officials in the executive branch or which would make known an illegal
or indefensible policy.

  I have also found that one of the largest impediments to openness is
the perverse incentives of the Government bureaucracy itself in favor
of classification, and the lack of accountability for those who do the
actual classification. I strongly endorse the Commission's
recommendation of adding individual accountability to the process by
requiring original and derivative classifiers to actually identify
themselves and include within the documents a justification of the
decision to classify.
  The only way to change a bureaucracy is to reverse the incentive to
classify. A good example of how to change this lack of bureaucratic
accountability is a provision contained in H.R. 3121--legislation which
we approved in the Foreign Relations Committee last year that was
signed into law. Previously, details on U.S. commercial arms sales to
foreign governments were not made available to the public unless a
citizen requested that the State Department make it public. The
incentive therefore was to keep the information closely regulated. H.R.
3121 provides that all arm sales will be made public unless the
President determines that the release of the information is contrary to
U.S. national security interest. Although this may appear to be a small
nuance, the bureaucratic incentive is changed enormously to favor
openness. Shifting the burden in this way can introduce more openness
into the system and force the bureaucracy to identify true national
security threats.
  I am convinced, however, that the single most important
recommendation of our Commission that Congress should focus on is the
concept of creating a life cycle for secrets. This means that all
information, classified and unclassified alike, has a life span in
which decisions must be made regarding creation, management, and use.
This kind of rationalization would shift the burden to favor openness
and reduce some of the costs associated with declassification.
  I would add a note of caution to the Commission's work on
declassification, however. In the course of the 2 years of its work,
the Commission became very interested in the declassification of
existing documents and materials. In a perfect world, if information
remains relevant to true U.S. national interests it should remain
classified indefinitely. Information that does not compromise U.S.
interests and sources should be made public. We all realize, however,
that this is a tremendously costly venture. In fact, the Commission was
unable to come up with solid data on the true cost of declassification.
  In this era when Congress has finally begun to grasp the essential
need to reduce Government spending and balance the budget, the issue of
balancing costs

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and benefits is an essential one. The financial costs to the American
taxpayers must be balanced against the necessity of the
declassification. The real lesson to take from the work of this
Commission is the need to redress for the future the problems of over
classification and a systematic process for declassification, so that
the costs and timeliness of declassification does not pose the same
economic and regulatory burdens on future generations. At the same
time, it may be too costly to declassify all of the countless
classified documents now in existence.
  With this caveat in mind, I hope the Congress will focus on bringing
government-wide rationalization to the classification process. It is an
area where tough congressional oversight is long overdue.
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