House of Representatives report on the problem of overclassification.
By Curt_Anderson January 20, 2023 10:35 pm Category: Government (0.0 from 0 votes)
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Not the current House, of course, this report was written by the Committee on Government Reform, 188th Congress. Here is an excerpt, the full report is at the link below.
TOO MANY SECRETS: OVERCLASSIFICATION AS A BARRIER TO CRITICAL INFORMATION SHARING
An old maxim of military strategy warns, ``He who protects everything, protects nothing.
Nevertheless, the United States today attempts to shield an immense and growing body of secrets using an incomprehensibly complex system of classifications and safeguard requirements. As a result, no one can say with any degree of certainty how much is classified, how much needs to be declassified, or whether the Nation's real secrets can be adequately protected in a system so bloated, it often does not distinguish between the critically important and the comically irrelevant.
This much we know: There are too many secrets. Soon after President Franklin Roosevelt's first executive order on classification in 1940, the propensity to overclassify was noted. Since then, a long and distinguished list of committees and commissions has studied the problem. They all found it impossible to quantify the extent of overclassification because no one even knows the full scope of the Federal Government's classified holding at any given time. Some estimate 10 percent of current secrets should never have been classified. Others put the extent of overclassification as high as 90 percent.
"There's somewhere in the order of over 50 million documents classified every year. We don't know the exact number because even the government can't keep track of it all," Oona Hathaway, a law professor at Yale University and former special counsel at the Pentagon, told NPR.
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Not the current House, of course, this report was written by the Committee on Government Reform, 188th Congress. Here is an excerpt, the full report is at the link below.
