How To Solve Overclassification: Give Government Departments A Limited Annual 'Secrecy Budget'
from the kicking-the-habit dept
Recently we noted that "overclassification" of sensitive material actually leads to more secrets being revealed. The New York Times has published an interesting article that picks up on this theme, and gives the following concrete example of how overclassification has been harmful to the US:Consider the least covert secret program in the American arsenal: drones. Every drone attack in Pakistan and Yemen made the local news, and Twitter, in hours. Often those reports were accompanied by huge exaggerations about civilian casualties. But the American ambassador in Pakistan was forced to let those claims go unanswered, because the program was classified. "We did far more damage to our national security pretending we knew nothing," one senior American official said in frustration, "than if we had owned up to them and said, 'Here's a list of terrorists we just put out of action.' "It also reports on an intriguing suggestion for solving this problem, which comes from Herb Lin, a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences:
"The incentives to classify information are many, and the incentives to refrain from classifying it are few," he noted recently, adding that he was speaking just for himself. "Classifying information doesn't incur any monetary cost for the classifier, and any economist will tell you that a free good will be overused."As well as being a practical suggestion that is easy to implement, Lin's approach has the huge virtue that the "secrecy budget" can be adjusted over time. That offers the hope that the US government's present addiction to over-classifying material could be gradually scaled back to something approaching sensible levels of secrecy.
So he proposes that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies should be given a budget, and every time a "top secret" stamp is used, it should be charged against that budget.
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Filed Under: overclassificiation, secrecy budget
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This either turns into an expensive bureaucracy to allocate and monitor the budget, paid for by the cost of using the secret stamps, or the budget is virtual and can be set at any level.
I would bet on the first option, and the resulting bureaucracy would lobby for an increased secrets budget so that it could grow itself.
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Under my plan, the budget (in terms of count, not $) is "0". For every document classified, one must be declassified. It would take a while to get to a decent steady state, but it would eventually happen.
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For example, OOTB is overusing air
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The amount of 'secret budget' used/remaining/overdrawn will be classified as secret.
The identities of those using and monitoring the budget will be classified as secret.
All other details of the program will be classified as secret.
The only thing that won't be secret is that there is a problem with overuse of secrecy.
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Well, we all should remember Watergate
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Which in my mind, raises the question of whether this is a digital issue. If over-classification was previously limited by the pain-in-the-ass factor, was this balance radically shifted by the shift to electronic documents? In a nutshell, has the digital era made the procedures for classifying too efficient?
If so, this might be a problem that needs both a political and a technical solution. A "budget" might indirectly address the technical issues, but I gather previous commentators are sceptical about the political aspects....
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Not monetary, but numbered
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Meanwhile, a solution that was supposed to be major surgery becomes nothing more than a band aid they can point to and say "look! We did something! We solved the problem!"
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Only SECRET
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