[Infowarrior] - GAO Finds Pentagon Erratic In Wielding Secrecy Stamp

[Richard Forno]

GAO Finds Pentagon Erratic In Wielding Secrecy Stamp
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/13/AR2006071301
518_pf.html

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 14, 2006; A19

The Government Accountability Office has criticized the Defense Department
for sloppy management of its security classification system, including the
marking as "Confidential or Secret" material that Pentagon officials
acknowledged was unclassified information.

The GAO said in a report June 30 that one of the major questions raised by
its study was "whether all of the information marked as classified met
established criteria for classification." The GAO also found "inconsistent
treatment of similar information within the same document."

The GAO reviewed only a "nonprobability sample" of 111 classified Defense
Department documents from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To
understand how minute the sample is, the GAO reported that in the five
fiscal years between 2000 and 2004, the Pentagon was responsible for 66.8
million new classified records. That is about 13.4 million a year.

The GAO report, which was sent to Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman
of the subcommittee on national security of the Government Reform Committee,
and disclosed on the Secrecy News Web site of Steven Aftergood, concluded
that "a lack of oversight and inconsistent implementation of DOD's
information security program are increasing the risk of misclassification."

The report was issued at a time when the Bush administration is criticizing
newspapers for publishing classified information, and when two nongovernment
civilians, who were lobbyists for a pro-Israeli organization, are being
prosecuted under the 85-year-old Espionage Act for receiving and
retransmitting material they got from a Pentagon official involving national
defense secrets.

"One reason why classification is an unreliable guide as to what should or
should not be published by the press is that classification policy is
implemented erratically by the government," Aftergood wrote on his Web site.

Of the 111 classified documents reviewed, the GAO questioned classification
determinations of 29, about one out of every four. A majority of those
questioned "pertained to whether all of the information marked as classified
met established criteria for classification."

Pentagon officials agreed that in five documents "the information was
unclassified and in a sixth document the information should be downgraded."

In a broader administrative criticism, the GAO found that 92 of the 111
documents had some marking error, such as failure to include
declassification instructions or the source of the classification as
required.

In 2004, there were 1,059 senior Defense Department officials designated to
possess "original classification authority," but more than 1.8 million
defense employees who were authorized to classify papers "derivatively,"
meaning the incorporation of already classified information into a new
document by paraphrasing or repetition.

The report also comments on a broader problem: that the government as a
whole has no common security classification standard and no penalties for
overclassification, underclassification or failure to declassify.

It notes, for example, that although different agencies have authority to
classify material, there are conflicting markings in some agencies for
annotating with an "R" whether a record is to be released or declassified or
retained and kept classified. "One of the agencies uses a 'D' to denote
'deny automatic declassification' and an 'R' to denote release," the report
says. "While the other agency uses a 'D' to denote 'declassify' and an 'R'
to denote 'retain.' "

The report also said that even though the president, Congress and the public
are given figures estimating how many Defense Department documents are
classified each year, such estimates are "unreliable" because Pentagon
agencies use different assumptions "about what should be included."
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