[Infowarrior] - DOD tackles controls on unclassified info

[Richard Forno]

(c/o SecrecyNews)

PENTAGON TACKLES CONTROLS ON UNCLASSIFIED INFORMATION

In a small step that could nevertheless have far-reaching consequences for
government information policy, the Department of Defense is preparing to
eliminate various markings such as "For Official Use Only" and "Limited
Distribution" that regulate disclosure of unclassified documents and will
replace them with a new standardized marking.

The DoD move anticipates near-term Presidential approval of a new
government-wide policy on so-called Sensitive But Unclassified information
that would streamline and rationalize controls on unclassified information.
It could also potentially lead to the public release of a vast amount of
currently controlled information.

President Bush called for development of the new policy in a December 16,
2005 memorandum intended to promote information sharing.

In response to the Presidential memorandum, officials soon discovered that
"there are at least 107 unique markings" for unclassified information "and
more than 131 different labeling or handling processes," according to
testimony last April by Amb. Thomas E. McNamara, Program Manager of the ODNI
Information Sharing Environment.

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_hr/042607mcnamara.pdf
In some cases the very same markings are used to refer to different control
systems, Mr. McNamara explained. Thus, SSI usually means "Sensitive Security
Information," but sometimes it stands for "Source Selection Information."
Likewise, some agencies use ECI to designate "Export Controlled
Information," while others use it to mean "Enforcement Confidential
Information," each of which entail "very different safeguarding and
dissemination controls."

In short, the handling of unclassified information within government has
become chaotic and counterproductive.

More than two years after the President's directive, a new policy that
replaces many of the existing information control categories with a new
"Controlled Unclassified Information" (CUI) category is said to be close to
final approval.

Last month, the Department of Defense established a CUI Task Force to
oversee implementation of the impending new policy, according to a memo from
the DoD Deputy Chief Information Officer.

"The new policy will replace all of the markings currently used for CUI
within DoD (e.g. FOUO, FOUO-LES, LIMITED DISTRIBUTION) with [the] new
standardized marking," the memo stated. "We anticipate White House approval
of the new policy shortly."

The DoD memo was first reported this week by Sebastian Sprenger in
InsideDefense.com.

See "Transition to New Markings for Controlled Unclassified Information
(CUI)," memorandum from David M. Wennergren, December 28, 2007:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/cui122807.pdf
At a minimum, the new policy should facilitate information sharing within
the government. But it might possibly do much more than that.

While many existing control categories are expected to merely be
consolidated and replaced by the new CUI marking, other controls may be
eliminated outright, according to Amb. McNamara, the Information Sharing
Environment Program Manager who led development of the CUI policy.

"The great majority of the information which is now controlled can be put in
a simple unclassified, uncontrolled category, it seems to me," he told
Congress in 2006.

If controls on "the great majority" of unclassified but restricted
information are truly going to be removed, that would imply an unprecedented
avalanche of disclosure of controlled government records. The recent DoD
memo contains no hint of such an outcome.

Yet "that is the system that we are trying to put together," Amb. McNamara
said, "a rational limited set of categories that... can be applied to
controllable information, but leave most of it as fully unclassified."

See "Building the Information Sharing Environment," hearing before the House
Homeland Security Committee, May 10, 2006 (at p. 17):

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2006_hr/ise.pdf