The New York Times, March 5, 1997
WASHINGTON -- A federal commission on government secrecy, only the second in the nation's history, said in its final report Tuesday that the government kept too much too secret for too long and blamed what it termed "a culture of secrecy" for fostering and perpetuating conspiracy theories.
"A majority of the American people think that the CIA was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy," said the chairman of the 12-member commission, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y. "That is a very bad thing."
The commission proposed a new law that would authorize classification of information only where there was "a demonstrable need" to protect national security, and it called for the creation and financing of a National Declassification Center to oversee such matters.
Most classified information would be made public after 10 years and all would be made public after 30 years, except where it would cause "demonstrable harm" to an individual or a continuing program.
The commission said that the new law should weigh the benefit of public disclosure against the need for secrecy, and "if there is significant doubt whether information requires protection, it should not be classified."
But Moynihan conceded that even if a new law is enacted, it will not by itself to stop bureaucrats from unnecessarily stamping documents "secret," sticking them in a file drawer and leaving them there for decades.
"The culture of secrecy in place in the federal government will moderate," Moynihan said, "only if there comes about a counterculture of openness, a climate which simply assumes that secrecy is not the starting place."
The bipartisan commission's unanimous report, which was delivered to the White House on Monday, said that more than two million federal officials and a million people in industries working with the government were authorized to keep documents and data secret. It argued that secrecy was a particularly nefarious form of government regulation.
"Americans are familiar with the tendency to overregulate in other areas," the report declared. "What is different with secrecy is that the public cannot know the extent or the content of regulation."
In a warning echoed by several commission members, the panel's vice chairman, Rep. Larry Combest, R-Texas, said that "the government must be made to discharge its superfluous secrets and behave in a more open manner," but in the process should "not compromise vital secrets, nor betray those who have risked their lives and fortunes to confide in us."
"Espionage is not over," Combest added.
Moynihan said, "Unless secrecy is reduced, it cannot be protected."
John Podesta, a deputy chief of staff at the White House and a member of the panel, said that President Clinton welcomed the proposals. The Senate and House intelligence committees will review the proposals next.
At a Capitol Hill news conference Tuesday morning, Moynihan not only argued that conspiracy theorists could be debunked if less material were classified, but also warned that "secrecy can be a source of dangerous ignorance."
He cited the Venona project, in which Soviet codes were cracked in the years after World War II, as an example. Neither President Harry S. Truman, Attorney General Tom C. Clark nor Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson was informed of the project or its results, Moynihan said.
Instead, he said, the data were kept in the vault of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. The CIA was not informed until 1952.
That gave Hoover tremendous power, and Moynihan reproduces in the commission's report a letter the director wrote in 1946 accusing many high officials of being Communists -- wrongly, the senator says -- while also identifying -- rightly, he says -- both Alger Hiss and Nathan Silvermaster as spies.
"The secrecy system," Moynihan wrote in the commission's report, "has systematically denied American historians access to the records of American history. Of late we find ourselves relying on archives of the former Soviet Union in Moscow to resolve questions of what was going on in Washington in mid-century. This is absurd."
In addition, the senator concluded, "it is time to assert certain American fundamentals, foremost of which is the right to know what government is doing, and the corresponding ability to judge its performance."
The only previous such commission was set up in 1955. It proposed that anyone
could be punished for disclosing what the government had chosen to classify
-- not just government officials, but journalists and publishers as well.
That amounted to prior restraint of the press, and the idea was dropped.
So was a second proposal, which would have extended government wiretapping
authority.
The New York Times, March 5, 1997 [Editorial]
It is a rare moment in Washington when someone does something sensible about the Government's obsession with secrecy. A Congressional commission has done just that in a thoughtful new report that recommends a long-overdue change in the way official secrets are made and maintained. The commission's novel contention is that Congress, not the Federal bureaucracy, should determine how and why information is kept secret by establishing a law on secrecy.
Remarkably, no such law now exists. The existing classification system is set forth in executive orders. With the exception of John Kennedy, every President in the past 50 years has issued his own secrecy rules, like an elected monarch. The result is an egregious mountain of musty classified documents, some dating back to World War I, and a Federal secrecy industry that cost taxpayers $5.6 billion in 1995, so the commission reckons.
Previous panels that have studied the secrecy system have expounded the benefit of sunshine laws and open government and preached the people's right to know. But attempts at real change have always been blocked by a permanent and potent national security bureaucracy. The broad-based Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, headed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, could change all that.
The commission urges Congress to enact a law that would limit classification to 10 years unless an agency expressly requests continued secrecy. The law would require the declassification of all information after 30 years unless disclosure would demonstrably harm an individual or vital governmental activities. The commission further urges requiring the President to establish and publish secrecy procedures, and recommends creation of a National Declassification Center.
As the report argues with considerable eloquence, the system more often than not protects reputations and conceals blunders in the name of security.
The report makes a persuasive case that reform is the equivalent of prudent deregulation.
This panel's 12 members include Senator Jesse Helms; Representative Lee Hamilton, an Indiana Democrat, and John Deutch, the former Director of Central Intelligence. This gives its unanimous recommendations the bipartisan weight essential to command attention. But enacting its reforms will take a serious commitment from both Congress and President Clinton. There is unlikely to be a better opportunity for years. In an age when information is more than ever the key to self-government, excessive secrecy thwarts democracy.