(UPDATED January 4, 2009)
By now you may have heard that President Obama this week issued a new Executive Order governing Classified National Security Information. Elsewhere details have been reported about why the President had to take action on classification by December 31, 2009. That was the deadline for automatic declassification of large swaths of historical (more than 25 year old) records that were not ready, from certain agencies’ perspectives, for declassification. Even though this was essentially a legacy problem that developed under prior presidential administrations, the Obama Administration did not want to be seen as limiting transparency without also committing to improving transparency. Thus, last May, President Obama directed the National Security Advisor to oversee an interagency process to revise the Executive Order and improve the classification system.
This process involved a level of public input that has never before taken place during the revision of an EO governing classification of national security information. The National Security Advisor asked the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an advisory committee established by Congress that is comprised of presidential and congressional appointees, to solicit public input. The PIDB launched a web based blog discussion that solicited public comments, held a public hearing seeking recommendations, and reported the results to the National Security Advisor.
A leak of a draft of the EO in September led to criticism by a number of organizations because it lacked any commitment to declassification and public release of records and failed to include significant measures to address overclassification. Significantly, the EO and an accompanying Presidential Memorandum issued this week include provisions that address some of the comments made by the public and reflect the recommendations that came about through the government’s engagement with the public. In that sense, even aside from the innovations present in the EO, this has been a truly historic process that demonstrates the feasibility of public collaboration in government policy. (more…)
