{"id":17505,"date":"2012-12-19T15:13:33","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T23:13:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=17505"},"modified":"2012-12-19T15:13:33","modified_gmt":"2012-12-19T23:13:33","slug":"obamas-secrecy-rules-are-meant-to-be-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/19\/obamas-secrecy-rules-are-meant-to-be-broken\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama’s Secrecy Rules Are Meant to Be Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to a recent Congressional Research Service report (via Secrecy News<\/a>), the Obama administration’s working policy is that US officials can disclose classified information (to reporters, and others) so long as it suits the needs of the government.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The CRS\u00a0report<\/a>, written by legislative attorney Jennifer K. Elsea, continues:\u00a0 \u201cNothing in the order provides explicit authority to release classified information that exists apart from the authority to declassify, but it is possible that such discretionary authority is recognized to release information outside the community of authorized holders without formally declassifying it.\u201d\u00a0 Indeed, this appears to be an accurate characterization of actual practice.<\/p>\n

In any case, \u201cthere is little to stop agency heads and other high-ranking officials from releasing classified information to persons without a security clearance when it is seen as suiting government needs<\/strong>.\u201d\u00a0 Again, an accurate description\u2013 particularly since \u201cthe Attorney General has prosecutorial discretion to choose which leaks to prosecute.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If ever there were a clearer indication that the classification process is not about protecting the safety of Americans, but rather about protecting the government from unwelcome facts…<\/p>\n

In the context of Obama’s war on transparency – his\u00a0crackdown on whistleblowers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0attacks on legitimate journalism<\/a>\u00a0as national security threats are now infamous – the CRS report is quite revealing. Last month, Obama started implementing new standards<\/a> for cracking down on whistleblowers – or, as officials sometimes call them, unauthorized leaks.<\/p>\n

You see, it’s not the unauthorized leaks – which are apparently illegal – that Obama doesn’t like. It’s when those leaks make his administration look bad, or negligent, or criminal.<\/p>\n

The most relevant example<\/a> is the practice of constantly bragging about killing “terrorists” in the drone war, while turning around and claiming they can’t be subject to any public scrutiny on the technically classified program.<\/p>\n

In an environment of successive whistleblowers, the Obama administration has driven the conduct of the Executive Branch underground. Consider that the government\u00a0spent more than $11 billion dollars<\/a>\u00a0in 2011 just on keeping secrets from the American public (compared with\u00a0$4.7 billion in 2001).<\/p>\n

There is a radical trend towards over-classification.\u00a0Document reviews conducted by Information Security Oversight Office<\/a>\u00a0in 2009 discovered violations of classification rules in 65% of the documents examined, with several agencies posting error rates of more than 90%.\u00a0According to the ISOO, the government made a record 76,795,945 classification decisions in 2010, an increase of more than 40% from 2009.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo me it illustrates the most important problem \u2014 namely that we are classifying far too much information,\u201d Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News told<\/a> the New York Times<\/em> recently. \u201cThe credibility of the classification system is collapsing under the weight of bogus secrets.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

According to a recent Congressional Research Service report (via Secrecy News), the Obama administration’s working policy is that US officials can disclose classified information (to reporters, and others) so long as it suits the needs of the government. The CRS\u00a0report, written by legislative attorney Jennifer K. Elsea, continues:\u00a0 \u201cNothing in the order provides explicit authority […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-17505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17505"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17508,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17505\/revisions\/17508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17505"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}