Despite the allocation of security clearances to nearly five million people, an inspector general report found few problems with over-classification within the US intelligence community.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) report, which was made public last Friday, “found no instances where classification was used to conceal violation of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; restrain competition; or prevent or delay the release of information not requiring protection in the interest of national security.”
The report focused on procedures within ODNI, and reviewed similar reports produced by the inspectors general at five other intelligence agencies, including the NSA and the CIA.
However, the base conclusions of the IG are belied by recent events.
Amid the release of last year’s Senate report on the CIA torture program, Senators decried excessive redactions made by the spy agency that run counter to the inspector’s finding. As The Sentinel reported at the time, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, two former contractors who were known to have designed and executed the CIA’s torture program, had their identities concealed in the report. A senior CIA officer, dubbed by the New Yorker as “The Unidentified Queen of Torture,” also had her identity withheld in the report. The Intercept later revealed it was Alfreda Bikowsky and noted she had “already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.”
Even though the Senate’s CIA torture report has now at least partially seen the light of day, another report about the program remains classified. Former Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) devoted his final floor speech last December to the existence of the Panetta review, which the Senator described as an internal report the CIA conducted on its torture program that came to similar conclusions as Senate investigators.
“The Panetta review identifies dozens of documents that include inaccurate information used to justify the use of torture and indicates that the inaccuracies it identifies do not represent an exhaustive list,” Udall said on the Senate floor. He went on to say that the Panetta review is a “smoking gun” that shows how current CIA leadership is continuing to mislead Congress and the American people about the CIA torture program.
Although, ODNI’s inspector general was conducting its report during this saga between the Senate and the CIA, it saw no problem with the classification decisions.
Outside the headlines, the classification state is growing unwieldy.
As the Washington Post reported in 2013 amid a debate about over-classification sparked by the recent NSA disclosures, “the US government has become so reflexive about classifying information, much of which is not nearly as sensitive as an NSA spying program, that clearances are required even for totally banal work.”
Roughly 4.9 million people currently have some sort of clearance, and 1.4 million people hold top-secret clearance.
Aside from its primary conclusions, the IG did note problems regarding training, management, and oversight of the classification process.
“[L]ess than half of their workforce met the recurring biennial training requirement” the report said about the intelligence community. Five of six agencies found that certain training “did not adequately prepare those personnel to make…classification decisions.”
In addition, all intelligence agencies “noted their organization’s self-inspection program did not fully comply” with requirements under the law laying out classification procedures.
“Overall, effective program management – including high quality training, self-inspections, and adequate oversight – requires an increased emphasis across the [intelligence community] enterprise,” the IG found.
The review was conducted in compliance with a 2010 law aimed at reducing over-classification that requires intelligence IGs to evaluate transparency procedures. Three years after that law was passed, many reports have still been withheld from the public, forcing journalists to file Freedom of Information Act requests to receive copies of them.
One report from the CIA, obtained by the Huffington Post last year, also claimed that it found “no instance” of over-classification.
