impeachment toolkit: more on Cheney's secrecy

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COST OF SECRECY SYSTEM REACHES RECORD HIGH

The cost of implementing the national security classification system in
government and industry reached an all-time high of $9.91 billion last
year, according to the latest annual report from the Information
Security Oversight Office (ISOO).

http://www.fas.org/sgp/isoo/2007rpt.pdf

The 2007 classification cost figure, which includes physical security,
computer security and other aspects of classified information security,
was a 4.6 percent increase over the year before and is the highest
amount ever reported by the ISOO.

Is that too much? Not enough? The right amount? The new report
doesn't venture an opinion. Instead, it suggests that "the annual rate
of growth for total security costs is declining." That is not strictly
true, since the rate of growth actually increased from 2006 to 2007,
though it is now lower than it was in the immediate post-2001 period.

The ISOO annual report each year presents a unique snapshot of
classification and declassification activity throughout the executive
branch, though the data provided are often of uncertain significance
and are cited with exaggerated precision.

The number of new secrets ("original classification decisions")
increased by 1% in 2007 to 233,639, ISOO reported. Meanwhile,
"derivative" classification decisions, referring to the restatement of
previously classified information in a new form or a new document,
increased sharply by 12.5 percent for a combined total of 23,102,257
classification actions (original and derivative) in 2007. Again, no
judgment on the quality or propriety of these classifications is
offered.

Of 59.7 million pages reviewed for declassification last year, 37.2
million pages were declassified government-wide, a decrease both in the
number reviewed and the number declassified but an increase in the rate
of declassification. (At the Central Intelligence Agency, the
situation was reversed: There was a 138 percent increase in the number
of pages reviewed and a slight increase in the number declassified, but
"a significant decrease" in the proportion of reviewed pages that were
declassified.)

The Department of Transportation reviewed 380,000 pages but
declassified none of them because they all had to be referred to other
agencies for further processing. The President's Foreign Intelligence
Advisory Board (recently renamed the President's Intelligence Advisory
Board) reviewed 130 pages and declassified 40 of them.

ISOO reported uneven compliance with basic classification system rules
and regulations at several agencies.

"Disappointingly, we continued to find deficiencies at multiple
agencies relating to basic requirements concerning implementing
regulations, security education and training, self-inspections,
classification, and document markings," the report stated.

One interesting data point that does not appear in the report is the
number of classification challenges filed by authorized holders of
particular information who believe that it is improperly classified.
(Section 1.8 of Executive Order 12958, as amended, authorizes and
encourages such classification challenges.)

In response to an inquiry from Secrecy News, ISOO indicated that there
were 275 classification challenges filed by cleared personnel in FY
2007. The number of challenges that were actually accepted or approved
by the originating agencies was not available.

The "2007 Report to the President" from the Information Security
Oversight Office, which is the first issued by the new ISOO director
William J. Bosanko, was transmitted to the White House on May 30 and
made public today.

The new report makes no mention of the Office of the Vice President
(OVP) and its continuing refusal to cooperate with ISOO's reporting
requirements on classification and declassification activity. That
refusal, highlighted by a complaint filed by the Federation of American
Scientists in 2006, led to a confrontation between the OVP and ISOO's
former director J. William Leonard last year, and the issue remains
technically unresolved.