Charlie Savage reports in the New York Times on President Obama’s Executive Order and Presidential Memorandum that “overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.”
Highlights of the President’s actions include:
- Requiring agency heads to comprehensively review that agency’s classification guidance periodically — looking at present circumstances and whether information no longer needs to be protected
- Establishing a new declassification center at the National Archives to centralize review of whether documents should be declassified
- Setting a four-year deadline to process military records relating to WWII, Korea, and Vietnam
- Requiring spy agencies to appeal to the president to prevent the release of information, instead of being able to block the decisions of an interagency review panel
It’s not clear to me what Section 4 from the Declassification memo means:
4. Promotion of New Technologies to Support Declassification.
Striking the critical balance between openness and secrecy is a difficult but necessary part of our democratic form of government. Striking this balance becomes more difficult as the volume and complexity of the information increases. Improving the capability of departments and agencies to identify still sensitive information and to make declassified information available to the public are integral parts of the classification system.
Therefore, I am directing that the Secretary of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence each support research to assist the NDC in addressing the cross-agency challenges associated with declassification.
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