WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama plans to deal with a Dec. 31 deadline that automatically would declassify secrets in more than 400 million pages of Cold War-era documents by ordering government- wide changes that could sharply curb the number of new and old government records hidden from the public.
In an executive order the president is likely to sign before year’s end, Obama will create a National Declassification Center to clear up the backlog of Cold War documents. But the order also will give everyone more time to process the 400 million pages rather than flinging them open at year’s end without a second glance.
The order aimed at eliminating unnecessary secrecy also is expected to direct all agencies to revise their classification guides — the more than 2,000 separate and unique manuals used by federal agencies to determine what information should be classified and what no longer needs that protection. The manuals form the foundation of the government’s classification system.
Two of every three such guides haven’t been updated in the past five years, according to the 2008 annual report of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the government’s security classification.
The anticipated timing of Obama’s order was disclosed by a government official familiar with the planning who requested anonymity in order to discuss the order before its release. A draft of the order was leaked last summer.
The still-classified Cold War records would provide a wealth of data on U.S.-Soviet relations, including the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the Berlin Wall, diplomacy and espionage.
Obama’s executive order will follow on the president’s Inauguration Day initiatives on open government.
William Bosanko, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, says the classification policies in place under executive orders signed by presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have protected national security and enabled increased declassification.
But Obama’s review is necessary to enhance security and increase declassification “to a level that our open society expects and deserves,” Bosanko said.
Obama’s executive order “is an experiment, but it just might work,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “By changing the rules about what gets classified, this could lead to a dramatic reduction in secrecy throughout the government.”
