Classified Information

The reason that the U.S. government maintains such a large volume of classified information--some dating to before World War II--is that declassification has been unnecessarily delayed. According to the General Services Administration, government officials exempted most material from the automatic declassification procedures because they believed that the prescribed maximum period was too short. Classifiers continue to unnecessarily retain classified material by not specifying a date or event for automatic declassification. As a result, most national security information will not be available to the public for at least 30 years. In other cases, classified documents have been erroneously marked. This has been a major problem at the State Department, where officials have been classifying most documents in full rather than designating those portions that actually contain classified information.

GAO found that: (1) the federal government has maintained large volumes of classified material because document declassification has been unnecessarily delayed and automatic declassification is viewed as inadequate; (2) a 1982 executive order exempted federal agencies from automatic document declassification requirements by allowing agencies to use the Originating Agency's Determination Required (OADR) document designation; (3) OADR has delayed document declassification by up to 30 years and contributed to the large classified document inventory because OADR classifiers are not required to supply declassification dates; (4) the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) believes the OADR designation is overused and often unwarranted, since its systematic declassification reviews showed that nearly 90 percent of the documents could have been fully or partially declassified; (5) the delays in declassification reviews are a result of the large document inventory and backlog and the limited staff resources available; (6) in 1992, 3 percent of the classified documents contained marking errors and unwarranted classifications and 12.5 percent were questionably classified; (7) information is overclassified because individual classifiers are inadequately trained and are not given sufficient criteria to make classification decisions; and (8) Department of State documents are routinely overclassified because classifiers fail to designate which portions of the documents contain classified material.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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