Administration Orders Interagency Review of Classification and CUI

On May 27, the Obama administration released a memorandum [1] requiring reviews of overclassification and the current Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI)/Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) process. The memorandum establishes separate 90-day interagency review processes to advise the administration on actions it should take to advance previous efforts to reform problems associated with these issues.

Whether or not the interagency processes will be transparent and include public participation is unknown. The memo does not dictate any new procedures on how agencies must handle such designated material.

Overclassification

On overclassification, the administration ordered a review of Executive Order 12958 [2], originally authored by President Clinton in 1995 and amended in 2003 by President Bush. The review, to be completed by the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, will issue recommendations concerning:

• Establishment of a national declassification center
• Measures such as restoring a presumption against classification
• Changes necessary to facilitate greater classified information sharing among appropriate parties
• Prohibition of reclassification once documents have been declassified.

The right-to-know community has been calling for a national declassification center for a long time; open government advocates say such a center is needed to improve the efficiency of records processing. Most importantly, creation of a declassification center was a key recommendation [3] made by the Public Interest Declassification Board in 2007.

Further, the Obama administration also seems to seek a clear prohibition of reclassification in response to the Bush administration's systematic review and restriction of access to documents once available to the public in the National Archives and the presidential library system. Some have criticized [4] the Obama memorandum for not adequately recognizing important classification problems such as the role of "need to know" restrictions and antiquated classification criteria. Without more substantive changes to classification policy, it is uncertain if a centralized declassification center will just produce the same results as before.

CUI/SBU

To address the CUI problem, the administration has ordered the creation of a task force composed of senior representatives from a broad range of agencies both inside and outside the information-sharing environment. The group will address issues including whether the scope of CUI should remain limited to terrorism-related information or expand standardization to all SBU categories and identify measures to track and enhance agency implementation of a CUI framework. Whatever the recommendations are, the administration gave clear orders that it will balance a presumption of openness with an understanding of the value of standardizing SBU designation procedures and the need to prevent public disclosure where it would compromise privacy.

Some groups have expressed concern that the administration's memorandum does not adequately recognize all the negative issues related to CUI. Meredith Fuchs of the National Security Archive stated, "On CUI, it seems like there is very little focus. It does not commit to scope or reduction in labeling or protection of access. These are serious problems."

The memorandum does not offer actual change or even the promise of it, nor does it ask the task force to address all the relevant problems that right-to-know advocates have been highlighting for years. As early as April 1993, President Clinton issued his own directive [5] for classification reform. The Clinton memo illuminated problems that the Obama administration memo does not acknowledge, even though they remain unaddressed.