Executive Order 12958, enacted in October, 1995, included several changes to the system by which government information is classified. In particular, the order mandates that many documents over 25 years old must be declassified by the year 2000. To the extent that this order accelerates the release of historically relevant information and discourages overclassification of new documents, it is a step in the right direction. However, further action should be taken both to expedite the process of declassification and to reduce the level of classification of some forms of information.

Progress towards automatic declassification threatens to be slowed because agencies expect to apply for the exemption of a large number of documents. The CIA, for instance, has declared that 64% of its information may be eligible for exemption. Also, the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), an office within the National Archives that has been given the responsibility to enforce some of the provisions within the executive order, has insufficient resources to carry out its duties.

This study recommends that the ISOO budget be significantly expanded, because a relatively small investment in the office would greatly improve ISOO's capability to oversee and assist the intelligence agencies in declassification efforts. Perhaps the additional funding for ISOO can be found by requiring intelligence agencies who have requested that a large portion of their documents over 25 years old be considered for exception to automatic declassification to lend financial support to the office. A threshold could be established, and agencies that apply for more exemptions than the threshold amount would have to contribute resources to ISOO. This would have the additional benefit of establishing an incentive to reduce the volume of requests.

The question of how the declassified information is to be distributed to the public is only addressed in general terms in executive order 12958, which mandates that a government-wide declassification database be established consisting of all declassified documents. How declassified information is distributed will affect the cost of the program and its effectiveness in the eyes of the public. However, distribution options that have been developed for the FOIA system provide hope for answering this question in a cost-effective way. The National Security Archives at George Washington University, for instance, is a privately funded non-profit organization that maintains a large collection of documents released through FOIA. The Archives maintains a public reading room and a database of FOIA requests, and it compiles collections of materials on popular topics on CD-ROM. The IC should seek advice from organizations such as these in order to develop an archive for declassified information that would be only partially funded by the government.

根据外交政策和信息技术的最新变化，必须重新考虑对新信息进行分类的理由。对于行业和政府来说，新信息的分类都是昂贵的，政府共同花费了56亿美元来保护机密信息。在联合军事行动期间，与联合国等组织共享信息变得更加困难，从而使成本也间接产生。在核不扩散的领域，采取安全措施的放宽以允许其他政府检查美国境内的核材料，导致协议提高了前苏联核武器材料的安全性。最后，越来越多的国家安全威胁使情报界分析了这些威胁累积的所有信息的能力。例如，在1994年，最终向联合国安理会释放了描绘波斯尼亚大众坟墓的架空图像仅在非政府组织调查事件后几个月才发现。如果图像可向更广泛的受众群体可用，则可能会很快发现它们，并对我们和世界对波斯尼亚的世界政策产生更及时的影响。由于这些原因，DCID 1/7专注于以一种易于发行的外国政府和国际组织的形式生产情报，应扩展到明确的情报，包括与IC以外的组织进一步合作的情报。

These areas include environmental intelligence, health intelligence, support for law enforcement, efforts to combat global organized crime. Although DCID 1/7 applies to all subjects of intelligence, the motivation conveyed in the memo accompanying it from DCI Deutch was support to military operations (SMO). The non-military subjects listed above should receive equal attention from the next DCI. In particular, the directive should include techniques analogous to tear lines for satellite imagery, such as reducing the resolution of the images, so that they may be easily distributed outside of the intelligence community if necessary. Also, the DCI should recommend that ISPAC, a council of individuals outside of the government who set priorities for declassification under E. O. 12958, include representatives from the fields listed above. In this way, the benefits expected for SMO under the directive can also be realized for non-traditional, but nevertheless important, intelligence objectives.

Making this statement a reality for the leaders of the nation has been the challenge of U.S. intelligence agencies for 50 years. There are many ways to describe the mission of the intelligence community (IC), but this one divides its mandate into two parts. First, intelligence officers must ensure, as best they can, that they "know the truth," a task which involves the collection of best possible information and its analysis in the best possible ways. Then, they must empower others to strengthen national security with the intelligence they produce, in effect making the nation free. Unfortunately, secrecy can be beneficial to the first task but detrimental to the second.

How can the need to protect the information within the IC be balanced with the need for other agencies and individuals to use it? Intelligence officers are continually faced with this question in a variety of specific forms. On one hand, the release of information about intelligence gathering capabilities increases the chance of those capabilities being undermined. On the other hand, excessive secrecy wastes resources and diminishes the value of the information by preventing its use by those who could benefit from it. Today, after the Cold War has ended and as the kinds of information available throughout the world are changing, an evaluation of the way that the IC answers that question is especially appropriate.

最近的评估分类ystem culminated in 1995 with Executive Order 12958, which made several changes to the way information is classified and declassified within the Federal Government. One of the most controversial of these changes was the introduction of automatic declassification for documents over 25 years old. I argue below that this executive order was a step in the right direction, and, in particular, the automatic declassification program should be retained. In order to ensure its effective implementation, a branch of the National Archives known as the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) should be expanded with funds from those agencies that have applied for exemptions to automatic declassification for some of their archives, which ISOO must assist in processing.

更能提高分类of current documents, however, than what is found in the executive order. The IC should modify its classification procedures to provide for greater eventual coordination with other parts of the U.S. Government, foreign governments, and international organizations in areas such as environmental intelligence, health intelligence, and assistance to law enforcement. This could be accomplished by specifically mentioning these areas in the Director of Central Intelligence's directive to write at the lowest classification level possible, DCID 1/7. Also, specific techniques should be developed to facilitate the sharing of imagery intelligence that retain the value of the images to the consumer but also protect the secrecy of the capabilities of their sources. Changes such as these hold the promise of improving the effectiveness of coordination with outside organizations while maintaining secrecy at the minimum level necessary for national security.

CURRENT CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

1995年4月,克林顿总统发布执行Order 12958, "Classified National Security Information," which established the current classification system used throughout the Executive Branch. The policy set out in the previous executive order, issued by President Reagan in 1982, had drawn criticism from non-governmental organizations such as the Society for Professional Journalists for being too secretive for the Post-Cold War era. Clinton's executive order was the result of an effort to reform the classification system that began with the formation of the Task Force on National Security Information in April, 1993. The final draft contains guidelines for which kinds of information may be classified, how it may be declassified, and which agencies have responsibility over the process.

信息分类

Executive Order 12958 authorizes the classification of seven categories of information when its release poses an articulable threat to national security:

(a) military plans, weapons systems, or operations;
(b) foreign government information;
(c) intelligence activities (including special activities), intelligence sources or methods, or cryptology;
(d) foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources;
（e）与国家安全有关的科学，技术或经济事项；
为safeguar (f)美国政府项目ding nuclear materials or facilities; or
（g）与国家安全有关的系统，装置，项目或计划的漏洞或能力。

Information that falls under one of these categories may be classified as "Top Secret", "Secret", or "Confidential", depending on the degree of damage that its release is expected to incur. The decision to classify information may only be made by "original classification authorities:" the President, agency officials designated by the President, and, except in the case of "Top Secret" information, designees of those who have been authorized by the President. Information is specifically prohibited from being classified in order to "(1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) restrain competition; or (4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of national security." It is also prohibited to classify scientific research that cannot be linked to national security and documents that have already been lawfully released to the public.

行政命令12958引入新的classification procedures intended to simplify the eventual declassification of information. In order for a document to be classified, declassification instructions that specify a date or an event after which the document can be released must be specified. If a specific date or event cannot be determined, the default date for declassification is ten years after it was classified. Another new requirement for classifying a document is to include on the cover "a concise reason for classification which, at a minimum, cites the applicable classification catego ries in . . . this order." In contrast, the previous executive order permitted documents to be marked with the notation "Originating Agency's Determination Required" in lieu of more specific declassification instructions and did not require an explicit reason to be cited for the decision to classify. E.O. 12958 does, however, permit the reclassification of documents for successive periods up to ten years at a time, and exceptions can be made to the ten year classification limit for reasons similar to the exceptions to automatic declassification described below. The key difference between Clinton's policy and the previous one is that special attention must be paid to preserve a document's classified status after a period of time, as opposed to removing it.

Provisions for Declassification

Perhaps the most significant departure of President Clinton's order from the previous one is the mandate to automatically declassify all documents over 25 years old within five years of the effective date of the order. E. O. 12958 also continues the programs of systematic declassification and mandatory review upon public request that appeared in President Reagan's order.

Automatic declassification, as described within the executive order, is a misnomer in the sense that the name implies the release of information in bulk with little prior review. While this is the intent for much of the archives, exemptions can be made for information which could:

（1）揭示机密人类来源的身份，或揭示有关智力源或方法的应用的信息，或者在未经授权的disclo确保该来源清楚而明显地损害民族时，揭示了人类智能来源的身份美国的安全利益；

(2) reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction;

(3)将损害美国cryp透露信息tologic systems or activities;

(4) reveal information that would impair the application of state of the art technology within a U.S. weapon system;

(5) reveal actual U.S. military war plans that remain in effect;

(6) reveal information that would seriously and demonstrably impair relations between the United States and a foreign government, or seriously and demonstrably undermine ongoing diplomatic activities of the United States;

(7) reveal information that would clearly and demonstrably impair the current ability of United States Government officials to protect the President, Vice President, and other officials for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized;

(8) reveal information that would seriously and demonstrably impair current national security emergency preparedness plans; or

(9) violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.

The broad scope of these exemptions provides the opportunity to override automatic declassification often within the IC. In order for an exemption to be granted at the onset of the program, however, the agency must request it from the President. Requests that occur later in the process are handled by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP). The President may deny the exemption or require the release of the information earlier than the requested date of declassification.

Under the order, Government agencies must also undertake systematic review of information with historical value but not eligible for automatic declassification. Material is chosen on the basis of its likelihood of being declassified upon review and recommen dations from the Information Security Policy Advisory Council (ISPAC), a group of seven individuals appointed by the President who are interested in declassification but are not employed by the Government. The agencies must also review information for declassification at the request of the public, a requirement referred to as "mandatory review," if the information has not been reviewed for two years and if the request is specific enough so that the information can easily be found.

Implementation of Executive Order 12958

There are tentative signs that E. O. 12958 has reduced the level of classified materials within the IC, but the prospects of meeting the goal set for automatic declassifi cation remain uncertain. According to Steven Garfinkel, Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, the rate of declassification has increased dramatically during the past couple of years:

This program [Executive Order 12958] has been in place now for a little over a year . . . , so we have a fair impression of what the last year has been. . . . One good thing has been that we have actually declassified a tremendous amount of material. I can't give you an exact number yet because we are a ways from reporting that to the President, but we are gathering data right now that indicates that -- and we're about to report that 1995 was an outstanding year -- 1996 looks like it is going to be even better in terms of the amount of material that was declassified.

ISOO's 1995 Report to the President was released after the interview; it states that the number of decisions to classify new documents decreased by over 20% in 1995 and that agencies declassified twice as many pages as they did in the year before through system atic review. As for progress in automatic declassification, John Carlin, Archivist of the United States, stated at a conference on declassification in December that:

Actually, for the most part, the results of the first year have been good. Most agencies have put declassification programs in place and are making honest efforts to meet the goals for declassification specified in the Executive Order. You're consulting with the user community for advice on declassification priorities. And you're cooperating with us on the review of records in our custody.

Mr. Carlin did, however, express the concern that the agencies within the IC should improve the way that they process other agencies' information for declassification. The executive order appears to have motivated significant action toward reducing the production of new classified information and accelerating the release of previously classified documents.

但是，该订单的实施远非完整。尽管行政命令12958包含到2000年将25年以上大多数文件解密的目标，但一些机构利用了该规则的例外。例如，中央情报局声称，他们的分类信息中有64％可以根据自动解密的豁免有资格，这一论点是DCI历史审查小组在1996年8月反对。往往很高。考虑到1995年空军提交给ISOO的估计：

符合第3.4条标准的空军记录的估计总数为：70,598立方英尺（176,495,000页）。在总数字中，有70,288立方英尺（175,720,000页）包含可能被允许的信息。在接下来的五（5）年中，具体的记录审查将更精确地确定必须保留哪些记录，以及可以自动解释哪些记录。其余310立方英尺

这些豁免要求如何考虑将对自动解密计划下实际发布的材料量产生很大的影响。

冷战后时代的分类利弊

Is President Clinton's policy on classification sufficient for the post-Cold War era? Or did it go too far? In order to answer these questions, the advantages and disadvantages of classification must be considered in light of the fall of the Soviet Union.

分类成本vs. The Cost of Declassification

分类成本

保护分类信息是一项昂贵的任务。根据代表大卫·斯卡格斯（David E.该估计值不包括对中央情报局内的机密信息的保护，该图形本身已被分类。间接分类的成本很难量化，但是中央情报局局长和国防部长委托进行的一项研究表明，它们远远超过了直接安全成本：

安全的成本可以描绘成一座冰山having four facets. Two of the facets are visible and therefore more or less quantifiable. The other two are hidden below the waterline and, while difficult to measure, experience suggests they may be very large indeed. . . . the visible facets of the iceberg are made up of direct and indirect security costs. Together they account for a small percent of the iceberg. . . . Below the waterline are difficult to quantify and comparatively large hidden costs, loosely defined as inefficiency and opportunity costs. The commission believes that attacking these kinds of costs can yield near-term savings without degrading effectiveness.

The study also reported that the direct cost increases with the level of classification. Security for unclassified programs was typically one half to one percent of the total operating cost. In classified programs whose existence was acknowledged, this percent age was typically one to three percent. The security cost for unacknowledged programs varied widely, from one percent to ten percent, with one report as high as 40 percent.

Outside the Government, indirect costs of classification can also be found. In industry, the classification system imposes requirements in addition to the development of the requested product, which increases the cost to the Government. In testimony before the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy in Congress, an engineer from the "Skunk Works", the Lockheed facility where the U-2 and the SR-71 were developed, lists some of the complications that arise as a result of the classification system:

超分类技术会抑制程序之间的信息交换，并导致“重新发明车轮”。
Classifying contractual and financial data within a corporation, which in today's environment should rarely be classified, inhibits accurate forecasting, limits oversight, and could eventually lead to an erosion in shareholder value based on unavailability of information for analysis.
From a legal standpoint, classifying unnecessary paperwork can put the company and the customer in jeopardy of union actions and lawsuits. . . .
For larger programs, massive declassification would not only eliminate unneeded protection for older information but would also have the potential for decreasing the amount of classified areas that are dedicated to storage.

Withholding Government sponsored research from the private sector prevents its use to improve the competitiveness of American industry. Michael Ravnitsky, technical director of the Industrial Fabrics Association International, contends that classified research could be valuable for the textile industry: "Decades of work done by the Defense Department and its contractors in the area of safety and protective fabrics would be of enormous use to our industry." Other technologies, such as microwave electronics, have benefited from the decision of the U.S. Government to reveal its research in those fields. The true cost of classification must take into account these negative impacts upon American industry.在学术界,不必要的机密信息prevents historians and political scientists from obtaining all of the information that they need to make a complete analysis. Trudy Peterson, acting archivist of the National Archive in 1995, would have preferred that some of the oldest of these documents be released with little review:

In an interview before the executive order was released, Peterson sug gested adding a provision that would force the release of information 50 years old or older, with no exceptions. "The President signed an executive order last November in which we declassified the majority of the materials that we hold in-house that predated World War II," she says. "And I don't believe that we have had severe repercussions in this government because we finally released all of the documents remaining that I know of from World War I. The Republic didn't fall."

历史价值可能imp的机密文件e academic research with little benefit to national security. One historian who gained access to some of the archives of the CIA expressed the opinion that the release of the documents there would not reveal any previously unknown episodes in the history of the IC:

Whatever remains in the CIA files cannot be nearly as awful as the Ameri can public imagines. To be sure, I hardly saw everything there was to see, but I got not even a whiff of dirty tricks that had somehow remained hidden from Church Committee investigators or the army of historians and authors who write about the CIA. I really believe that it would be in the Agency's interest to let historians see for themselves what remains classi fied. I do not see why the Agency does not declassify almost any secret that is more than 30 years old.

The declassification of historically valuable information might improve the quality of historical analysis. It would definitely reduce the need for historians to request the declassification of the information through the Freedom of Information Act, which may, in turn, free the staff who review FOIA requests to respond to more applicants. According to Anthony H. Passarella, the Director of the Directorate for Freedom of Information and Security Review within the Department of Defense:

大量的国防部时间花在处理FOIA的请求中，向一小部分多产的请求者提出要求，他们不断寻求大量分类的历史数据，这些数据长期以来一直退休到Suitland，Maryland，Maryland或Maryland的联邦记录存储区被奈良加入。从记录存储区域中检索记录需要时间，并且对大量机密材料的审查也需要时间如前所述。

If documents such as these could be released automatically without detriment to national security, both those who request documents through FOIA and those who review them would benefit.

There is a danger that classification can be used to hide fiscal irresponsibility, environmental damage, and other embarrassing Government actions. Executive Order 12958 specifically prohibits such practices, but many recent examples suggest that the threat continues to exist. When former Government workers sued for allegedly unsafe working conditions at an Air Force facility at Groom Lake, the federal Government declared that many of their lawyer's documents were in fact classified, an action consid ered by several individuals to be a tactic to avert the lawsuit. Environmental damage caused by the early nuclear weapons effort remained classified for many years, as did human radiation experimentation, by the predecessors to the Department of Energy. Much information about these actions has since been released by the DOE as a result of Energy Secretary O'Leary's "Openness Initiative" that includes a directory of declassified DOE information on the World Wide Web.

Without sufficient information, public advocacy groups, lawyers, and concerned citizens do not have the opportunity to criticize the actions of the Government. This hurts the individuals affected, the Government, and the nation in general. Terry Anderson expressed his concern over the difficulty of retrieving information about his own captivity in Lebanon:

In such delicate areas, the Government has a right to national secrets. In my case, I was the focus of highly sensitive investigations. I am fully aware that some of the information I am seeking names intelligence agents and sources who cannot, and should not, be revealed. Where lives and national security are at stake, I am quick to justify caution. At the same time, I can't believe that much of the information in those files poses any danger to national security. The hostage crisis is over. It is time now to judge our leaders on how well they have done the jobs we elected them to do. We cannot judge them without information. Could it be that they do not wish to be judged, and that is why the system makes it so hard to come by that information?

Classification limits public oversight, leaving the entire task of oversight to the Legislative and Executive Branches.

The Cost of Declassification

The cost of the declassification process, however, must also be considered. In order to determine whether information can be safely declassified or not, the information must be reviewed by knowledgeable personnel within all of the Government agencies that may be affected by its release. Some estimates for the cost of this review process have been as high as $2 a page, although these have been attacked by the Information Security Oversight Office. For example, the Navy suggested in a memo to ISOO that "Calcu lated at $1.00 per page, the cost for declassification review could exceed an estimated $500 million." A much lower estimate is provided by the experience of the National Archive, which had declassified 16 million pages in three months in 1995 at a cost of about 3 cents per page. One of the reasons behind the discrepancy among agencies' estimates may be a difference of opinion toward the realism of "true automatic declassifi cation," the release of information without page-by-page review. Steven Aftergood, the Director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of the American Scientists, describes how both the high and low estimates are derived:

。自动declassificatio的全部意义n is that it is supposed to minimize the amount of resources that are consumed. To the extent that it genuinely is automatic and quantities of records are declassified in bulk, those records do not have to be examined page by page, they do not have to be handled by qualified reviewers, and so on. The resource problem comes because most agencies are reluctant to practice automatic declassification; they are insisting on exempting large fractions of their files and doing detailed review of those files - and that is extremely resource intensive.

The debate over the cost-effectiveness of the automatic declassification program in terms of a direct price for the Intelligence Community is difficult to resolve without detailed information about the nature of the classified documents eligible for release.

Another potential cost of declassification is the inadvertent release of information vital to national security. The case for declassification cannot be plausibly made if it depends on an infallible system. As above, however, knowledge of the specific subject matter of the classified information which may released would be necessary to make an informed estimate of this cost. One recent example of a possible error in declassification occurred on the Department of Defense's "Gulflink" earlier this year. Gulflink is a World Wide Web page that provides access to declassified information pertaining to the Gulf War Syndrome. In February 1996, several documents on the computer system were removed at the request of the CIA:

Mr. Tuite, who was the chief investigator in a Senate Banking Committee investigation of gulf war illnesses from 1993 until last year, said the report [suggesting U.S. Government knowledge of the exposure of American soldiers to chemical weapons during the Gulf War] was put on the Penta gon site on the Internet -- http://www.dtic.dla.mil/gulflink/ -- last July along with hundreds of other declassified documents. But the documents disappeared from the site in February. Pentagon officials said that the documents were removed from the Internet because of a dispute between the Defense Department and the CIA over whether the material had been declassified too quickly and whether they disclosed intelligence methods.

The documents were later reposted on the Internet, but they were also distributed unofficially by individuals who had downloaded the files during the period in which they were first publicly available, demonstrating the irreversibility of the flow of information in declassification projects. The danger of the release of national security information must be considered in any declassification scheme.

Developments in the Post-Cold War Era

Government secrecy has no place in a perfect world. However, neither do intelligence agencies; the existence of both is justified by the need to maintain national security in a far from perfect world. For a document to be classified, Executive Order 12958 requires that:

The original classification authority determine that the unauthorized disclosure of the information reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security and the original classification authority is able to classify or describe the damage.

The purpose of this section is to evaluate the damage that the release of classified information can have in the post-Cold War era. Some information can almost always be expected to have a sufficiently adverse effect on the security of the United States to justify its classification. For instance, the Government would seem to be almost always justified in maintaining the secrecy of knowledge that enables the nation's adversaries to develop weapons of mass destruction. In the post-Cold War era there are few absolute rules, however. For example, modern technology has enabled certain actions to be announced in advance with little detriment to the effort, as the Clinton Administration recently demonstrated with the announcement of the decision to launch cruise missiles against Iraq before the operation had begun. In every case, both the cost of classification and the risk of declassification must be considered and balanced.

New Requirements for National Security

Coalition Warfare

The increase in the number of multilateral military operations has caused new problems for the protection of information used on the battlefield. In the post-Cold War era, U.S. Armed Forces have cooperated with the militaries of several other nations and with the United Nations. In the process, the U.S. has had to share intelligence information with governments that would not otherwise be considered close allies. In contrast, during the Cold War the U.S. often operated with long-time allies such as Great Britain. Information provided to such nations could be assured to have similar protection as the U.S. intelligence community would have provided, because these countries had the same interests as the United States did. In recent U.S. military operations, the Armed Forces had to coordinate with nations such as Saudi Arabia and Syria and organizations such as the United Nations, where the bond of common interest and common security practices is weak, increasing the risk for the release of classified information. For example, American intelligence information was recently discovered unguarded in Somalia after it had been shared with the United Nations during U.S. operations there. DCI John Deutch de scribed the new challenges to intelligence producers in a memo concerning DCID 1/7:

We must recognize that military commanders not only require timely information at the collateral level but they often must share information with coalition partners who may not normally receive U.S. intelligence. In this equation it is not our military forces that have changed, but rather the nature of conflicts in which our military forces are involved. The world has changed and our provision of intelligence must change with it. We need an updated intelligence product line that is releasable from the inception--a flow of reporting based on all available sources that is written from the outset to be given broad U.S. dissemination and appropriate foreign release. The challenge is to extract meaning from all intelligence sources and package it for our various customers without betraying the very sources that will provide the next critical piece of intelligence.

Deutch发行的指令（DCID 1/7）要求以更容易将其清算为可立即在低安全性环境中使用的水平产生的智能。特别是，DCID 1/7建议使用“撕裂线”，这是文档中的一个位置，然后可以找到文档中包含的信息的敏感版本。这样的撕裂线清楚地描述了可以共享文档中信息的程度。

Ethnic Conflicts and Human Rights Violations

Another development since the Cold War has been the rise in the number of ethnic conflicts. Strife in regions such as Somalia and Bosnia has captured the attention of both the conscience and the military of the United States. The impact of the human rights violations there on national security is difficult to quantify. However, Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., USAF, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, alluded to this threat in a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee in 1995:

Whether these kinds of conflict impact on U.S. interests is not for me to say. But as a purely factual matter, their numbers are increasing and at a minimum they will confront the world with humanitarian disasters involv ing millions of people. Thus far, these conflicts have had a relatively indirect impact on the West's "interests" -- largely directed toward our conscience and our urge to make things better. However, it will only be a matter of time before the impact, whether it is major refugee movement or some other phenomenon directed against one of our close allies, is much more direct.

U.S. intelligence assets can be useful in detecting human rights violations during such conflicts. However, the low priority that these conflicts necessarily receive within the IC when U.S. troops are not involved sometimes leaves American resources untapped. For instance, in the case of the mass grave at the Bosnian town of Srebenica in 1995, the Intelligence Community failed to make timely use of the information that they had gathered, as reported in the New York Times:

On July 13, as the press reported refugees' accounts of mass killings, a U.S. spy satellite passing over Bosnia recorded pictures of two fields in which hundreds of prisoners were guarded by gunmen. One of these was the stony field of the "rabbit hunt," where the 17-year-old Avdic was shot.

But no one saw that picture for three weeks.

Techno-thriller readers think spy satellites make the CIA all-seeing and all-knowing. In fact, U.S. intelligence collects far more data than it can analyze. One former National Security Agency director said gleaning hard facts from the avalanche of information was like trying to take a drink of water from a fire hose.

To the IC's credit, the pictures were eventually discovered and presented to the United Nations Security Council and the public, but human rights activists stated that had the images been revealed sooner they might have been useful in their investigation of the incident. Had this intelligence been available in some form to a wider audience within the IC and even outside of the Government, this it might have been identified in a more timely manner.

Arms Control

A number of international arms control treaties and agreements have emerged after the Cold War, and the verification of these treaties has increased the need to share classified information. One of the most important subjects requiring verification is the disarmament of nuclear weapons and the stewardship of the nuclear stockpile of the former Soviet Union. According to Joan B. Rohlfing, the Director of the Office of Nonproliferation and National Security in the Department of Energy, declassification has been important for these agreements:

我们的解密计划在推动美国非扩散目标方面也发挥了工具作用，尤其是在与俄罗斯达成双边协议以交换机密信息以促进确认透明和不可逆的核武器减少的计划。

The option to exchange classified information can make arms control treaty verification a realistic goal, something that might strengthen national security more than the protection of the shared information. Professor Frank von Hippel of Princeton University explains that:

It would be easier for the U.S. and Russia to collaborate on improving the security of fissile material if its management were more "transparent," that is, if each side declared its inventories of nuclear material and allowed the other to make spot checks of these declarations. Increased transparency would also make it possible to verify nuclear disarmament. To date, the verification of nuclear arms reductions has been limited to missiles, their launchers and bombers. It has not yet been extended to warheads and warhead components.

The need to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to reduce the stockpile of the former Soviet Union may outweigh the risk of sharing information with a former adversary.

Commercial Imagery

As the requirements of national security have changed, so have the threats to Government secrecy. One new threat, less sinister but no less dangerous than other threats, is the increased public availability of information around the world. In no area of intelligence gathering is this more apparent than in overhead satellite imagery. By the end of this year Earth Watch, Inc. expects to have launched a satellite with a resolution of 3 meters, and by the end of 1997 Space Imaging plans to have launched a satellite with a resolution of 1 meter. Over 20 satellites are planned to be launched by the end of the decade. By comparison, the best resolution for modern satellite imagery commercially available today is 10 meters, found in the French private satellite system called SPOT. Several commercial and public uses are anticipated for the sharper images, such as assistance in disaster response, urban planning, and crop analysis.

However, one potential use for the information is for independent verification of Government information. With commercial imagery, it would no longer be necessary for the media or public interest groups to accept the U.S. Government's information as the last word. For example, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, Peter Zimmerman used five- meter resolution images from a Russian satellite to substantiate the claim that the size of the invasion force had been smaller than the size reported by the U.S.. He stated that with one-meter resolution imagery, "I would have been able to make conclusions with extremely high confidence. I would have been able to see individual vehicles on the road." The ability of any government to keep information gathered by satellite imagery secret will be seriously impaired by these commercial initiatives. As commercial imagery becomes a reality, the need to maintain a high level of security for U.S. satellite images that have value for environmental research and the monitoring of activities that the IC considers a low priority may diminish.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Executive Order 12958 and Automatic Declassification

Executive Order 12958 made several significant improvements to the classifica tion system. It is too early to make a definitive judgement concerning the changes in the requirements for classifying information, but initial data suggest that the executive order is having the effect of reducing new classified materials. The program of automatic declassification currently underway has suffered from large requests for exemptions, but, again, the progress towards the declassification of historically relevant material being made through systematic review reported by ISOO implies that the very existence of an automatic declassification policy has motivated intelligence agencies to review their archives with renewed vigor.

IC如何支持大量解密材料的分布的问题对于自动解密而言是一个重要的问题。废除该规定的一个论点可能是，IC缺乏向公众分发信息的资源。但是，为FOIA系统开发的分销选项为以具有成本效益的方式回答这个问题提供了希望。例如，乔治华盛顿大学的国家安全档案馆是一个由私人资助的非营利组织，维护着通过Foia发布的大量文件。该档案馆保留了公共阅读室和FOIA请求数据库，并在CD-ROM上汇编了有关流行主题的材料集合。IC应该向像这样的组织寻求建议，以便为自动解密的信息制定档案，该信息可能仅由政府部分资助。

已提交的大量豁免请求确实威胁要减慢解密过程。但是，应认真考虑所有需要保护某些信息超过25年的合法问题；应该扩展信息安全监督办公室，而不是限制可以提出的请求的数量，以便可以及时评估请求。如果将25年历史的所有适当信息解密的目的证明了由于豁免请求而证明了非现实情况，并且该计划的效果只是在IC内启动更耗时的系统审核过程，那么该政策仍然可以被视为一项成功，即使文件将被解释得更少。这种方法旨在最大程度地减少政府和公众的机密信息的成本，同时避免释放其保密的信息，而这些信息仍然需要国家安全。到目前为止，不应通过要求自动解密符合2000年对IC的反对的目标来浪费浪费。相反，这些异议应由足够资助的ISOO仔细考虑。

The staff of ISOO is tasked to oversee the classification system within both the Government and industry. They also provide support to ISCAP, the body that will review applications for exemptions to automatic classification after the deadline for submitting exemption requests to the President has passed. ISOO is well-positioned to assist the President in evaluating the exemption requests, except for its small size. The release of their 1995 Report to the President in November 1996 suggests that they have inadequate resources to execute their tasks. According to Steven Aftergood, "They [ISOO] need to be increased in size by a factor of ten, although even double would be good. They have an annual budget of less than $1.5 million, so it is not unthinkable that it should be doubled, and I think that would go a long way towards achieving what the executive order sets out to do."

Perhaps the additional funding for ISOO can be found by requiring intelligence agencies who have requested that a large portion of their documents over 25 years old be considered for exception to automatic declassification to lend financial support to the office. A threshold could be established, and agencies that apply for more exemptions than the threshold amount would have to contribute resources to ISOO. This would have the additional benefit of establishing an incentive to reduce the volume of requests.

Reconsidering the Level of Classification of Government Information

向非传统消费者提供信息

DCI Directive 1/7, mentioned above, recommends that intelligence be produced in a way that enables the military to share it with non-traditional allies if necessary:

Coalition warfare is the future model for U.S. military conflicts, and I want the Intelligence Community to rededicate itself to the concept of releasable tailored intelligence -- intelligence produced at the lowest security level commensurate with the protection of sources and methods or produced in a format that allows for timely disclosure to U.S. customers or authorized foreign governments. From this point forward we must "write for the consumer."

DCID 1/7, which focuses on producing intelligence in a format that is easily releasable to foreign governments and international organizations, should be extended to explicitly include intelligence in the areas that the conference believes further cooperation with organizations outside of the IC would be beneficial. These areas may include environmental intelligence, health intelligence, support for law enforcement, and efforts to combat global organized crime. Although DCID 1/7 applies to all subjects of intelligence, the motivation for the directive, as conveyed in the memo accompanying it from DCI Deutch, was to improve support to military operations. The non-military subjects listed above should receive equal attention in the next DCI directive on this topic. In particular, the directive should include techniques analogous to tear lines for satellite imagery, such as reducing the resolution of the images, that would allow their distribution to a wider audience without revealing the capabilities of the sources of those images. Also, the DCI should recommend that ISPAC, a council of individuals outside of the Government who set priorities for declassification under E. O. 12958, include representatives from the fields listed above. In this way, the benefits expected for military operations under the directive can also be realized for non-traditional, but nevertheless important, intelligence objectives. Information could be shared more easily, resulting in the more effective utilization of intelligence gathered by the IC. Also, the initial preparation of intelligence with these consumers in mind would minimize the chance that information vital to national security would be inadvertently released.

Performance Measure: Unauthorized Leaks

One of the best measures of the shortcomings of the current classification system is the existence of unauthorized leaks within the Government. The unauthorized release of classified information indicates that individuals within the IC believe that some documents are improperly classified. Leaks pose a greater danger than systematic declassification, because it is more likely that a leaker would unwittingly release information that would pose a truly grave danger to national security. If declassification were faster and more reliable, or if certain documents were not classified in the first place, then it would remove an incentive to resort to leaks. The intelligence agencies should perform a thorough analysis of leaks to determine not only their sources but also the categories of information that are most likely to be released. No specific information should be considered for declassification simply because it has been leaked to the public, but a review of the classification policy for any category of information that is continually leaked may lead to an improvement of the system and the prevention of further leaks. Also, as the executive order and other reforms of the classification system are implemented, the frequency of leaks should decrease.

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