A “Drop Dead” Date for Classified Info

参议员罗恩·怀登（Ron Wyden）上周说，解密过程已被等待评论的机密记录泛滥所淹没。“我打算促使国家情报局局长修复破裂的解密系统，”他说.

开始修复解密系统的一种非常有效的方法是设置信息可以保持分类的最长时间。分类的最大寿命有时被称为“死亡”日期。

记录到达日期就会死去not require review and they would not even need to be declassified in any formal way. Their prior classification status would simply lapse without any further processing.

克林顿政府期间，信息安全监督办公室（ISOO）对这种方法受到了青睐。

“我们正在研究'Drop Dead'日期的想法 - [这意味着]任何年龄的东西都被解释了，”the late Steven Garfinkelsaid in1992年的采访, when he was ISOO director. But “x” is “going to be a lot longer than twenty years,” he said then.

How long should it be? Mr. Garfinkel thought that a forty year duration for classification would be the optimal period for maximizing declassification while minimizing risk.

“When we looked at material that was 40 years old or older, we were ending up declassifying just about every bit of it, far more than 99 percent of it,”Garfinkel先生告诉他回忆说，1996年国防部的咨询小组。实际上，克林顿行政命令的初稿实际上“有40年的死亡日期”。

但是在开放性倡导者（包括我自己）的压力下，who arguedthat 40 years was too long to wait, the final克林顿行政命令instead adopted a 25 year period for “automatic declassification.” Unfortunately, however, in doing so it also provided nine exemptions from declassification. This negated the concept of a drop dead date. It entailed painstaking review by agencies to locate and redact exempted information. The resulting declassification process was anything but “automatic” — as Steve Garfinkel had anticipated.

但是，死亡日期的想法仍然是一个有许多积极特征的好想法。

It would put a temporal boundary on the classification system. It would complement current efforts to prioritize the declassification of documents that are in high public demand by ensuring that allotherdocuments will also ultimately be declassified. It would terminate the spiral of repeated reviews of the same partially redacted documents. And it would relieve agencies of a massive bureaucratic burden — at literally no cost — that will be difficult or impossible to overcome in any other practical way.

Arguably, a drop dead date is already implicit in current policy.Executive Order 13526(sect. 1.5d) states that “No information may remain classified indefinitely.” All that is needed is to act on that established principle and to set a definite limit on the duration of classification.

A drop dead date for classification would not solve all declassification problems, even for the oldest classified documents. Information concerning nuclear weapons that is still classified under the Atomic Energy Act cannot be declassified by fiat, no matter how old it is. Certain classified information that is controlled by international agreement or treaty would also have to be protected regardless of its age. But these represent a small fraction of the massive accumulation of old records awaiting declassification.

可以想象一份已有40年或更长时以上的文件构成了某种明确的国家安全威胁。如果事实证明这是一个真正的问题，那么可以将降落日期的极少数例外的一些津贴。但是，考虑到当前的美国政府信息系统已被外国参与者广泛渗透，可以合理地认为，将死亡日期置于半个世纪的旧文件中的任何残留威胁都可以被合理地认为可以容忍 - 特别是如果它帮助机构最终克服其解密的积压。

“I agree that current policies, practices, and technologies cannot keep pace with the amount of classified information generated each year,” said Avril D. Haines, the new Director of National Intelligence, last week in对预先确认问题的回答来自参议院情报委员会。

她说：“我期待研究这些挑战并确定可能有必要的变化。”