A Washington Riddle: What Is ‘Top Secret’?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/04/sunday-review/a-washington-riddle-what-is-top-secret.html

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WASHINGTON — LESS than 24 hours after Pfc. Bradley Manning was convicted last week of handing off 250,000 State Department cables and defense documents to WikiLeaks, The Guardian published on its Web site the latest classified material from the leaker of the moment, Edward J. Snowden. That installment included the National Security Agency’s playbook for XKeyscore, a powerful surveillance program enabling the agency’s analysts to monitor and trace Internet searches around the globe.

The cases have provided lots of cable-television drama, from Private Manning’s court-martial to Moscow’s provocative granting of temporary asylum to America’s best-known fugitive. But the deeper lessons lie in how the government is stumbling in its efforts to protect its secrets in the Internet age. Washington has still not heeded two decades of warnings that the best way to protect America’s biggest secrets is to have far fewer of them and to recognize that much of what is stamped “secret” today is widely available on the Internet.

There are certainly some secrets the government needs to protect, but many of the most important clues about revolutions, nuclear transfers and new military sites can be found online, in open chat rooms and commercial satellite photos.

In the early days of the cold war, secrecy seemed simpler. Classified documents were almost all on paper, making it far easier to limit access to officials with top clearances. There were not yet 16 intelligence agencies, much less the post-9/11 directives for them to share information they had once kept “stovepiped,” so that others could not get to it.

It was this pooling of information that allowed Private Manning, sitting at a remote outpost in Iraq, to download cables from the American Embassy in Beijing, and let Mr. Snowden, at a small base in Hawaii, to download — without setting off alarms — documents about intelligence collection operations and secret court decisions that had nothing to do with his job.

“This failure originated from two practices that we need to reverse,” Ashton B. Carter, the deputy secretary of defense, said recently. “There was an enormous amount of information concentrated in one place,” he said. “That’s a mistake.” And second, no individual should be given the kind of access Mr. Snowden had, Mr. Carter said. That has led to a new “two-person rule” for downloading classified data, akin to the two guys who would sit in nuclear silos, each with a separate key needed to launch a missile.

But that tactical solution doesn’t get to the core issue: When far too much information gets classified, nothing is really classified. Respect for the system erodes when information readily available in open sources is ostensibly guarded with high-level classification. It was this habit that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan railed against 20 years ago in “Secrecy,” a book detailing the corrosive effects of over-classification.

Mr. Moynihan might roar at recent examples. The bona fide secrets in those 250,000 cables were hidden among thousands of newspaper articles that someone had stamped “secret” and sent to the State Department.

A more serious problem erupts when classification collides with other American interests. Consider the least covert secret program in the American arsenal: drones. Every drone attack in Pakistan and Yemen made the local news, and Twitter, in hours. Often those reports were accompanied by huge exaggerations about civilian casualties. But the American ambassador in Pakistan was forced to let those claims go unanswered, because the program was classified. “We did far more damage to our national security pretending we knew nothing,” one senior American official said in frustration, “than if we had owned up to them and said, ‘Here’s a list of terrorists we just put out of action.’ ”

Now, after years of investigative news reports, President Obama has begun talking about the program publicly. But he has steadfastly refused to show an equal willingness to justify America’s use of cyberweapons. That has many government officials and corporate executives worried because there are no global rules defining legitimate and illegitimate cyberattacks.

Administration officials say Mr. Obama has succeeded in reducing, by 42 percent, the number of “new secrets” classified by the government last year — to a little over 72,000.

But the White House has had less success redefining what should be classified. A 2008 report by the director of national intelligence acknowledged, “The definitions of ‘national security’ and what constitutes ‘intelligence’ — and thus what must be classified — are unclear.”

That seemed obvious over the past week when the government suddenly declassified the secret court order that was the basis for collecting “metadata” on every telephone call made in the United States. It was unclear why it could not have been made public years ago — especially since, as one intelligence official said recently, “terrorists have thought for years we collect this stuff.”

“The reality is that much is classified just to take the issue off the public agenda,” said Steve Aftergood, a secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “That’s not what classification is for, but it often serves that purpose.”

So how might the government deal with its classification problem? Herb Lin, a researcher at the National Academy of Sciences, believes that budgets must be used to change behavior.

“The incentives to classify information are many, and the incentives to refrain from classifying it are few,” he noted recently, adding that he was speaking just for himself. “Classifying information doesn’t incur any monetary cost for the classifier, and any economist will tell you that a free good will be overused.”

So he proposes that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies should be given a budget, and every time a “top secret” stamp is used, it should be charged against that budget.

Intelligence officials would argue that you can’t put a price on national security and that classification decisions shouldn’t be made with budgets in mind. But Mr. Lin’s idea drives home a point: that secrecy and security are often not synonymous.

<NYT_AUTHOR_ID> <p>David E. Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times.