U.S. Keeping The Wrong Secrets, And Spends $18B To Classify Them

The United States keeps a lot of secrets. In 2017, the last year for which data are complete, roughly four million Americans with security clearances classified around 50 million documents at a cost to US taxpayers of around $18 billion, lawyer Oona A. Hathaway stressed in an analysis for the January-February 2022 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs.

Photo Insert: The CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia

“The US system for classifying secrets is based on the idea that the government has access to significant information that is not available, or at least not widely available, to private citizens or organizations. Over time, however, government intelligence sources have lost their advantage over private sources of intelligence. Thanks to new surveillance and monitoring technologies, including geolocation trackers, the Internet of Things, and commercial satellites, private information is now often better—sometimes much better—than the information held by governments,” Hathaway argued.

The US is focused on keeping too many secrets that don’t really matter. After war broke out in Europe, President Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and asked it to strengthen the laws against sedition and the disclosure of information.

His racist nativism on full display, he declared, “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit, born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America” who “have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the Government in order to serve interests alien to our own.”

The result was the Espionage Act of 1917—a law that, with a few revisions, still forms the main legal basis for proscribing the unauthorized disclosure of national security information in the US. The law was extraordinarily broad, criminalizing the disclosure of “information respecting the national defense” that could be “used to the injury of the US.”

Almost everyone who has examined the US system of keeping secrets has concluded that it results in mass overclassification. J. William Leonard, who led the Information Security Oversight Office during the Bush administration, once observed that more than half of the information that meets the criteria for classification “really should not be classified.”

Others would put that number much higher. Michael Hayden, a former director of the National Security Agency and later of the CIA, once complained of receiving a “Merry Christmas” email that carried a top-secret classification. One factor driving overclassification is the fact that those who do the classifying are almost always incentivized to err on the side of caution—classifying up rather than down.

Secrecy also begets more secrecy, because documents must be classified at the highest level of classification of any information they contain. If a ten-page memo contains even a single sentence that is classified as top secret, for instance, the memo as a whole must be classified as top secret (unless it is “portion marked,” meaning that each segment—the title, each paragraph, each bullet point, and each table, for instance—is given a separate mark of classification).

This requirement fuels an endless progression of derivative classification that compounds the US’ already enormous overclassification problem.

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