Jude

Feds step up concealment of public documents
Staff and Wire Reports
Feb 21, 2006
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/artman/publish/article_8175.shtml

U.S. intelligence agencies have been secretly removing from public
access at the National Archives thousands of historical documents that
were available for years, The New York Times reported on Monday.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously
declassified pages began in 1999, when the CIA and five other agencies
objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information
after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton,
the Times said on its Web site.

The secret program accelerated after the Bush administration took office
and especially after the September 11 attacks, according to archives
records, the paper said.

It came to light after intelligence historian Matthew Aid noticed dozens
of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the
archives' open shelves, the Times said.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be
declassified after 25 years unless there is a particular reason to keep
them secret.

Some historians say the program is removing material that can do no
conceivable harm to national security and note that some of the
documents have been published by the government, the Times said.

Critics say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under
the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying
documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some
material under the Freedom of Information Act, the paper said.

Information Is Power
Terry J. Allen
February 14, 2006
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2488/
[thanks, Airean]

Sometimes it's the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how
profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of
national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to
birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the
country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists,
lawyers, and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution that
officials miss or ignore.

In These Times has obtained a draft of the proposed regulations now
causing widespread concern among state officials. It reveals plans to
create a vast database of vital records to be centralized in Washington,
and details measures that states must implement-and pay millions
for-before next year's scheduled implementation.

The draft lays out how some 60,000 already strapped town and county
offices must keep the birth and death records under lock and key and
report all document requests to Washington. Individuals who show up in
person will still be able to obtain their own birth certificates, and in
some cases, the birth and death records of an immediate relative; and
"legitimate" research institutions may be able to access files. But
reporters and activists won't be allowed to fish through records; many
family members looking for genetic clues will be out of luck; and people
wanting to trace adoptions will dead-end. If you are homeless and need
your own birth certificate, forget it: no address, no service.

Consider the public health implications. A few years back, a doctor in a
tiny Vermont town noticed that two patients who lived on the same hill
had ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease. Hearing rumors of more cases of the
relatively rare and always fatal disease, the doctor notified the health
department. Citing lack of resources, it declined to investigate. The
doc then told a reporter, who searched the death certificates filed in
the town office only to find that ALS had already killed five of the
town's 1,300 residents. It was statistically possible, but unlikely,
that this 10-times higher-than-normal incidence was simply chance. Since
no one knows what causes ALS, clusters like this one, once revealed,
help epidemiologists assess risk factors, warn doctors to watch for
symptoms, and alert neighbors and activists.

Activists in Colorado already know what it is like when states bar
access to vital records. For years, they fought the Cotter Corporation,
claiming that its uranium mining operations were killing residents and
workers. Unwilling to rely on the health department, which they claimed
had a "cozy" relationship with the polluters, the activists tried to
access death records, only to be told that it was illegal in this
closed-record state. An editorial in Colorado's Longmont Daily
Times-Call lamented, "If there's a situation that makes the case for why
death certificates should be available to the public, it is th[is]
Superfund area."

Some of state officials around the country are questioning whether the
new regulations themselves illegally tread on states' rights. But the
feds have been coy. Richard McCoy, public health statistic chief in
Vermont, one of the nation's 14 open records states, says, "No state is
mandated to meet the regs. However if they don't, then residents of that
state will not be able to access any federal services, including social
security and passports. States have no choice."

But while the public loses access to records, the federal government
gains a gargantuan national database easily cross-referenced in the name
of national security. The feds' claim that increased security will deter
identity theft and terrorism is facile. Wholesale corporate data
gathering is the major nexis of identity theft. As for terrorism, all
the 9/11 perpetrators had valid identification.

Meanwhile, the quiet clampdown on vital records is part of a growing
consolidation of information at the federal level. "That information
will dovetail with the Real ID Act of 2005," says Marc Rotenberg of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Real ID cards are the other shoe
that is scheduled to drop in three years." That act, signed into law
last May, establishes national standards for state-issued driver's
licenses and ID cards, and centralizes the information into a database.

Aside from public health and privacy concerns, closing vital records
incurs a steep intangible cost: It undermines community in places where
that healthy ethos still survives. In small town America, the local
clerk's office is a sociable place where government wears the face of
your neighbor. Each year, Vermont's 246 towns distribute their vital
statistics to all residents. "It's the first place everybody goes in the
Town Report," says state archivist Gregory Sanford. "Who was born, who
died, who got married, who had a baby and wasn't married."

This may not be the most dramatic danger to democracy, but it is one of
the Bush administration's many quiet, incremental assaults on the health
of America's body politic. And it may end up listed on the death
certificate for open society. ++

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
SCOTT SHANE
February 21, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html

WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 - In a seven-year-old secret program at the National
Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access
thousands of historical documents that were available for years,
including some already published by the State Department and others
photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously
declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency
and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of
sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by
President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration
took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according
to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy -
governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National
Archives even from saying which agencies are involved - it continued
virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an
intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents
he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open
shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the
documents - mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean
War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents
had been previously published in the State Department's history series,
"Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some
of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information
Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification,
began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard,
director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn
documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were
classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an
interview. "It just boggles the mind."

If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his
office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to
the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a
revision of the reclassification program.

A group of historians, including representatives of the National
Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign
Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the
reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some
material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.

Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is
a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries
behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was
reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State
Department in 1996.

Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied
years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962
telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia,
containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on
China's nuclear weapons program.

Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be
declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep
them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at
the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic
reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century
ago.

One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the
C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the
Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27,
some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program,
some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him
in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared
by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve
copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could
even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are
classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general
counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George
Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account
of the secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org/~nsarchiv, on
Tuesday.

The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly
declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been
dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National
Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.

But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no
conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked
trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has
increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and
discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of
Information Act.

Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies,
not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification
program.

"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic
sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of
American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it
was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of
secrecy."

National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500
documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office.
About 30 reviewers - employees and contractors of the intelligence and
defense agencies - are at work each weekday at the archives complex in
College Park, Md., the officials said.

Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it
was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million
to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.

Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the
National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever
possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions
agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.

Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies
are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of
anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major
participants.

A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had
released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since
1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for
deciding what should be secret.

"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the
anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players
involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.

A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to
comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.

Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said
she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number
of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.

"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed
that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is
being deprived of what history is really about: facts."

The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security
Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications
since 2003.

The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a
bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the
reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though
they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers
and even published, he said.

Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified - and pulling
them from public access is not really reclassification.

Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained,
the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about
the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit,
showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret
is deeply flawed.

"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said.
"There's got to be a better way." ++

It is not enough to be compassionate; you must act.
-- The Dalai Lama