On January 15, 2023, an editorial by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post highlighted the urgent need for the federal government to reduce “over-classification,” as the increasing “tsunami” of electronic information that stems from current government operations overwhelms the existing system of classification management and declassification. In the editorial, The Washington Post Editorial Board cited the 2020 Report to the President of the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), and three PIDB blogs from Transforming Classification, including: an interview with PIDB member Paul-Noel Chretien; a PIDB blog reporting about the conference on “Reforming the Classification System” that was co-sponsored by the PIDB at the Hudson Institute on December 6, 2022; and a PIDB blog commenting on the generational backlog of records awaiting review at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in response to public requests submitted under the Freedom of Information Act. Read The Washington Post editorial citing the PIDB here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/01/16/biden-trump-document-scandals-over-classified/.
Reducing over-classification is a start, but will not fully address the problem. Electronic systems that process classified hold billions of pages of information. A petabyte of information can contain more than 50 billion pages of textural records. ISOO has reported to the president that these systems create more than a petabyte each month.
Every document in these systems must be considered classified irrespective of its markings until it can be reviewed and electronically processed to remove any artifacts of other classified documents in the file structure.
The ability of users to create 100s or 1000s of copies of classified documents by attaching them to email messages and allowing recipients to save them locally makes the review and declassification problem 100 to 1000 times greater.
We need a comprehensive look at how government information is created, shared, stored, processed, and reviewed. Without that the reduction in the number of documents newly classified is only a token effort and will not make much of a dent in the larger problem.