The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals about America’s Top Secrets

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign well hello and welcome to uh our program today here at the Cato Institute my name is Patrick Eddington I'm a senior fellow here working issues essentially at the Nexus of the Bill of Rights and so-called National Security um I'm really glad that you're with us today I think we have a great uh program on for you here today I do have a couple of admin announcements that I need to make here uh really quickly just make sure that everyone has got for those of you who are here in the auditorium please make sure that any of your electronic devices are either off or at least muted so we can make sure that we keep things rolling here in a very smooth way we will be taking questions both online and in person we'll save the in person for the last 10 minutes to be clear the online audience may join us and submit questions directly on the event webpage on cato.org Facebook YouTube and on X otherwise known as the service that was previously known as Twitter and using the hashtag Century of surveillance I want to also say that when we get to questions here in the audience when you stand and you're recognized please make sure that you speak clearly and give us your name and affiliation if any you know I spent the better part of a decade at the Central Intelligence Agency back in the late 1980s through the mid 1990s and it was a perfect experience essentially to kind of learn about what I think many of us consider to be secret government what I did not realize when I was working at the CIA was just exactly how many hundreds of millions perhaps billions perhaps trillions of classified documents there are at this point and our guests today are going to really help us kind of untangle that how did we get to this point why do we actually have so many of these classified documents is it really necessary what does it cost us not just in dollar terms but in terms of our ability to hold our elected and unelected officials accountable and our topic today of course the subject of this entire program is this book the declassification engine what history reveals about America's Top Secrets or perhaps what it doesn't necessarily reveal about our top secrets the author Matthew Connelly is a professor at Columbia specializing in international and related history and joining us also over here on the end is my partner in crime in the Freedom of Information Act and Trend government transparency business uh Nate Jones of the Washington Post gentlemen thanks thanks for joining us so very much I want to just kick off here by pulling something directly out of the preface of the book Matt and and at one point you say quote lawyers however are paid to dream up other people's nightmares end quote give us the context for that statement because it really is quite the story Texas uh I have nothing against lawyers I come from a family of lawyers might have even been one myself if I hadn't gone down this other path but um but yeah as Patrick just told you I was in a room full of lawyers uh this was in a foundation where we were waiting to find out if my team at Columbia was going to be given a grant that was going to allow us to begin doing this research using you know a trove of Declassified documents now all of these have been Declassified we weren't trying to use any leaked information what we were going to do though is to use new methods from data science you know to see what we could discover you know about how it is the government decides what secret when and how they decide what can be released to the public and what these lawyers who'd been hired by the foundation told us was that everybody involved in this project could be prosecuted under the Espionage Act uh and then they enumerated a number of other statutes whereby we could also be subject to felony prosecutions and did you have your own counsel in the room when this took place oh luckily yes I was lawyered up Colombia um you know had provided me with a lawyer they have their own lawyers of course but they had hired outside Council who was very experienced in this area and whereas the you know the former head of Major Crimes in the southern district and the former general counsel of the NSA you know they had written I think was like 60 Pages probably charging about ten thousand dollars a page this uh this one first amendment lawyer you know produced a memo I think was about three pages long it just blew them out of the water I mean there was no precedent for anybody being prosecuted um using you know basically Declassified documents you know just to learn things about the world and luckily the first amendment is a really powerful protection you know especially for academics and journalists because long ago the Supreme Court recognized that if you don't allow people to learn things you know then civilization dies so that was a close call because that Foundation at the end decided that they didn't want to take the chance but luckily the MacArthur Foundation came along and they did give us the funding so we were be able to to begin that work so what is the history lab yeah so the history lab began that way began about 10 years ago we're a team of social scientists data scientists developers engineers and what we've done over that period of time is we've aggregated what we think is the largest collection of Declassified documents in the world it's a database now people may correct me but they haven't yet because you know there are large you know volumes of Declassified documents you know the government has it's estimated you know over 20 Washington monuments worth of records that have not been released to the public but we've done a lot of hard work it was mainly my colleagues actually did the hard work of turning all those documents into data and it's for that reason now that we can begin doing a whole series of experiments you know learning for instance you know what kinds of topics tend to be classified at the highest level you know who's in the room when things are still withheld decades later how long does it take you know for say a document about nuclear weapons to get Declassified versus one that's about UFOs and you know the New Frontier now is uh you know these Frontier models for large language models like chat GPT which I think are going to take us to a whole new level Nate could The Washington Post use something like that well Jeff Bezos just has to write us a small check and we're in business just uh just as long as the journalists aren't turned into Bots well what are your what are your impressions essentially of of this incredible book that he's written and the and the contribution essentially that it's making to you know our understanding of how we got to this insane Place uh it was a Paige Turner couldn't put it down uh I'm reminded of another book talk where Matthew was the host a while ago it was a book of Alex wallerstein restricted data on nuclear secrecy um and Matthew erupted almost in his comments on Alex's great book where's the outrage um and I cannot say that in this every page is dripping with outrage and as a person that spent the better half of all of my career fighting for access to information um the outrage is is just um so it's this book if you haven't read it is not just a prescription for um possible way to increase Americans access to their data their records that they paid for but also a history of how this came to be starting from the atomic bomb all the way up to the present uh and uh I was absolutely fascinated can't recommend it enough again and looking forward to digging in today well and and I think you know one of the points that Matt makes in the book is that during most of the history of our Republic this was not an issue this really wasn't a problem we didn't have you know permanent formalized structures uh within the executive branch creating this mountain of information uh and at this point I'd like to go to this first slide if you take a look up here we're looking at the total number of lines encoded in Communications from U.S ligations located in Europe and this comes straight out of Matt's book actually can you talk about you know how you got to that particular point there yeah sure I mean I created the graph but this is actually someone else's research and and by the way Alex Waller seaton's book restricted data is phenomenal it's a fantastic book and I'm fortunate there's now you know a number of Scholars working on the history of secrecy there's almost nobody doing this 10 years ago Sam levibik has a book coming out on the history of the Espionage Act this I wish I could remember but if you take a look at my book you'll find the the original research was not by me but what I did was just you know I like to look at graphs I sometimes find them Illuminating so in this case I just took a table and I turned it into a graph showing you know how much of America's diplomatic Communications was encrypted beginning you know in The Early Republic right up until the Civil War and to me it really tells better than than words could how it is that yes for a time you know when we still had our revolutionary generation you know the founding fathers people like Jefferson Madison Hamilton Washington you know while they were still um you know in the leading positions in our government you know the U.S did you know uh encrypt Communications it's well known you know that some of them were experienced operatives themselves or Asian handlers like in the case of Washington but when that first generation passed from the scene um this you know way in which we try to protect Communications like every other power of the day that just faded away and it wasn't because the U.S lacked capacity in fact you know Thomas Jefferson developed an enigma-like encryption device that would have foiled you know any contemporary code breaking office and for the for the benefit of those who may not have caught the Enigma reference of course that was um the encryption device that uh I think it was the polls prior to World War II actually developed but the Nazis wound up taking the device essentially and turning it into a system to encode you know their critical Communications one of the reasons why the Allies won World War II is because a group of incredibly talented cryptographers at Britain's Bletchley Park were successful ultimately in penetrating that code and that's one of the reasons why so many Nazi submarines were destroyed in the battle of the Atlantic ultimately and that was pivotal in terms of allowing the United States When It ultimately entered the war to be able to successfully Trend transport troops and War material over to Europe and ultimately launch The Invasion at Normandy and finally destroy the Nazis so you know the that whole issue of encryption uh and how valuable it is uh in terms of you know keeping communication secure uh there's no way to underestimate that and in our modern world of course uh those of us you know who use apps like signal or other encrypted apps we do that in order to do for the same reasons that the founders did you know whether it was Jefferson or or Washington or any of the others that is to essentially keep our Communications private and out of uh unfriendly hands but I think this this graph to me speaks to how much things have changed essentially what it was like back in the day if you will before we had this giant National Security State compared to what it is today yeah and and I was just going to say notice the period of the Civil War you know that was a time in which the U.S conducted open diplomacy you know the uh President Lincoln decided that the union cause would be better served by conducting American diplomacy in the open so he began to publish American diplomatic Communications sometimes just a few months after they were first delivered and this you know caused an uproar in foreign capitals you know no other country in the world was doing this but it just shows like how even in Wartime in some cases the US was really radically different radically more accountable and transparent than other countries of the day uh I want to give the audience a taste just a little taste of Matthew's outrage he writes we will see how in this book in time this culture of secrecy became a cult in which inductees were indoctrinated took oath swearing their loyalty and recognized one another through shared rituals and special badges he quotes Max Weber quote every bureaucracy seeks to increase the superiority of the professionally informed by keeping their knowledge and intention Secret but he didn't just bash from the outside he got a senior Cia official to tell him I don't think the official gave him his name but the CIA official said nonetheless quote the best engineering decisions are the ones debated in public the very worst are the ones hidden from scrutiny under the cloak of secrecy so that makes me ask the question is secrecy including National Security secrecy at odds with the scientific method of hypotheses complete citations reputable results and peer review yeah usually yes with few exceptions I mean there certainly have been you know very impressive scientific uh projects undertaken under the cloak of secrecy I mean famously I think now we're all thinking about the Manhattan Project right uh even if you haven't seen the the Christopher Nolan film but actually one of the scientists uh uh one of the leading scientists as part of that project said that if they had not conducted that research in secret they probably could have deployed a weapon 18 months earlier than they did in the end so just think of it imagine you know if the U.S have been able to deploy atomic bombs in early 1944 you know how different the course of the second world war might have been right so certainly I wouldn't dispute the idea that there's sometimes a place for secrecy but then all the more reason then right that we have to be discriminating and judicious and make sure that we're actually identifying the information that really could kill people and the rest of it needs to be available to the American people so we could keep our government accountable for all the other decisions that they make what are what are some examples of of these real true secrets that should be protected um that should be protected yeah well I would say for example you know the identities of of covert operatives you know uh or even you know in some cases the people who speak with American diplomats thinking they they can speak in confidence um you know I'm not a fan of WikiLeaks you know I I think it was it was Reckless uh when you know whether it's through poor operational security or poor you know choice of Partners they allowed hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables to be released because you know if now you go back and you do keyword search to protect closely you will find dozens and dozens of names of people whose lives were then put at risk right merely because you know in some cases they were human rights activists and others they they committed the crime of speaking to an American Diplomat so absolutely there there is an important place for secrecy I'll give you an example you know how on the other hand you know the United States sometimes doesn't even protect its own just think of the office of personal management hack right that's how millions of people some people in this audience perhaps now your personal information Patrick for instance you know Patrick's most personal information I'm not saying he has any secrets necessarily we don't know um but when he was asked you know about his uh drinking alcohol taking drugs money problems gambling and they also asked you know typically as they would right they would have asked his friends his employers sometimes even their doctors and so on everybody has to give up this kind of information you know to get a security clearance all that information now is in the hands of the Chinese government none of those records were classified which none of them which just brings us to essentially the issue here of you know trying to actually keep a handle on that which really should genuinely be you know under lock and key so to speak and that which you just really shouldn't uh you know necessarily be concerned about and and I love this graphic because number one it says at the very bottom you can see there on the actual graphic itself approved for release by NSA on 417 2018. foia case number there is nothing classified about this document it contains no classified National Security information on it the fact that they were concerned about an Insider threat I don't understand for a single minute how that could ever have necessarily been classified but that to me is a prime example of overclassification uh and hanging onto a document that really had absolutely no business um you know Patrick this particular poster was one I found at the National Archives among records also released by The National Security Agency almost all of them related not to what the NSA typically does right I call this chapter The Secret Of Secrets because as you were saying like if you can't keep your own information your own communication secret then nothing is secure but interestingly the National Security Agency when they were releasing records there was almost nothing about uh you know with few exceptions like they're precursors when they conducted Army intelligence you know they did the Winona operation for example otherwise there's almost nothing now we know even from NSA operations from 70 years ago right you know their success or failure in decrypting Soviet Communications from the entire period of the Cold War is almost completely unknown but they did release a lot of Records related to things like fiscal security Personnel security like how they conducted you know background checks who they interviewed how they did it how it is they protected their physical facilities and so on so what's interesting about that for me is I was able to write a whole chapter how you would hack into the NSA because in back of the 19 80s many of them were never classified like the blueprints for NSA headquarters at Fort Meade were not classified like you could have seen and you still can if you go to the National Archives all these schematics about their duck I'm not saying you should do this but you know all this information is out there so like it's bizarre in some cases the things that you know like this poster for example is treated with utter solemnity but it's released along with all these other things that really could do damage and and I think it's important for folks to understand that nsa's ability to do this kind of thing stems from its original authorizing legislation passed in 1959 it's known as the National Security Agency Act of 1959 as public law 86-36 and section 6 of that particular statute gives the NSA the ability to withhold literally anything which is exactly how we get this kind of insanity here that we've been talking about um and that's that's one of the major problems that we have with respect to this secret government in this secret history of our own country is that so many of these they're called so-called B3 statutes in the in the world of the freedom information act there are nine specific exemptions that Federal officials can invoke in order to withhold information and one of those is known as the otherwise by protected or otherwise protected by Statute provision that's known as the foia B3 exemption and there are literally dozens of agencies and departments that have this and the government accountability office has done reports over the last few years that show that the number of those exemptions passed by Congress and signed into law by by presidents of both parties has simply exploded over the last you know several decades so we we see not only the internal bureaucratic machinations here to try to basically conceal information that would otherwise expose waste fraud abuse even criminal conduct we see efforts on the part of the people that you and I elect to keep us in the dark through the provision of these kinds of of statutes so we have both a bureaucratic problem but we also fundamentally have a political and I think overarchingly a mindset problem one of those b3s Pat you forgot to mention is kind of important it's to protect the technology used to grow watermelons I don't just you can look at the GAO report and that's one of them of course seriously more seriously I'm sure that if the Department of Agriculture really wanted to protect that if it really was a serious issue they would have been able to use one of the other Freedom of Information exemptions so it's an example of the Absurd um so we just talked about something that was not classified that should have been classified probably the schematics to the NSA but I want to raise another point and that's that lots of times we talk about declassification properly classified information and that goes to an executive order it's currently executive order 13526 as Matthew said in this book it's usually updated by every president but it has not yet been updated for the past two Administrations but but my point is is that just because that executive order defines what is and is not properly classified does not mean that these records pass the laugh test so for example I think most people in this room probably learned in middle school that the Cuban Missile Crisis ended when Kennedy secretly negotiated to remove the Jupiter missiles from Turkey in exchange from the Soviet Union moving its missiles from Cuba the Department of Defense and most other agencies redact that in every record and it cites to executive order 13526 as a properly classified secret so my question is if things that are defined as technically properly classified are things that have already been reported in history books in The New York Times how much Authority and respect should we give to what sometimes say as the conversation some people say is conversation Ender it's classified yeah well I I may surprise you about this Nate because uh you know I too uh I I have a good time looking at some of the more ridiculous things that end up getting classified at the highest levels but you know sometimes you know when I see for example like I think that the classic example would be like the Drone program and over Pakistan so everybody knew because officials you know were constantly leaking information about how the US was operating a program you know that was killing you know both Afghan and Pakistani Nationals they've been doing it for years every time they leaked information they wanted to tell us like how effective it was and how few people how few innocent people that is were being killed and so it was public knowledge right I mean there I think it was the ACLU they put together a really helpful infographic where you could look at the whole timeline over and over again senior officials telling us all this information about about that program at the same time over and over again they denied foyer requests right uh and continually they they cited the same reason that this was an operation that had never been acknowledged and so there was no public information so you know what do we make of this well you know I come from a background I spent many years studying diplomatic history diplomats are Past Masters talking around things that everybody knows but nobody can acknowledge so in this case you know if the United States had officially at that time anyway if they'd acknowledged that they're operating a program that was killing Pakistani Nationals that would have created a diplomatic incident you know the government in Pakistan would have had to explain you know to the people of Pakistan why it is they were permitting a foreign power to kill their fellow citizens on their own soil so this is the kind of thing you know that that happens and in a way I understand it you know maybe I absorb too much of that world when I spent years studying it so I would draw a distinction between examples like this where yes things are public knowledge but no they're not officially acknowledged an example is where we just know it's incompetence or Worse right when they're actually covering up like uh you know activity that anyone would uh deem to be illegal um or or uh or worse than that worse than a crime um an error so sometimes there's real overlap because many people think that the Drone program itself was criminal um but yet and still there are distinctions that diplomats are paid to to make and and I think that would be one of them well we have uh an anonymous viewer who's posing really kind of a threshold type question so I I want to take this opportunity to read it why are agencies allowed to control the declassification process they have a bias in favor of secrecy should the U.S set up an independent agency to operate the declassification process yes the answer is yes uh because when you look back uh the history and I wrote a short piece of anybody who wants to hear the longer version of this I wrote it in uh in time um and the uh the title was you know uh the president is not going to fix the broken secrecy system just ask Joe Biden because I give these examples from when Joe Biden was a Senator he was actually a charter member of the Senate select committee on intelligence and back in 1977 you know he was telling everyone who had listened that the only way in which you're ever going to get sanity for what was already A system that had gone out of control was if Congress acted and they created a statutory basis for defining uh National Security information and he used that as a threat right to impel The Carter Administration to make meaningful changes in the executive order and they did now unfortunately a lot of those you know uh changes in the end they they were absorbed like the Borg you know by the national security agencies and they were rendered almost null the amount of classified information actually increased you know after Carter implemented this order that was supposed to bring more transparency um and so to me that's a great example like yes you can sometimes get Congress to act and I do have High Hopes uh and I hope we get to talk about it some of the legislation that that's now before Congress but at the end of the day I think it may be necessary to create an independent Authority like I think for example the Federal Reserve right when you don't you think something is too important to be under the direct control of either the president you know or legislators then yes sometimes you have to create independent entity that has the the power to act in that domain you know what's interesting about essentially the history of how the executive branch got control of this classification process it's really both fascinating and depressing at the same time because if you actually look at the text of the Constitution itself the word secret appears only once in the entire document and it's not in connection with article two which covers the presidency it's in article one Section 5 specifically which covers Congress and congress's ability essentially to conduct its business create its own products and to make them secret if it so chooses so the reality is Congress was the original classification Authority in this country but what's happened over the course of the last two centuries essentially is that Congress is essentially largely seated that you know the last time the Congress really asserted itself in this area was during the church committee uh period in the in the 1970s after a number of these major scandals involving the FBI my beloved former employer the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency came to light and in the course of doing that particular investigation Senator Church made it very clear and he had he had the full bipartisan support of his colleagues on the committee he made it very clear to the Ford Administration if you have objections to what we are going to include in our report that our executive branch documents we will listen to those objections and we will make a decision but in the end this is our work product and we will include it in what we deem necessary in order to inform the American people and to the best of my knowledge that is the last time that Congress has really aggressively asserted this Authority most the time when there's there's any kind of question about a classification issue involving an executive branch document they defer to the executive branch I think personally I think that sets a terrible precedent I believe it to be unconstitutional on his face but this is the pattern in practice unfortunately that has developed over the course of the last 200 years and especially in the course of the last 50 years you know Patrick just to piggyback on that Nate um I everybody should Patrick gave testimony before the homeland security and government Affairs committee back in March and uh uh and he made that excellent point you know if you actually read the black letter text the Constitution I defy you to find the legal Authority whereby the president is able to decide what the rest of us are allowed to know it's not there it's judicial judicial activism for the most part right for the most part and and I also liked uh since I'm on uh you know Senator Rand Paul's home turf share I want to pay tribute senator Paul you know said uh I think an unscripted remark speaking from the heart it seemed you know said that uh you know basically the president of Democratic and Republican presidents had taken power away from Congress and it was time for a congress had to take it back and he said we need a hammer he's absolutely right about that the only way that Congress is going to rest at least some of that power away from the executive is if they use the threat of of creating law right which is I think what we're now talking about at least I I hope we will yeah I want to give a Bittersweet example to the questionnaire's exam question about an independent agency so um the interagency Security Appeals classification panel classification appeals panel ice cap is not really is within the National Archives but it acts very independently there were years when they would review classification Decisions by the agency or if the agencies missed their deadlines they would take the record and then say oh you missed the deadline this needs to be released and an infuriated patch friends at CIA I know for a fact so including records at the Presidential Library and in the Heyday ice cap was declassifying a lot of stuff a lot of high-level stuff some of the gems on the National Security archive where I'm still a fellow's website are from ice cap and we run around town heralding it um but I guess it was a victim of its own success or uh there was the return of the classification Empire because as Michael points out uh in the in Matthew sorry as Matthew points out in the latest ice cap report I believe they Declassified one case in the last fiscal year so that's a Bittersweet example of something that was working that has now essentially turned off the spigot you know what's also interesting about ice cap is that this is a body made up of representatives from the Pentagon from the state department the CIA Etc uh all of them with security clearances and so on right all them occupying responsible positions and if I remember right I think in two-thirds or more of the cases at least they decide that actually information that was withheld from the public should not have been withheld from the public so this gives you a good sense about the error rate of withholding information when even government officials representing these agencies you know decide that when you actually look at the documents that this information is being improperly withheld from the government you know there's something deeply wrong with the system and and by the way uh I have friends like Mary serrati for example have written excellent histories for example the the end of the Cold War NATO enlargement we need more history like that right I mean if ever there is a time we need to understand revisit right how the Cold War ended in the beginnings of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine now is the time the only way she was ever able to do that research and publish that book was by using ice cap but now it's basically unusable there are so many people who've lined up in that queue you could take it would take years to get through the backlog even if they were designing more than one case yeah we have another person who is posing a question anonymously here should the U.S adopt a quote 30-year rule or whatever where documents will be automatically Declassified after 30 years barring an affirmative agency showing that continued classification is in the National interest to a certain degree that theoretically is already supposed to be happening under the executive order that Nate referenced you know just a moment ago but as as Matt's book really does a great job of showing the sheer volume of information right now and I'm just thinking about paper because it's the paper records for the most part that I wind up dealing with for the kind of historical research that I've been doing it is literally measured in the tens of millions of pages and the National Archives staff which has taken a lot of hits essentially from an attrition standpoint as a result of covet and some other things they're simply overwhelmed which is why the proposal that Matt has been making and trying to get folks around town to buy into is so important because if you can take that stuff scan it into a system essentially apply the kind of methodology that Matt and his team has developed you'll have the ability to figure out what really ought to still be classified in the case of most of this material it's probably you know 30 40 50 or more years old the vast majority of it I think undoubtedly would be you know Declassified if we had something that was much closer to what Matt is proposing here do you think that that I mean that's really what you're talking about right and Patrick you know I I hear people you know people who try to use chat TPT you know it hallucinates and you get nonsense out of it you know I understand there's good reason why people might be skeptical right as to the limits of Technology but let me just point out what the status quo is right now so people who tried to get records from if I remember right from the George W Bush Administration from presidential libraries we're told that at the rate at which they were reviewing and releasing material it would take 250 years 250 years before they could produce those records that's why we're that's why we're suing them yeah so that Cato is a very aggressive foia litigation program precisely and and it pains me to have to have us Target the National Archives because you know as a general rule I see them essentially most of the time uh as the good guys and good gals you know trying to actually make a information available to the public but but the simple reality is we have reached a point I'm sure Nate that you share this view as well where the level of recalcitrance on the part of agencies and departments in terms of releasing information has reached a level where if you're an average foia requester without access to your own Council who can actually go into court your chances of getting what you're looking for are not going to say they're absolute zero but they're really close to zero and that's one of the things that frustrates me and I know I'm sure it frustrates the both of you which is why you know trying to utilize you know a technology like this I think is so important I will say that we do still have Scholars out there doing incredible work even in places like the National Archives at College Park this particular document that we're showing now is the infamous Martin Luther King Jr kill yourself letter uh and this is the completely unredacted version and I believe that it was Beverly Gage of Yale who actually came across this version of it there's still a lot that individual Scholars like myself or Dr Gage and others are able to accomplish and sometimes you can come up with gems like this but most of the time you're still dealing essentially with a bureaucratic or legal wall that makes it impossible to actually you know get anywhere and I'll just I'll tell one quick anecdote from my time out the national archives in August and September of this year I've been trying to get into Department of Justice Records essentially from the Kennedy and LBJ eras for a second book that I'm working on about domestic surveillance and political repression here in the United States and they actually pulled the record slips that identify essentially what records you want to kind of get at right the date of the record a brief description of the subject all the rest that they literally barred access uh to those those record slips in that department of justice group because somebody had a freakout incident over potentially nuclear slash restricted data being referenced bear in mind that these record slips have been served to researchers like myself prior to this for literally decades so when we talk about the lack of a system that is essentially digital in nature fully keyword searchable fully indexable Etc that's how I think you ultimately get to a place where you avoid you know this kind of a problem I think to answer the the last person's question along with you guys I think that there in the art of the Practical I think that I look to what uh Steve gar Finkel and Insider at ISU said and Steve aftergood Federal Academy American sciences and Outsider said and they both pointed to some need for an actual drop dead date maybe of 40 years and there's a good article on FAS website and the again the kind of the the bittersweetness of this is that the Clinton executive order and parts of it remain in the Obama executive order are still in the books was so close it used the word automatic declassification except it made it very easy for the agencies to uh oppose this and now they do that almost as a knee-jerk so I think the way forward is something that predominantly is like the UK system of a drop dead date and maybe there could be AI to find the true Secrets provided that it's one percent of the records or less rather than I believe 85 percent of the records is less as agent he's currently improperly claim I believe it's today it's uh the last time they published this information which was several years ago it showed uh that the Pentagon withhold 75 percent of the records that they were reviewing for automatic declassifications that is like after a quarter of a century they looked at these records under so-called automatic declassification and they withheld three out of every four right and the rest of it kind of goes into a warehouse somewhere where we're probably never going to see it again or maybe someday maybe in 250 years but the CIA was 82 percent right so that's what automatic declassification actually means and it's interesting you know one of the other topics that you raise in chapter three is this Shadow broker uh issue that that particular hack that took place and this is a breach essentially that exposed uh NSA commercial software exploits and unless I'm mistaken to this day we still don't know whether that breach that was the result of a hack or an exfiltration but it raises a very interesting question because here we're not talking about government originated records we're talking about vulnerabilities that have been discovered should federal agencies be able to essentially classify that data should they be allowed for for commercial vendors right a Microsoft a Google you know whoever should they be allowed to classify the information because every one of us you know one way or the other is using that kind of software so there are vulnerabilities don't they have an obligation to let the vendors know immediately well if we're talking about uh you know commercial software that you know could uh cause problems for National Security or could be used you know by the US government for national security purposes they already have the invention secrecy act right so that they can and they sometimes have like decided that uh information or tools or methods or software that's been produced in the private sector in effect can be nationalized right so so that is something they they can do and they they have done it uh sometimes um so you know uh you know examples like the shadow Brokers though like to me it's another example of how it is that we've built such capacity in this country um you know that 800 billion dollar Pentagon and uh classified intelligence budget that has to be you know well over 50 billion dollars that uh you know we have incredible capacity now you know to use the latest methods of data science you know to do a Mischief they can can't spare a few million dollars perhaps a tiny sliver to do a little bit of research on how it is we can use tools like that to keep government accountable to the American people I mean to me it's just outrageous you know and and I tell the story in this book how it is uh at the end what I thought after we'd done some research we've shown proof of concept we had some prototypes you know I got a briefing at the intelligence Advanced research projects agency and they said even though the by the Obama administration had directed the Director of National Intelligence to have DARPA and I arpa work on developing technology for declassification I was told to my face by the senior official in iapa they had no interest they had no interest in developing this technology so so unfortunately like that's what we're talking about well and and I guess you know in the context of the the mission of these agencies and departments as they see them um keeping secrets is the name of the game because Secrets equals power right so if you've got the ability essentially to dominate the information narrative it gives you the ability to essentially you know control outcomes or at least have a lot of influence over the outcomes the other thing that has always annoyed me um and continues to annoy me on a daily basis is When government officials make the claim that they're taking actions in the name of National Security but they're doing everything they can not to violate people's rights I love this particular graphic um from uh from Matt's book this is an example of a highly redacted so-called National Security letter and for those who may not be familiar with it it is literally an administrative subpoena that FBI agents can use to go to your internet service provider for example and ask for just about every bloody thing that they have got on you and and now as Matt noted here when you impose a gag order like this on the recipient of these letters you're telling them in essence that they don't have any First Amendment rights and whether you're talking about an individual proprietor you're talking about a corporation you know let's say like Rackspace or you know um GoDaddy or whoever that's just to me it's just utterly nonsensical yeah yeah and what's funny about it if anything's funny about it is how you know they are swimming in data like one of the most interesting to me like the most revelatory things that came out of the Snowden leak was how the NSA was spending 50 million dollars a year on dealing with information overload so they have you know budgets of 50 million dollars of this one agency just to deal with the the overwhelming amount of data they've collected from you me and everyone else around the world and yet and still there is zero money to do anything you know to figure out how to eventually anyway you know allow at least some of this information to get to the American public and some folks might be you know kind of wondering you know what what does this look like in terms of these different classification levels this is another graphic from Matt's book that kind of gives you a sense of you know the relative proportion of things in terms of unclassified limited official use confidential and secret and you can see here that the vast majority of the information is in fact unclassified or it's at an extremely low level and I should note that limited official use for official use only administrative internal use only sensitive but unclassified controlled unclassified information these are dissemination restrictions so to speak they are not actual classifications but it's another way another very very angry way that these agencies and departments essentially try to withhold information that by all right should actually be out in the public domain can I ask the audience a pop quiz so I'm a professor I can't help myself so can anybody tell me when from looking at this graph it's a trick question when did we transition from you know the least accountable most secretive most unlawful perhaps you know until recently uh president that we've had in the 20th century when did we see the transition to the president who was famously transparent who gave an interview to Playboy magazine where he admitted to his lust you know for women who are not his wife uh president who famously campaigned on how he was going to be accountable to the American people and and be a president that would serve the ideal as a democracy because that was a better way can you tell yeah you can see there's a transition from Dixon you know to Ford to Carter you could see the dramatic change that made in the amount of Diplomat diplomacy diplomatic cables that were classified versus what was unclassified so this is an example like do what you like with the executive orders even with the best will in the world and Carter by the end of it he actually quite likes secrecy he even said we need to have a new like presidential level of secrecy some of his aides said we should call it Royal this is Jim harder even Jimmy Carter was seduced by the dark state so so this is like what we're up against like if you think the executive branch is going to reform itself this is what we're up against and this is another example essentially of what we're up against this also of course is from Matt's book and you know you reference uh Nixon's secretary Mary Rose uh Rosemary woods and the 18 and a half minutes of missing audio and all the rest of that but as you point out that was just literally like one incident in one particular day here you're looking at Kissinger State Department Records and what happened to them well you know I had this question from a historian uh she's working on a biography of Henry Kissinger and she said well off the Record like what do you think happened to them because it's really kind of interesting the only way you can produce a graph like this is if you take these millions of State Department cables in electronic Forum you know you look in the database to see which ones have you know message text you know deleted or message text unreadable and then you simply like count them right and you look at that relative to all the other you know cables produced at the time and what you see is like these really weird kind of spikes where there are particular periods where you know many many records have gone missing especially the secret ones interestingly like the ones that are classified we don't have any of the top secret cables in this you know release from the National Archives but of the ones that are secret and below it was five times more likely that secret records were going to go missing compared to the ones that were unclassified and it's strange right because you would think when they implemented this new system this was the first time to my knowledge the US government created an electronic record system to retain textual records it started in the state department they built it so they could stop leaks by the way it started in the Nixon years but when they implemented the system you would think they would have all the Kinks worked out by the you know three or four years in instead that's when you have these massive losses so I asked you know on the record obviously I told her that I asked the archivist who's the most knowledgeable about this whole system he's been or had been at the national archives for almost 50 years he was actually there in the 1970s he said we never gotten an answer from the state department nobody could explain how this happened so so the honest answer is like I don't know but I'd love for more people to look in on it and we do know that Henry Kissinger he famously said everything that's on paper will be used against me so he clearly had the motive we have a couple of other online questions here that I'd really like to work in while we still have the time how do other Democratic countries handle the declassification information are there lessons the U.S could learn I think Nate you've kind of spoken to some of that with respect to the UK system not sure that we have a lot of other examples from from countries other than the United States I would just say in general one lesson is that Freedom of Information laws should be disclosure statutes not withhold withholding statutes the more successful countries the laws that people use to request records essentially are used to show that it's um not normal for records to be secret and it's much easier to make them unsecret where the freedom information act over the years and bad court rulings and Etc has flipped that around and it's more easy for people to use that and use exemptions Pat talked about to withhold and that goes to another question that we had from David can you protest over redactive material the short answer is yes there is an administrative process within foia that you have to exhaust first but if you still get denied on that administrative appeal you can you know take it to the federal court but of course you have to have counsel you know that's willing to do that for you we're down to our last 10 minutes at this point I would really like to open it up for our audience here for anybody who might have questions we've got some microphones are going to be coming around here so if you bear with us for just a second you know one thing just while we're waiting um you know there's now more than 100 countries in the world that have something like the Freedom of Information Act the U.S wasn't the first was one of the first and in many ways you could say it kind of led the world you know and I think we're going to be the first country that's experienced the challenge of how do you deal you know with big data when much of it is is classified so the the struggles that we're seeing you know in the National Archives which has less funding than military bans by the way Pentagon spends more money on bands than this country spends on the National Archives to preserve our National Heritage but they are obviously struggling with this they're underfunded um and and it's it's really a chaotic situation it's only getting worse but unfortunately I think this is just the beginning I think many other countries in the world are going to be running up against the same kinds of challenges gentleman down here in front the jacket and the red bike if you could give us your name in any affiliation I'm a Peter Humphrey I'm an intelligence analyst and a former Diplomat I note that the oldest piece of classified information in our system is uh the formula for an invisible ink and it dates from about World War One my question is uh we shot down this uh Chinese spy balloon with the seven hundred thousand dollar stinger missile instead of a bow and arrow and all this gear comes crashing off the coast of the Carolinas and uh our government has yet to reveal a single one of the instruments on board that I wrote a note to the Washington Times saying hey why don't you guys look into this silence I wrote a note to The Washington Post saying hey why don't you guys look into this silence so I'm wondering uh what do we get by withholding from the American people uh the instruments on a Chinese balloon do we fear like maybe the Chinese might find out um and secondarily the love letters from Kim Jong-un to Trump oh why haven't those appeared in Washington Times or Washington Post can you shed light on those two horrific situations probably any any of us could I mean in my case I would say this is another example where it's not completely unreasonable I think what they wanted to do in some cases like I think they would rather have never disclosed the U.S that is that you know the Chinese was overflying U.S territory because they didn't want to reveal what our capabilities are I mean obviously like we could see it right but what more did we know about it in terms of like picking up on on you know electromagnetic uh signature and and other things that are kind of above my pay grade I so in situations like that I think sometimes they don't want to reveal like in this case what they were able to recover because you know if the Chinese don't know then then maybe it's better they don't right um so there are examples like that that I understand it may be that the an adversary in other cases might know something we don't want them to know that we know there are other cases of course where you know the American people knows or no I'm sorry it's just the opposite like our adversary is well know and it's really high time the American people under understands better and Nate has done some work like this revealing you know for example the age I'll let you tell the story Nate it's a good one actually it's a really important one in this context you want to talk to him about Abel Archer oh well I don't think we have two hours um to answer the second part of the question quickly the um Kim Jong-un letters are covered by the presidential record act which says that those cannot be released unless Trump did it on his own within five years after he leaves office so starting in a few months if he's not elected you could file a foia for them but that's a different law let's let's go to another question I can talk I can talk Evolution on the end here thank you though thank you hi my name is Todd Wiggins my website's called MeetMe DMV and so I can appreciate the subject matter and I wanted to apply it to area 51. do you talk about that about UFOs and the fact that this subject was brought up recently again and we still have no serious answer from NASA about what in fact does exist or we know I love UFOs can I take this one so you know it's true after five years you can request records from Presidential Library or what we now call whatever we call them right I mean now that they're not going to be any more presidential libraries but still when they're presidential records it takes five years before you can even ask for them I know somebody who is very diligent who waited for the moment you know when they could first you know request information I think it was from the Clinton years and in this case so they said that they found out even though they thought they'd press the button the moment it was possible they were already like number 52 in line and they were told the first 51 were all about UFOs so there's other s obviously like tremendous appetite you know in the public for more information what our government knows about them now I have my own Theory but it's not entirely theoretical there's a great computer scientist named Hannah Wallick she did a really interesting experiment she's at Microsoft research and what she did was use a technique called topic modeling where you can cluster records that have similar kinds of language she did that with all the records that have been released from presidential libraries from the 1970s and what she was able to do is I cluster the records are about UFOs the records are about nuclear weapons and like 50 other you know groups of records and then she calculated how long it on average it took before these records would be released so how many people here think that it was the nuclear records that were the most secret how many people here think it was the UFO records that were the most secret okay I'm sorry you're wrong actually it was only 14 years before the stuff about UFOs got released and it was 55 years before the stuff about nuclear weapons gets released the exception that proves the rule I had to insist on having that picture in here was an Air Force program to build flying saucers because they thought they would be stealthy and they would be excellent for reconnaissance and nuclear weapons delivery so that was the exception that proves the rule when the U.S Air Force built a flying saucer we're going to keep that secret for half a century and don't you think you know contrary to a lot of Hollywood film scripts if the Air Force had better evidence if they had better than the flying Tic Tacs that turns out they were only going 60 miles an hour if they had really good evidence that there was alien life forms that were threatening life on Earth why wouldn't they tell us like is it like they don't want to cause Panic they love causing panic I mean just think the bomber Gap the missile Gap the Iraqi wmds and any information at all doesn't even have to be true if it's going to make people think we have to throw more money at the Pentagon they're all over it so so that's my skepticism when it comes to UFOs but I'm ready if there's better evidence I'm the first one is going to want to read it I tend to think that if they're out there they take one look at what we're doing on this planet to each other and they think next let's let's get to the next let's get to the next galaxy or the next solar system that's that's my two cents on that one folks if we could put up the last graphic here that I've got in the package and we will get we will get to your question ma'am hang on one second thank you this side by side is my favorite uh out of the out of the whole book they're actually on two different pages but the one on the left essentially shows you the amount of time that it's taking and this is the foreign records of the United the Foreign Relations the United States collection we've gone for maybe you know just a few years in the very beginning of of the series all the way up to anywhere from 40 to 50 years you know to see anything uh essentially which is of course nuts and then the graph on the other side of course shows you know the number of documents so longer and longer and longer keeping them secret fewer and fewer and fewer actually popping out the gentlelady here had a question so if we could get the mic to her thank you I really appreciate um this lecture it's been really insightful I'm Sarah broncourse I'm a journalist living in DC right now but I'm from Amsterdam and I wrote my undergraduate thesis about the Espionage Act and whistleblowing and I'm just very curious on your take how should whistleblowers within these organizations navigate the balance between the public interest and also valuing the reasons why those documents were classified at all we were talking about Wikileaks and that it's quite a debatable subject but how should whistleblowers go about in navigating this landscape and respecting both sides of the coin now it's a great question I think I'm the only actual former government whistleblower on the panel so I'm happy to actually take that one the existing statutory structure that we have right now for for whistleblowers to try to protect them particularly in a national security context so somebody who works in the intelligence Community FBI Etc is really a a very bad joke um and I've written about this extensively until we get um a whistleblower protection statutory framework in place that allows someone in a federal agency or Department to at their discretion at their sole discretion without having to inform their employer to go to their member of Congress their Senator or a committee of jurisdiction without any kind of fear or the government accountability office that would be another place or the office of special counsel until we have a structure like that that's really Ironclad no whistleblower at the end of the day is going to be safe they're simply not going to be safe you know we saw some of this with respect in the Trump era where an individual came forward presented information to the intelligent house intelligence committee suggesting that Mr Trump had in fact engaged in the conduct that he was subsequently impeached for at least in the house but there are all kinds of other situations you know that have come up over the course of the last several decades in which whistleblowers have taken a look and decided that because the general protections are just not there it's better to Simply go to the press in order to inform the public the problem with that is if you signed a secrecy agreement that opens you up to prosecution and that's why I generally if you're if you're out there if you're watching this uh this particular program you're in the federal government and you're thinking about blowing the whistle um my advice to you is to go to the project on government oversight or the government accountability project reach out to them using secure Communications um and and get yourself a lawyer before you do anything because they will absolutely come after you even if your disclosure as in the case of Edward Snowden with respect to domestic surveillance targeting each and every one of us even if your disclosure is clearly in the public interest there is no so-called public interest defense so that's one of the great gaps that we have great question thank you very much I think we're going to have to leave it there we're already a little bit over time my thanks to Matt Connolly to Nate Jones to all of you here in the auditorium and all those of you who've been kind enough and patient enough to watch thanks so much for joining us for the Cato Institute I'm Patrick Eddington [Music]

Channel: The Cato Institute

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Length: 64min 49sec (3889 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023