[net-gold] Secrecy News -- 09/07/10

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Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 11:26:20 -0400 (EDT)

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Date: Tue, 7 Sep 2010 10:41:42 -0400
From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood@xxxxxxx>
To: saftergood@xxxxxxx
Subject: Secrecy News -- 09/07/10 (alt list)

SECRECY NEWS

from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2010, Issue No. 71
September 7, 2010

Secrecy News Blog:

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

**      PENTAGON SEEKS "COORDINATION" OF MEDIA ACTIVITIES

**      A REPORT CARD ON SECRECY

PENTAGON SEEKS "COORDINATION" OF MEDIA ACTIVITIES

The Department of Defense last week increased its efforts to require that
Department contacts with the media be monitored and approved by DoD public
affairs officials.

"I am asking the heads of the Military Services, the Joint Staff and the
Combatant Commands to reinforce to all of their employees to work closely
and effectively with their public affairs offices to ensure full situational
awareness," wrote Douglas B. Wilson, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Public Affairs in a September 2 memorandum.

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/media2.pdf

The latest Pentagon move follows up on a July 2 memo from Secretary of
Defense Robert M. Gates, who stated that the DoD Office of Public Affairs
"is the sole release authority for official DoD information to news media in
Washington, and ... all media activities must be coordinated through
appropriate public affairs channels.  This policy is all too often ignored,"
he complained.

"We have far too many people talking to the media outside of channels,
sometimes providing information which is simply incorrect, out of proper
context, unauthorized, or uninformed...," Secretary Gates wrote.

     http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/media.pdf

Both memoranda assert prohibitions on unauthorized disclosures of classified
information as well as on unclassified but sensitive or predecisional
information.

As a practical matter, the degree of control over DoD contacts with the
media sought by the Pentagon may be impossible to achieve.  The Department
is too large (with millions of employees), too decentralized (with thousands
of locations) and, perhaps, too open (with hundreds of reporters holding
building permits at the Pentagon alone) to allow rigorous monitoring or
"coordination" of more than a fraction of all external contacts and
communications.

And though it may not be convenient for Pentagon officials to say so, almost
everyone understands that freedom of the press means something more, and
something different, than reproducing authorized government releases.
Unauthorized disclosures -- even incomplete or partially inaccurate ones --
often serve a valuable public policy function, at least when they do not
trespass on legitimate secrets, because they enable reporters and others to
develop an independent account of events and to generate a more complete
public record.  When the short-term institutional interests of the Pentagon
or other U.S. government agencies lead them to overclassify or otherwise
impede public access to information, unauthorized and "uncoordinated"
disclosures help to fill the void.

A REPORT CARD ON SECRECY

Last year, the number of "original classification decisions" -- or new
national security secrets -- actually declined by almost ten percent from
the year before.

This and other empirical measures of government secrecy were compiled in a
new Secrecy Report Card that was issued today by Openthegovernment.org, a
coalition of public interest advocacy organizations.  The Report Card
presented data on classification and declassification activity,
classification costs, Freedom of Information Act requests, Presidential
signing statements, assertions of the state secrets privilege, and other
aspects of official secrecy.

     http://www.openthegovernment.org/otg/SecrecyRC_2010.pdf

While new classification activity slowed last year, the Report Card noted,
so too did declassification, with 8% fewer pages declassified in 2009 than
in 2008.  A National Declassification Center that was established in
December 2009 is supposed to sharply increase the number of pages
declassified in the coming months and years.

_______________________________________________

Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation
of American Scientists.

The Secrecy News Blog is at:
     http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/

To SUBSCRIBE to Secrecy News, go to:
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OR email your request to saftergood@xxxxxxx

Secrecy News is archived at:
     http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/secrecy/index.html

Support the FAS Project on Government Secrecy with a donation:
     http://www.fas.org/member/donate_today.html

_______________________

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
web:    www.fas.org/sgp/index.html
email:  saftergood@xxxxxxx
voice:  (202) 454-4691

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[net-gold] Secrecy News -- 09/07/10

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