Consolidating classified presidential records in DC raises concerns

In Secrecy News, 5 Mar 2018, Steven Aftergood reported on a letter sent out by William J. (Jay) Bosanko, NARA’s COO, announcing NARA’s “intent to consolidate all of the classified records in the Presidential Library system in the Washington, DC area. This follows our previous consolidations of all other classified records that were previously maintained in the field.” Steve asks in the blog—and in a question he put to Mr. Bosanko—whether it really is necessary to physically move the records to DC in order to declassify them? In his email reply, Bosanko noted that the question
“comes back to age-old issues around declassification authority and third-agency referrals.  … And, bringing them here makes it much easier to address long-standing challenges such as certain topics that cut across more than one Administration.”
Given the resistance of the intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA, in letting “their” records be declassified. and a specific history of removing records from NARA—

Washington, D.C., February 21, 2006The CIA and other federal agencies have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), according to a report published today on the World Wide Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Matthew Aid, author of the report and a visiting fellow at the Archive, discovered this secret program through his wide-ranging research in intelligence, military, and diplomatic records at NARA and found that the CIA and military agencies have reviewed millions of pages at an unknown cost to taxpayers in order to sequester documents from collections that had been open for years.

At issue then, and a possibility now, is that the IC agencies assert ‘equities’ in records not created by them.

An “equity” is information that was originated, classified by, or concerns the activities of another government agency or organization and only they can declassify it. Records that contain other agency “equities” must be referred to those agencies for declassification review.

A referred record becomes declassified upon final declassification action by the referring agency based upon the results of the other agency reviews, or automatically without benefit of additional review if not acted upon by those agencies within a specific time frame and after appropriate referral notification.

President Obama’s 2009 Executive Order 13526 created a National Declassification Center (NDC) at NARA and specifies that ‘If an agency fails to provide a final determination on a referral made by the Center within 1 year of referral, or by the centralized facilities referred to in section 3.7(e) of this order within 3 years of referral, its equities in the referred records shall be automatically declassified.”

It is potentially worrisome that the letter from Mr. Bosanko does not directly address the role to be played by the NDC and its responsibility for reigning in the endless foot-dragging on referrals undertaken by IC agencies.

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