We Have Clearance, Clarence!

Classification and the National Security State

Oh my, oh my. A former and current President are both in hot water for taking classified information out of the office and holding it un-secured places. Nothing new here for senior officials. Just cite a few in the administration I served.

-       John Deutch, former CIA director, lost his CIA clearance because he assumed the right to take classified information home and work on it on an unprotected computer. 

-       Sandy Berger, former National Security Advisor, was fined and lost his clearance for taking classified documents from the National Archives, reportedly by tucking them into his socks on the way out.

-       I remember walking down the hall of the Old Executive Office Building at 17th and Pennsylvania Ave.in 1995 into the high-ceilinged office of a senior official of the National Security Council Staff.  They were sitting with their feet up on the desk, talking on the phone. In their lap was a document with a red-framed cover marked “Secret.” They were telling a reporter about White House views on a foreign policy debate then underway, using guidance and information from that “Secret” memorandum.

I wasn’t shocked then, nor am I now by the latest revelations. I knew full well that many staffers, especially senior ones at the NSS, were explicitly tasked to leak classified information to the press to advance administration views or respond to criticisms. Classification was being treated “lightly.”

So the current fracas reeks of a certain amount of hypocrisy and political score-keeping. And the press eats it up in an era when any scrap of ammunition found on the floor is fired at the other side to even the score. Clicks trump analysis in the press every time.

None of this mud fight gets to the core problems with classified materials: the government classifies too much and then turns around and hands out clearances through a chaotic process to too many people, many of whom are held up for months or years.

Let’s face it. We have a huge, way too huge, national security sector - public and private. We have made it worse since 2001, expanding both agencies and private contractors who make a living in this sector, a conclusion drawn by the Washington Post more than 20 years ago. To serve this ever-expanding tarantula, the institutions award more and more clearances. 

And the institutions classify more and more documents. Because information is power. More secrets and more bearers of secrets.  Having information becomes a talisman of “insidership.” Officials keep the information from each other or share it selectively. They leak it systematically when it is to their advantage. Access to and utility of that information are corrupting. They lead to the assumption that the higher in the national security complex you are, the less the rules apply to you.

And too many people have access to the growing number of secrets. One estimate (2015 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) of the number of people with security clearances, public and private sector, is 4.3 million, or 1.3% of the American population. Quite a complex; and quite a risk of leakage, too. Including a cumbersome process for providing clearances, where each agency – State, DoD, CIA, NSA, Energy, DHS, and the rest – assume their approval process is the only one they trust, which slows down the whole process.

Nobody really likes the system, except it conveys power and insider status.  Senior officials treat classified materials with incredible lightness, as a recommendation. Junior officials, as I was, have briefings that drill in all the security arrangements from a viewpoint of intense paranoia. With GSA support, I kept a safe in my house to hold any classified material I might need to work on overnight; presumably my 4 and 5-year-old children constituted a security risk.

Yes, the former President has been contemptuous of the system and the rules. The current one seems to have been simply a bit lax. But the complex is too large; there are too many materials flying around with a classification stamp; and the process of deciding who gets access to them is excessive and still pretty broken.

It is time to step back and ask if the whole complex of the national security state is out of control. I am not holding out a lot of hope. The Congress is in the process of handing the complex nearly $850 billion dollars for this year, well above any peacetime and almost all wartime spending since World War II.

There will be no incentive to streamline anything, including the classification and security clearance process. And it is likely to continue to be abused or treated lightly by national security officials.