GAO Finds Pentagon Erratic In Wielding Secrecy Stamp
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 14, 2006; Page A19
The Government Accountability Office has criticized the Defense Department for sloppy management of its security classification system, including the marking as "Confidential or Secret" material that Pentagon officials acknowledged was unclassified information.
The GAO said in a report June 30 that one of the major questions raised by its study was "whether all of the information marked as classified met established criteria for classification." The GAO also found "inconsistent treatment of similar information within the same document."
The GAO reviewed only a "nonprobability sample" of 111 classified Defense Department documents from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To understand how minute the sample is, the GAO reported that in the five fiscal years between 2000 and 2004, the Pentagon was responsible for 66.8 million new classified records. That is about 13.4 million a year.
The GAO report, which was sent to Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the subcommittee on national security of the Government Reform Committee, and disclosed on the Secrecy News Web site of Steven Aftergood, concluded that "a lack of oversight and inconsistent implementation of DOD's information security program are increasing the risk of misclassification."
The report was issued at a time when the Bush administration is criticizing newspapers for publishing classified information, and when two nongovernment civilians, who were lobbyists for a pro-Israeli organization, are being prosecuted under the 85-year-old Espionage Act for receiving and retransmitting material they got from a Pentagon official involving national defense secrets....
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/13/AR2006071301518.html