Official Secrets Law

At the close of its session, Congress considered two bills addressing classified information. One had been pending for more than a year, had more than a hundred co-sponsors, was the subject of two lengthy hearings and received virtually unanimous approval in amended form from the House Judiciary Committee. The other was quietly attached to an intelligence authorization bill and was never the subject of public hearings. But secrecy has a way of trumping democracy, and the latter, which one member of Congress accurately termed an "official secrets act," passed, while the former, which would have restricted government reliance on classified evidence in immigration proceedings, died on the floor. At press time it was unclear whether Clinton would sign or veto the secrecy bill.

The Intelligence Authorization Act would make it a felony for government officials to disclose any "properly classified" information. That is eminently reasonable. By law, information may be classified only if its release would threaten national security, and officials with security clearances should not be allowed to abuse that authority by releasing information that imperils the nation.

But in practice, information is often classified that has no real potential for undermining national security, as is routinely demonstrated when leaks are made public without the sky falling. Because the entire process is secret, there is no effective check on classification decisions. The Clinton Administration--which has actually been more sensitive to the problem of overclassification than many of its predecessors--created more than 8 million new secrets in 1999 alone. And once a secret is classified, it is often decades before it is declassified, if ever.

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