Report of the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy (1997) (also referred to as The Moynihan Commission Report) (full-text).
Overview[]
This report, by the Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, was intended as a reexamination the long-standing tension between government secrecy and openness. It sought to develop a new way of thinking about government secrecy as the United States move into the next century. The report contained a series of recommendations for legislation:
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We therefore propose the following as the framework for a statute that establishes the principles on which classification and declassification should be based:
Sec. 1. Information shall be classified only if there is a demonstrable need to protect the information in the interests of national security, with the goal of ensuring that classification is kept to an absolute minimum consistent with these interests.
Sec. 2. The President shall, as needed, establish procedures and structures for classification of information. Procedures and structures shall be established and resources allocated for declassification as a parallel program to classification. Details of these programs and any revisions to them shall be published in the Federal Register and subject to notice and comment procedures.
Sec. 3. In establishing the standards and categories to apply in determining whether information should be or remain classified, such standards and categories shall include consideration of the benefit from public disclosure of the information and weigh it against the need for initial or continued protection under the classification system. If there is significant doubt whether information requires protection, it shall not be classified.
Sec. 4. Information shall remain classified for no longer than ten years, unless the agency specifically recertifies that the particular information requires continued protection based on current risk assessments. All information shall be declassified after 30 years, unless it is shown that demonstrable harm to an individual or to ongoing government activities will result from release. Systematic declassification schedules shall be established. Agencies shall submit annual reports on their classification and declassification programs to the Congress.
Sec. 6. There shall be established a National Declassification Center to coordinate, implement, and oversee the declassification policies and practices of the Federal Government. The Center shall report annually to the Congress and the President on its activities and on the status of declassification practices by all Federal agencies that use, hold, or create classified information.