(Via Charging Rino) A couple of months ago, I passed along the report that declassified information was being reclassified and removed from the National Archives. NARA conducted an audit, and released its findings in the past few days:
The audit found a total of ten unrelated efforts to identify such records, which resulted in the withdrawal of at least 25,315 publicly available records; approximately 40 percent were withdrawn because the reviewing agency purported that its classified information had been designated unclassified without its permission and about 60 percent were identified by the reviewing agency for referral to another agency for declassification or other public disclosure review.
In reviewing a sample consisting of 1,353 of the withdrawn records, we concluded that 64 percent of the sampled records did, in fact, contain information that clearly met the standards for continued classification.
The audit also found that in attempting to recover records that still contained classified information, there were a significant number of instances when records that were clearly inappropriate for continued classification were withdrawn from public access. We concluded that 24 percent of the sampled records fell into this category, and an additional 12 percent were questionable.
The release goes on to mention that many of the properly-reclassified items had been declassified because they belonged to Department [A], but the classification of information in the item actually belonged to Department [B]. Until recently, the declassification project apparently hadn’t provided a mechanism to obtain a blessing from Department [B]. Now that that’s happened, the rate of erroneously declassifying classified information should decrease significantly.
