On Jan. 9, the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB) released a report, Improving Declassification: A Report to the President from the Public Interest Declassification Board, outlining a series of recommendations to improve the declassification of government information.

The report primarily addresses the challenges posed by Executive Order 12958's requirement to automatically disclose classified information 25 years or older. The report recommends improving the efficiency of the system and respecting the historical importance of documents. Moreover, the PIDB report discusses the need to prepare for future challenges — in particular, the need to archive and review electronic records.

The PIDB was formed in 2000 to create more transparency and greater access to declassified documents, but it was not operational until 2006 because Congress provided no funding for the board until then. For the past two years, the board reviewed the current status of declassification procedures and heard testimony from a number of government agencies and private and public sector experts.

Efficiency

The government's efficiency in releasing documents is severely hampered by the magnitude of requests and documents agencies must process. Executive Order 12958, issued by President Bill Clinton in 1995, requires the release of all classified documents 25 years or older unless a department or agency exempts them from disclosure. The executive order, Freedom of Information Act requests, and Mandatory Declassification Review requests have overwhelmed the limited resources that agencies have committed to preview information for possible disclosure and have created enormous backlogs. Moreover, the National Archives is experiencing difficulty keeping up with the large amount of information that agencies are successfully declassifying.

According to the PIDB report, there were 36.4 million pages declassified over the five-year period from Fiscal Year 2002-2006, as compared to 139.8 million pages in the previous five-year period (Fiscal Year 1997-2001).

To remedy the situation, PIDB recommends:

• Establishing a National Declassification Program under the Archivist of the United States, a Deputy Archivist for Declassification Policy and Programs, and a National Declassification Center (NDC)
• Requiring the NDC to issue guidelines to govern declassification at all agencies
• Consolidation of control for all declassification activities within agencies into one office
• Recording every declassification decision on a centralized computer system and making the database public within five years

Historical Importance

In the report, PIDB notes that government is missing a notion of the public interest in classified documents and that there is "no common understanding among agencies of what 'historically important' information is, nor any common understanding of how such information can be treated once identified as such." Information that has historical importance is essentially lost in the declassification process and not prioritized, despite the importance of its disclosure.

PIDB recommends:

• Establishing a system for identifying historically important information and giving such documents a higher priority in their release and disclosure
• Creating a board of historians to identify records of likely historical importance
• Requiring all agencies with significant classification activity to create historical advisory boards

The PIDB also makes several recommendations related to modern challenges of information management that government agencies face. For instance, the report recommends improvements on handling electronic records, increasing the resources devoted to declassification, and improving problems related to re-review. Similar to points made for historically important documents, the PIDB report also recommends prioritizing and streamlining the review and disclosure of presidential records.

Declassification, the report notes, is a fundamental aspect of a well-informed citizenry and active democracy. "Without historic understanding, the mistakes of the past are destined to be repeated; the triumphs, unappreciated." The PIDB sent the report and recommendations to President Bush on Jan. 3.