It turns out that the slippery slope was merely a polemical device intended to discourage any disclosure at all. There is no independent review of CIA classification decisions. To a large extent, the current Congress has abdicated its role in this debate, or rather it has tended to reinforce CIA's indiscriminate secrecy policies. It may be no coincidence that the leadership and staffs of the CIA and the Congressional intelligence committees have become interpenetrated to an extraordinary degree. To begin with, Tenet is a former committee staff director, and House Intelligence Committee chairman Porter Goss is a former CIA officer.
Judicial review is likewise hopeless under current circumstances.
At oral arguments in federal court on November 1, Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies presented the case in favor of budget disclosure with superb clarity and precision. Judge Hogan appeared to grasp the essence of the issue, and to see that CIA was overreaching. In a badly written and weakly argued decision , he did just that. In fact, no federal judge has ever compelled the CIA to release information it wished to withhold. Which is to say, CIA's classification authority is effectively unchecked.