Between 1994 and 1997, I had the honor of presiding as the Chairman of the bipartisan Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy. The Commission s investigation was the first authorized by statute to examine government secrecy in 40 years, and only the second ever. Among its key findings were that secrecy is a form of government regulation, and that excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when policy makers are not fully informed, the government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage fully in informed debate. On the other hand, this remains a dangerous world.
Some secrecy is vital to save lives, protect national security, and engage in effective diplomacy.
Yet, as Justice Potter Stewart noted in his opinion in the Pentagon Papers case, when everything is secret, nothing is secret. When the Secrecy Commission began its work in 1994, it estimated that the United States government had over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that was 25 years old and older. Today, we still have enough classified material to stack up as high as 441 Washington Monuments. Approximately 18 million of the most sensitive and interesting of these are found in our 11 Presidential libraries. The cost of protecting this historically valuable information is enormous.