27 July 2000

Date: Thu, 27 Jul 2000 15:00:30 -0400
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Steven Aftergood <saftergood@igc.org>
Subject: "The Public Interest Declassification Act"

The only remnant of the ambitious secrecy reform program initiated by Senator Daniel P. Moynihan in the mid-1990s is a bill pending in Congress called the "Public Interest Declassification Act (S. 1801)."  It would do no more than establish an "advisory board" to "advise" on classification and declassification policy.

The bill was the subject of a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, chaired by Sen. Fred Thompson.  Most of the witnesses, including Senator Moynihan, Rep. Porter Goss, historian Warren Kimball, and former DCI James Woolsey, argued that the proposed board would help to prioritize and limit competing declassification initiatives ("special searches").  Steven Garfinkel of the Information Security Oversight Office astutely noted that next year "the new President will very quickly receive conflicting advice about what should be done" with respect to declassification, and suggested that the proposed Board could provide reasoned judgment on this topic.  FAS testified that the Board could usefully serve as an advocate for declassification within the executive branch and a monitor of secrecy-related legislation in Congress.

Prepared testimony from the July 26 hearing on the Public Interest Declassification Act is posted here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2000/index.html#declass

At the hearing, Senator Moynihan released a CIA report to Congress (declassified last Friday) that describes and tabulates special declassification reviews conducted by the CIA from 1993-1999.  Among the dozens of reviews, CIA indicates that "more than 1,000 hours" have been spent responding to congressional requests and "demands" for satellite imagery of Mt. Ararat in Turkey and assessment of the "presence of Noah's Ark" at that location.  Despite the level of effort, "no definitive information [has been] identified."  The status of the review was "ongoing" as of last year.

Thirty-three such searches were conducted in 1998-99.  "Special searches are a growth industry," warned CIA Director of Congressional Affairs John H. Moseman in his cover letter.

But the CIA report did not address CIA's criteria for declassification, which are widely considered to be obsolete and self-serving.  The report is posted here:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/cia_search.html

___________________

Steven Aftergood
Project on Government Secrecy
Federation of American Scientists
http://www.fas.org/sgp/index.html