Critics of the executive
branch’s information control practices tend to focus on the here and now. They argue that
overclassification of national security–related documents undermines democratic
self-rule. They inveigh against delays and
denials in the implementation of the Freedom of Information Act. They condemn regulations that “incorporate
by reference” materials developed by industry groups. They worry about the
growing use of black box algorithms, criminal
leak investigations, and secret waivers for former lobbyists
turned political appointees. All of these critiques raise important issues,
even if they sometimes understate the transparency that exists—U.S. administrative
agencies “are some of the most extensively
monitored
government actors in the world”—or overstate the benefits of sunlight.
One of the
executive’s most worrisome information control practices has received relatively
little attention, perhaps because it requires taking a longer view. Over the last
several decades, as Matthew Connelly explains in a new essay on “State Secrecy,
Archival Negligence, and the End of History as We Know It,”[*]
our national archives have been quietly falling apart. FOIA backlogs look like
a Starbucks queue compared to the 700,000 cubic feet of records at the National
Archives and Records Administration’s research facility in Maryland that were
unprocessed as of 2013. The Public Interest Declassification Board recently
estimated that it would take a year’s work by two million declassifiers to
review the amount of data that a single intelligence agency now produces in
eighteen months.
The U.S.
government’s entire system for organizing, conserving, and revealing the record
of its activities, Connelly maintains, is on the verge of collapse; a “digital
dark age” awaits us on the other side. His is less a story about excessive
information control than a story about the absence
of information control. Archivists simply have not been able to cope with the flood
they face. The negative consequences extend far beyond the professional study
of history, as Democrats learned last month when NARA announced that it was
incapable of reviewing and releasing all of Brett Kavanaugh’s papers before the
Senate votes on his nomination to the Supreme Court.
How did this
crisis in the archives develop, and what might be done to mitigate it? Woefully
inadequate appropriations and “dubious management decisions” bear some of the
blame, according to Connelly. When the ratio of spending on the classification
and protection of national security secrets to spending on their declassification
exceeds 99 to 1, the historical record is bound to suffer. But the deeper cause
of the crisis, Connelly suggests, lies in the exponential growth of government
records, particularly electronic records. In a world where the State Department
generates two billion emails each year—all of which need to be screened for
sensitive personal and policy details prior to disclosure through any official
process—the traditional tools of archiving cannot possibly keep up.
Maybe the tools
ought to be updated for the age of “big data,” then. Connelly has collaborated extensively with data
scientists on the problems he highlights, and he argues that sophisticated use
of computational methods, from topic modeling to traffic analysis to predictive
coding, could go a long way toward rationalizing records management and accelerating
declassification. If these techniques were to be combined with bigger budgets for
archivists and greater will to curb classification, NARA might one day make
good on its aspiration to ensure
“continuing access to the essential documentation of the rights of American
citizens and the actions of their Government.” There is something intuitively
appealing about this vision: Digital technologies got us into this mess, and
now they ought to help get us out of it. Connelly’s diagnosis of information
overload and political neglect is so stark, however, that one wonders whether
any such reforms will prove adequate to the challenge.
Three response
pieces recast this challenge in a somewhat different light. The Archivist of
the United States, David Ferriero, emphasizes steps NARA is
taking to digitize its holdings, enhance public access to them, and enforce
government recordkeeping requirements. Ferriero does not dispute that “the
country would be well served” by greater funding for the agency he leads, but he
suggests that progress is being made even within severe budgetary constraints.
Elizabeth Goitein
largely endorses Connelly’s reform proposals but urges that they be
pushed further in the area of national security information. Drawing on extensive
research and advocacy she has done as co-director of the Brennan Center for
Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program, Goitein offers a suite of
specific recommendations, from tightening the substantive criteria for
classification to requiring federal agencies to spend certain amounts on
declassification to subjecting officials who engage in serious
overclassification to mandatory penalties.
Finally, Kirsten
Weld raises critical
questions about Connelly’s characterization of the problem and urges that his
reform proposals be pushed much further.
Weld points out that the records maintained by NARA represent just a “slice” of
U.S. history, albeit an important one, and that the government’s management of
that slice has always been bound up with larger political struggles. The true
source of the crisis at NARA, Weld submits, is not the rise of electronic
records or the politicization of transparency but “the dismantling of the
postwar welfare state and the concomitant ascendance of neoliberal governance.”
To address the crisis, accordingly, technical fixes are bound to be
insufficient. Nothing short of “a sea change in the federal government’s
priorities” and “a massive reinvestment in the public sphere” will do.
A crisis in the
national archives, all of the authors agree, is a crisis in American democracy.
It is certainly not the only one we face, and it may not be the most acute, but
preserving a record of our collective history arguably has a kind of epistemic
priority. As we fight for our democratic future, these essays remind us to
fight for the institutions that help us understand how we arrived at the
perilous present.