NARA declassification progresses.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In response to complaints that, since 1999, government agencies had removed more than 55,000 declassified documents from the National Archives' public shelves, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) imposed a moratorium, called for an audit, and launched several initiatives to stop the practice, including the National Declassification Initiative (NDI).

This program was also a response to the April 2006 audit report by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), "Withdrawal of Records from Public Access at the National Archives and Records Administration for Classification Purposes," which found that the classification system needed overhauling. According to a NARA press release, the NDI will reduce redundancies in declassification review, promote accurate and consistent declassification decisions, develop centralized priorities and management controls around the priorities, and make the declassification process more transparent to the public.

"The NDI will address the policies, procedures, structure, and resources needed to create a more reliable executive branch-wide declassification program for federal records," said Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein in a NARA press release. "Specifically, the program will establish a better means for managing referrals of classified equities between executive branch agencies. In addition to the NDI, the National Archives has an established program for handling the systematic declassification of Presidential records called the "Remote Archives Capture Project."

Weinstein has encouraged all federal agencies to participate in and support these initiatives.

In addition, NARA said in a press release that it has established an interagency executive steering group "to develop and implement detailed work plans designed to ensure that agency equities are referred and resolved to allow the maximum feasible declassification" The group also will work to develop common referral standards, reduce redundancies, and ensure that records are accurately reviewed for declassification so that only information critical to national security is withheld.

In the release, Weinstein stated that the practice of withdrawing documents from the open shelves has stopped and, today, agencies must demonstrate a compelling case to withdraw documents. NARA reported that only seven new documents have been withdrawn since April 26, 2006. All of those withdrawals have been carefully noted in the opened files so that their removal is transparent to researchers, and all have been handled in accordance with the audit protocol, according to NARA.

As a result of the findings of the ISOO audit, Weinstein requested that agencies do another re-review of the documents withdrawn during the first re-review. NARA says this effort is ongoing and it expects the vast majority of records that were withdrawn to be restored to public access over the next several months. For example, according to NARA's press release, the Air Force expects that 95 percent of its records under re-review be released in full or redacted. The CIA is re-reviewing 55 boxes of State Department records and expects to release in full 85 percent of its records. Additional collections will likewise be reviewed for return to the open shelves.