[Senate Hearing 118-57]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]


                                                         S. Hrg. 118-57

           MODERNIZING THE GOVERNMENT'S CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

=======================================================================

                                HEARING

                               BEFORE THE

                              COMMITTEE ON
               HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
                          UNITED STATES SENATE

                    ONE HUNDRED EIGHTEENTH CONGRESS


                             FIRST SESSION
                               __________

                             MARCH 23, 2023
                               __________

        Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.govinfo.gov

                       Printed for the use of the
        Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs
        
        
                  [GRAPHIC NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]
                  
                  
                    U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLISHING OFFICE
                    
52-497 PDF                 WASHINGTON : 2023           



        COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

                   GARY C. PETERS, Michigan, Chairman
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware           RAND PAUL, Kentucky
MAGGIE HASSAN, New Hampshire         RON JOHNSON, Wisconsin
KYRSTEN SINEMA, Arizona              JAMES LANKFORD, Oklahoma
JACKY ROSEN, Nevada                  MITT ROMNEY, Utah
ALEX PADILLA, California             RICK SCOTT, Florida
JON OSSOFF, Georgia                  JOSH HAWLEY, Missouri
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL, Connecticut      ROGER MARSHALL, Kansas

                   David M. Weinberg, Staff Director
                    Zachary I. Schram, Chief Counsel
            Lena C. Chang, Director of Governmental Affairs
               Emily I. Manna, Professional Staff Member
                Carter A. Hirschhorn, Research Assistant
           William E. Henderson III, Minority Staff Director
              Christina N. Salazar, Minority Chief Counsel
                  Andrew J. Hopkins, Minority Counsel
                     Laura W. Kilbride, Chief Clerk
                   Ashley A. Gonzalez, Hearing Clerk

                            C O N T E N T S

                                 ------                                
Opening statements:
                                                                   Page
    Senator Peters...............................................     1
    Senator Paul.................................................     2
    Senator Blumenthal...........................................    16
    Senator Marshall.............................................    18
    Senator Hassan...............................................    21
    Senator Lankford.............................................    23
    Senator Johnson..............................................    26
Prepared statements:
    Senator Peters...............................................    31
    Senator Paul.................................................    32

                               WITNESSES
                        Thursday, March 23, 2023

Elizabeth Goitein, Senior Director, Liberty and National Security 
  Program, Brennan Center for Justice............................     4
Thomas Blanton, Director, National Security Archive, The George 
  Washington University..........................................     6
John Fitzpatrick, Former Director, Information Security Oversight     8
Patrick G. Eddington, Senior Fellow, Cato Institute..............    10

                     Alphabetical List of Witnesses

Blanton, Thomas:
    Testimony....................................................     6
    Prepared statement...........................................    70
Eddington, Patrick G.:
    Testimony....................................................    10
    Prepared statement...........................................    89
Fitzpatrick, John:
    Testimony....................................................     8
    Prepared statement...........................................    85
Goitein, Elizabeth:
    Testimony....................................................     4
    Prepared statement...........................................    35

                                APPENDIX

National Coalition for History Statement for the Record..........   101

 
           MODERNIZING THE GOVERNMENT'S CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM

                              ----------                              


                        Thursday, March 23, 2023

                                     U.S. Senate,  
                           Committee on Homeland Security  
                                  and Governmental Affairs,
                                                    Washington, DC.
    The Committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in room 
SD-562, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Gary Peters, 
Chairman of the Committee, presiding.
    Present: Senators Peters [presiding], Hassan, Sinema, 
Rosen, Ossoff, Blumenthal, Paul, Johnson, Lankford, Romney, 
Scott, Hawley, and Marshall.

             OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PETERS\1\

    Chairman Peters. Good morning. The Committee will come to 
order.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Peters appears in the 
Appendix on page 31.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Every year, a whopping 50 million new classified documents 
are created. Classified materials typically fall into one of 
three categories: confidential, secret, or top secret, based on 
their perceived sensitivity.
    Although there are existing requirements to automatically 
declassify documents after 25 years, in practice that process 
is ineffective, and there is currently a backlog of hundreds of 
millions of pages that are awaiting declassification.
    Along with outdated technology, the result is an 
overburdened classification system that costs taxpayers more 
than $18 billion a year to maintain.
    Experts, both within and outside of the Federal Government, 
estimate that between 50 and 90 percent of all classified 
materials could be made public without compromising national 
security, and that the overclassification of documents reduces 
transparency and erodes public confidence in the Federal 
Government.
    Today's hearing is an opportunity for the Committee to hear 
from experts on how Congress can modernize the classification 
system to improve efficiency and promote better transparency 
for the American people.
    We will be discussing proposed reforms, including several 
recommendations from the National Archives' Public Interest 
Declassification Board (PIDB), to help streamline our nation's 
classification and declassification processes. For example, 
investing in advanced technology, such as artificial 
intelligence (AI) and machine learning, could help agencies 
better manage classified information, better serve the public, 
and meet the needs of the future.
    Other proposed reforms could help reduce the number of 
classified materials and levels of classification, establish 
automated declassification tools, and provide an expedited 
declassification request process for lawmakers, all of which 
would improve transparency and ensure Congress and the public 
can help hold Federal agencies more accountable.
    I am interested in pursuing bipartisan legislation to help 
tackle some of these concerns, and I hope my colleagues will 
join me in those efforts. I certainly fully appreciate the 
engagement of Ranking Member Paul and his staff, and believe we 
can find a bipartisan path forward on these important issues.
    I look forward to having a productive discussion with all 
of you here today so we can begin this process of reform, and I 
look forward to the answers to our questions.
    With that I would like to turn things over to Ranking 
Member Paul for his opening remarks.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR PAUL\1\

    Senator Paul. Twenty-six years ago, a bipartisan Senate 
Commission chaired by the late Senator Moynihan warned that 
excessive government secrecy and overclassification have 
significant consequences for the national interest. The 
Commission found that ``secrecy is the ultimate mode of 
regulation . . . for the citizen does not even know that he or 
she is being regulated.''
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Senator Paul appears in the Appendix 
on page 32.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    What happened in the decades since the Commission 
recommended Congress reassert its authority and reform the 
Executive Branch classification system? The problem got even 
worse.
    Executive Branch officials from both political parties 
continue to arbitrarily overclassify government information to 
prevent oversight and withhold information from the public. 
Both parties are guilty of this.
    According to the National Archives and Records 
Administration (NARA), in 2017, over four million Americans 
with security clearances classified nearly 50 million 
documents, a system that cost American taxpayers over $18 
billion. President Biden's own Director of National 
Intelligence (DNI), Avril Haines, acknowledged the 
overclassification problem on numerous occasions. As Director 
Haines said in January of this year, ``overclassification 
undermines the basic trust that public has in its government.''
    There is no better example of the undermining of public 
trust than the Federal Government's continued refusal to share 
with the American people information about the origins of the 
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.
    The Department of Energy (DOE) recently shifted its 
position on COVID-19's origins, and joined the Federal Bureau 
of Investigation (FBI) in concluding that the pandemic was most 
likely the result of a lab leak. The FBI Director later 
publicly confirmed the FBI's position that the pandemic most 
likely originated in a lab.
    If not for transparency, if not for whistleblowing, if not 
for the media getting ahold of this information, it would still 
be classified. Do you realize how crazy it is that they have a 
classified a conclusion, not the source, not even the data. 
They have classified the conclusion. They were not even telling 
us that the FBI and the DOE had come to this conclusion.
    Recently, Congress showed strong, bipartisan support for 
the need for transparency on the origins of COVID-19 by 
unanimously passing a bill requiring the Director of the 
National Intelligence to declassify information from the Wuhan 
Institute of Virology (WIV) and the origins of COVID-19. I am 
glad that President Biden signed the bill into law earlier this 
week.
    However, President Biden only committed to declassifying 
and sharing information ``consistent with [his] constitutional 
authority to protect against the disclosure of information that 
would harm national security.'' That sounds good, but it also 
might be an excuse for not declassifying a lot of information. 
Given the Administration's track record on transparency, I am 
concerned that the President's statement suggests he will not 
publicly release all the information that exists.
    It is not just classified information the Executive Branch 
is withholding from the American people on COVID origins. Most 
of what I have asked for is unclassified and they are still 
resisting. Nearly a dozen Federal agencies, including the 
Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS), State 
Department, Defense Department (DOD), and the FBI refuse to 
disclose thousands of records in their possession relevant to 
the origins of COVID-19. Many of these records are not even 
classified.
    I sent dozens of letters for over two years to Federal 
agencies requesting these records, only to be stonewalled. In 
fact, recently disclosed emails made available by the Freedom 
of Information Act (FOIA) actually show Defense Threat 
Reduction Agency (DTRA) employees, in private emails, were 
scheming to obstruct my request, mentioning me by name, and 
saying, ``We are not going to give any information to this 
guy.''
    The American people deserve transparency and 
accountability. If we are being asked to sacrifice those values 
in the name of ``national security,'' that definition should be 
narrowly tailored to protect only what is necessary to preserve 
our sources and methods.
    In the Pentagon Papers case, Justice Potter Stewart 
remarked upon the wisdom of avoiding secrecy for its own sake. 
In his concurring opinion, Justice Stewart wrote, ``When 
everything is classified, then nothing is classified. The 
system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the 
careless and to be manipulated by those intent on self-
protection or self-promotion.''
    I want to thank our consensus witness panel for being here 
today. My hope is, Mr. Chairman, that we have a unique to 
address overclassification by the Executive Branch in a 
bipartisan way. I think any reform, though, has to be us taking 
back some power. If we leave it up to ``Please, Executive 
Branch, please give us information,'' it will not work. There 
has to be a hammer and we have to take back some of the power 
that originally was ours. We have let it drift away from us and 
we have to grab back that congressional authority.
    Thank you.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Paul.
    It is the practice of the Homeland Security and 
Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC) to swear in witnesses, 
so if each of you would please stand and raise your right hand.
    Do you swear that the testimony that you will give before 
this Committee will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing 
but the truth, so help you, God?
    Ms. Goitein. I do.
    Mr. Blanton. I do.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I do.
    Mr. Eddington. I do.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you. You may be seated.
    Our first witness is Elizabeth Goitein. Ms. Goitein is the 
Senior Director of the Brennan Center for Justice Liberty and 
National Security Program, and is regarded as a national expert 
in government transparency, Presidential emergency powers, and 
government surveillance.
    Previously, Ms. Goitein worked as a Counsel to former 
Senator Russ Feingold and practiced as a trial attorney in the 
Federal Programs Bench of the Civil Division of the Department 
of Justice (DOJ).
    Welcome to the Committee. You may proceed with your opening 
remarks.

TESTIMONY OF ELIZABETH GOITEIN,\1\ SENIOR DIRECTOR, LIBERTY AND 
     NATIONAL SECURITY PROGRAM, BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE

    Ms. Goitein. Chairman Peters, Ranking Member Paul, and 
Members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me here today 
to testify.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Goitein appears in the Appendix 
on page 35.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Overclassification is a fact, not a theory. Insiders have 
estimated that 50 to 90 percent of classified information could 
safely be made public, as you said, Chairman, and the current 
system for declassification has no hope of keeping pace with 
the petabytes of classified information that agencies generate 
each year.
    The harms that result from this State of Affairs are every 
bit as real and as serious as those that can result from the 
unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information. 
Overclassification throws a wrench into the workings of 
democracy, it prevents the American people from weighing in on 
matters that affect their rights and their security, it 
undermines the rule of law by providing a shield for government 
misconduct, and it impedes oversight by Congress and the 
courts.
    Overclassification also harms national security. It limits 
the sharing of threat information, both within and outside 
government. It also causes officials to lose respect for the 
system. That, combined with the sheer volume of classified 
information can lead busy officials to cut corners or simply 
make mistakes when it comes to the protection of classified 
information.
    The causes of overclassification are easy to identify. 
There are multiple incentives unrelated to national security to 
keep information secret. Classifying by rote is easier and 
faster than giving careful thought to every decision. 
Classification can be a key weapon interforce between agencies. 
It can be used to hide government conduct that is illegal, 
embarrassing, or just controversial. Perhaps above all, 
officials face harsh penalties for failing to protect sensitive 
information, but no official has ever faced serious 
consequences for overclassifying.
    Solving this set of problems will require fundamental 
changes to the current system. Although classification policy 
is usually set by Executive Order (EO), Presidents have 
historically been reluctant to take the bold steps that are 
needed. That is why Congress should consider stepping in. The 
U.S. Constitution gives Congress shared power with the 
President over national security matters, and Congress has 
passed many laws regarding the handling of national security 
information.
    Congress, thus, has ample authority to enact the measures 
we will be discussing today. Chief among these is the 
development and implementation of advanced technologies to 
facilitate declassification and derivative classification, 
namely applying markings to information that has already been 
designated as classified. There is broad consensus among 
experts that we cannot and will not solve the system's problems 
without the help of technology. Pilot projects have shown that 
the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to 
identify classified information and information that is subject 
to declassification has tremendous promise, but getting this 
off the ground will require leadership and resources. Congress 
can ensure that we have both.
    Congress should also direct the President to convene a 
committee of senior agency officials tasked with narrowing the 
criteria for classification. Original classification 
authorities must be able to exercise discretion, but that 
discretion should not be unbounded. The criteria set forth in 
the current Executive Order are too broad to provide meaningful 
constraints.
    In addition, pending the deployment of technological tools 
for declassification, Congress should authorize the National 
Declassification Center (NDC) to declassify documents at 25 
years, without lengthy review by multiple agencies. This multi-
agency review is inconsistent with the automatic 
declassification required by the Executive Order, and it has 
brought the system to its knees, producing long delays and 
massive backlogs that will continue to balloon as agencies 
generate more and more classified information.
    Finally, Congress should build accountability into the 
system. It should direct agencies to implement systems to 
identify and hold accountable those officials who knowingly, 
willfully, or negligently overclassify. The designation of 
classified information, proper designation, should be part of 
the performance evaluations of all officials who handle 
classified information, and agencies should be required to 
implement spot audits, which will help to foster a culture of 
accountability.
    My written testimony includes some other recommendations 
but I will stop there for now. Thank you again for this 
opportunity, and I look forward to your questions.
    Chairman Peters. Ms. Goitein, thank you. Thank you for your 
testimony.
    Our next witness is Thomas Blanton. Mr. Blanton is the 
Director of the National Security Archive at George Washington 
University (GWU), where he has served for over 30 years. In his 
role he has conducted numerous investigations and published 
reports, books, and articles related to government 
transparency. Mr. Blanton led the National Security Archive to 
be the top nonprofit user of the Freedom of Information Act, 
and the Archive has made more than 60,000 FOIA requests to the 
Federal Government.
    Welcome to the Committee. You may begin with your opening 
remarks.

  TESTIMONY OF THOMAS BLANTON,\1\ DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY 
           ARCHIVE, THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY

    Mr. Blanton. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, Ranking 
Member Paul and other Members of the Committee. I am here to 
make five points in five minutes: overclassification is out of 
control; declassification has collapsed; core functions of the 
National Archives that could help have been flatlined, budget-
wise, for nearly 30 years, five different Presidents; key 
reform tools needed by this Congress and by the public are 
shriveling at the National Archives; and the key potential 
reform that could modernize the system is putting sunsets on 
secrets, on the front end, to force better thinking, and on the 
back end, to have automatic release. Those are my five core 
points.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Blanton appears in the Appendix 
on page 70.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I will not belabor the first one, Chairman Peters, Ranking 
Member Paul. Liza all made the case on overclassification. I do 
not need to go much further except to say one thing: I applaud 
that COVID origins bill but it has a giant hole that the 
intelligence community (IC) is going to run right through 
because the last phrase of it says we leave it up to the 
Executive on sources and methods. Congress can do a different 
standard on sources and methods. They did it in the John F. 
Kennedy (JFK) Assassination Records Review Board. They said you 
have to show harm and you have to weigh a cost and benefit 
between public benefit, congressional interest, public 
interest, and the damage done to any source and methods, but a 
flat sources and methods protection, which is built into so 
many statutes, is one of the main drivers of the 
overclassification crisis.
    Declassification has collapsed. Last year, I filed a 
Freedom of Information request with the George W. Bush Library, 
for one meeting the President had with a bunch of outside 
experts, none of them with security clearances, to prep for his 
first meeting with Vladimir Putin. They wrote back, ``Oh, we 
found 1,600 pages of classified documents on this meeting with 
uncleared outsiders. By the way, it is going to take us 12 
years to get that into the queue at the National 
Declassification Center. So 20-year-old documents and 12 more 
years to wait, that is the core argument I would make. You have 
to have an automatic sunset or I will never see those 
documents.
    Third, core functions of the National Archives have 
flatlined. We did an audit on the budgets. There are a lot of 
different ways to measure this, but we tried to take a 
consistent one over 30 years, and we see that five Presidents, 
the Congress, and the leadership of the Archives have flatlined 
the budget, literally, despite an exponential increase in the 
records that the National Archives is responsible for. Bush 41 
left 80 gigabytes of records to the National Archives. Donald 
Trump left 250 terabytes. Meanwhile, the amount of money 
National Archives has to deal with that has been flatlined in 
real dollar terms, and that is starting--my fourth point--they 
key reform pieces of the National Archives that make a 
difference.
    This gentleman was the head of the Information Security 
Oversight Office (ISOO). It is the best investment that 
Congress could make, is to give that office the resources it 
needs to be the inside watchdog on the secrecy system. That 
office staffs the Public Interest Declassification Board. That 
could be your go-to place. When you have a dispute with 
agencies on classified records, take them to that board for an 
objective judgment. But without staffing, without its own 
budget, without terms that continue until a new appointee is 
named, that board is withering away.
    The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel 
(ISCAP)--is the best single secrecy forum. It came out of the 
1990s. We got to appeal to this interagency group of 
bureaucrats when an agency stiffed us, and that panel ruled for 
us 75 percent of the time. That is a measure of the 
overclassification from the insiders. What they proved, that 
panel proved, was you take the decision out of the cold, dead 
hands of the originating agencies and you get some rationality. 
Right? Seventy-five percent was released.
    But that panel has withered away. Its success became its 
doom. It is overloaded with requests, a backlog of 1,317 cases. 
I am sorry. It does not work. Got to have more resources. Got 
to have the Information Security Oversight Office pushing it.
    The last, but not least, the National Declassification 
Center, it does not work. The original idea was that was going 
to be that interagency panel writ large. It was going to have 
the authority to declassify. All the agencies would send their 
people to that center, to sit at the same table and make 
decisions together. It does not work. Huge backlogs.
    A recent quote from a former employee, ``The National 
Declass Center is afraid of its own shadow. It does not have 
the power to push the agencies around so the agencies push it 
around.'' Congress can change that and make a difference.
    The last point, in my last 20 seconds, sunsets, sunsets on 
secrets. On the front end, to force original classifiers to 
establish a date. When does the risk diminish? When does it 
start to go away? We have had a test on that, this 10-year-or-
less rule. I think it worked. We have not seen it in historic 
records, but it could work. On the back end it is only way to 
get rid of that enormous backlog of hundreds of millions of 
records.
    I will leave it there, and in the questions I hope I can 
tell you about the machine learning experiment I ran yesterday, 
inspired by Liza's optimism about how computers are going to 
make a difference, and we will come back to that. But thank you 
very much for your attention.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Blanton.
    The next witness is John Fitzpatrick. Mr. Fitzpatrick 
serves as the former Director of the Information Security 
Oversight Office, the office within the National Archives and 
Records Administration that leads efforts to standardize and 
assess our nation's efforts to manage many aspects of the 
classification system. Mr. Fitzpatrick has extensive experience 
within the Federal Government, including leadership positions 
dealing with classification policy. Previously, Mr. Fitzpatrick 
worked at the National Security Council (NSC) where he chaired 
the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel and the 
Records Access and Information Security Policy Coordination 
Committee.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed 
with your opening remarks.

TESTIMONY OF JOHN FITZPATRICK,\1\ FORMER DIRECTOR, INFORMATION 
                   SECURITY OVERSIGHT OFFICE

    Mr. Fitzpatrick. Thank you, Chairman Peters, Ranking Member 
Paul, and Members of the Committee. I am grateful for the 
opportunity to discuss the changes needed to modernize the 
government's classification system.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Fitzpatrick appears in the 
Appendix on page 85.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    As noted, I served in the U.S. Government for 35 years, all 
of it in national security and intelligence, retiring in 2019, 
the last dozen or so of those years at the Office of the 
Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), as Director of ISOO, 
and on the National Security Council staffs of the Obama and 
Trump administrations, were concerned for the security and 
classification policies of the U.S. Government and their 
implementation.
    As demonstrated already, there is no shortage of 
opportunity for change and improvement in the government's 
classification enterprise. I wish to make clear I believe the 
possibility for change and improvement of the system is real. I 
emphasize how congressional action, and specifically this 
Committee's role, is urgently needed to send the demand signal 
for that change.
    I draw an analogy to the role of the Intelligence Reform 
and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA), of 2004, that it played 
in instigating improvements to the security clearance process 
across government. That law, and this Committee's role in 
overseeing its implemented, presented a clear mandate for 
change. It required the President to designated a single 
official as responsible for driving that change, and 
established strict performance measures and reporting 
timelines. I played a role in designing the approach and 
implementing the structure put in place to respond to those 
IRTPA requirements, and witnessed the necessity of having both 
the congressional mandate and the single Presidential designee 
to drive change.
    Any successful effort to modernize the classification 
system will require the concerted efforts of top administration 
functions to formulate and drive change. Specifically, the 
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and NSC focus and drive 
will be required to sustain collective reform efforts among 
departments and agencies. I consider it essential that any 
legislative mandate should require a single responsible 
official be designated by the President as accountable for the 
governmentwide effort. Without top-of-government 
accountability, prospects for progress are few.
    As Tom pointed out, another essential element of reform is 
strengthen ISOO's position to meet the challenge of significant 
reform. Specifically, deliberate efforts are required to 
increase ISOO's prominence within and among the national 
security departments and agencies, specifically through greater 
utilization by NSC and OMB, and preferably that Presidential 
designee.
    Increase ISOO's own resources and ensure it has independent 
control of same. ISOO's resources have dwindled over time, and 
a reform effort such as this would include right-sizing and 
empowering ISOO to ensure it is able to meet its mission.
    Retaining ISOO's role in administering both the Public 
Interest Declassification Board and Interagency Security 
Classification Appeals Panel, and designating the ISOO director 
to co-lead the development of a technology investment strategy 
with OMB and the Office of the Federal Chief Information 
Officer.
    As the Committee is aware, the proportions of 
overclassification are practically immeasurable, and owes to a 
range of factors including the decades-long under-resourcing of 
the staffs and programs in place at departments and agencies 
whose jobs are to consider classification and declassification 
actions. I believe that the need to invest in technology to 
support improved classification and declassification is the 
single most important need in this modernization effort. The 
success of reform will depend on the creation of capabilities 
in the existing and future information environments across 
government. They must utilize emerging and maturing 
technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine 
learning to facilitate the review of classified current 
holdings, to engage classification decisions at the time of 
document creation with the intent of thwarting 
overclassification, and to suggest new ways to process digital 
records and alleviate future backlogs before they are built.
    I do not portray these observations about the poverties of 
the current system nor the criticality of technological 
investment as in any way new, and as the board is already 
aware, I also commend the work of the Public Interest 
Declassification Board, what it has done to present a menu of 
opportunities to achieve strategy change. A prominent and 
fortified governance structure could use these ideas to guide 
the application of new technological capabilities to achieve 
reform.
    I will close by thanking the Committee for its efforts and 
to bring attention and drive action to these needed reforms, 
and I welcome your questions. Thank you.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Fitzpatrick.
    Our final witness is Patrick Eddington. Mr. Eddington 
serves as the Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, where he 
focuses on homeland security and civil liberties-related 
issues. He also serves as the Adjunct Assistant Professor at 
Georgetown University Center for Security Studies. Earlier in 
his career he served as a military imagery analyst at the 
Central Intelligence Agency (CIAs) National Photographic 
Interpretation Center (NPIC), where he earned several accolades 
from the Joint Special Operations Command and Joint Warfare 
Analysis Center and the CIA's Office of Military Affairs.
    Mr. Eddington, welcome to the Committee. You may proceed 
with your opening remarks.

   TESTIMONY OF PATRICK G. EDDINGTON,\1\ SENIOR FELLOW, CATO 
                           INSTITUTE

    Mr. Eddington. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much. Dr. Paul, 
Members of the Committee, my sincere thanks for inviting me to 
be here today with some old friends and hopefully some new ones 
as well, to offer my views on this absolutely critical issue of 
overclassification by the Executive Branch. Let me state at the 
outset that the views that I express here today are strictly my 
own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Cato 
Institute, its management, or its Board of Directors.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    \1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Eddington appears in the Appendix 
on page 89.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    I got my first Secret clearance as a young armor officer in 
1986, followed a Top Secret/Special Compartmented Information 
(TS/SCI) clearance for nearly nine years, as a CIA analyst, as 
the Chairman mentioned, and then a Top Secret clearance as a 
House staffer for over 10 years. I understand our 
classification system and its pitfalls very well.
    In my longer prepared statement I provide the Committee 
with some key historical background on how we got to this 
point, some of which you have already heard from some of my 
fellow panelists today--how our government creates and fails to 
release, in a timely way, literally millions of pages of 
Federal records. You will also find in that statement a lengthy 
list of examples where Executive Branch secrecy has been used 
to hide major unconstitutional intelligence programs as well as 
the failures of those programs and others actually authorized 
under the Patriot Act.
    Because the Congress has before it the pending business of 
whether to reauthorize or let die Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act (FISA) Section 702, I want to use my remaining 
time to offer this warning.
    When The New York Times exposed then President George W. 
Bush's illegal Stellar Wind electronic mass surveillance 
program in December 2005, he and his key advisors assured the 
Nation that the program was both necessary and effective. In 
fact, it was neither, something we only learned from still more 
New York Times reporting that surfaced, and only through 
Federal Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, I will add, 
intelligence community inspector general (IG) reports that 
revealed clearly that Stellar Wind was an ineffective program 
and one that collected data on Americans with no connections to 
terrorist groups or hostile foreign intelligence services.
    On June 6th it will be 10 years since the Guardian 
newspaper published National Security Agency (NSA) 
whistleblower Edward Snowden's first major revelation--the 
Federal Government's programmatic collection of telephone 
metadata on virtually every American. The program made a 
mockery, and I use that word advisedly, a mockery of the Fourth 
Amendment's individualized, particularized, probable cause-
based warrant requirement.
    The Patriot Act's Section 215 telephone metadata program 
was also a failure, something former Senate Judiciary Committee 
Chairman Patrick Leahy demonstrated in a 2013 oversight hearing 
in which after less than five minutes of cross-examination, the 
Chairman got then-NSA Deputy Director John English to admit 
that contrary to previous NSA claims, that 54 terrorist plots 
on America had been stopped by that Section 215 program. The 
actual number was zero. It would not be until 2019 that NSA 
would finally kill that failed program.
    The Executive Branch's reaction to Snowden's revelations 
was to once again prosecute a whistleblower for exposing 
Federal Government domestic surveillance misconduct. Snowden, 
Thomas Tamm, The Stellar Wind whistleblower, and former Army 
Captain Christopher Pyle, who exposed long-running 
unconstitutional Army domestic surveillance in 1971, to the 
late Senator Sam Ervin in his Committee, all acted out of a 
belief that the Federal Government's classification system was 
being used in a systematic way to conceal illegal or 
unconstitutional acts. They developed a contempt for a system 
that seemed designed to violate Americans' rights, not protect 
them.
    As an author and historian, I have a keen interest in 
getting the tens of millions of still-classified or otherwise 
unreviewed FBI, CIA, NSA, and related agency records into the 
public domain, and my statement for the record contains a model 
legislative proposal that I believe would accomplish that end.
    But even more fundamental to the preservation of the rights 
of our citizens is the need for a statutory ban on the misuse 
of the classification system to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, 
mismanagement, or violates of statute or provisions of the 
Constitution. I believe that my proposal would achieve that 
goal as well.
    I thank the Members for their time and attention, and I 
stand ready to answer your questions.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Mr. Eddington.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick, in your testimony you discuss the 
exponential increase in digital classified information, and all 
our panelists have concurred with that. I am always struck by 
the fact we are seeing an estimated 50 million new classified 
records each year. It is really hard to wrap your mind around 
the sheer volume of that. Most of all, these records are now 
electronic, not pieces of paper like think about the rules that 
existed not too long ago.
    If you could tell the Committee, what are some of the major 
challenges that we face in managing classified information that 
is digital, specifically?
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. Thank you for the question. One of the 
reasons those numbers are so high is because, in the post-9/11 
era and just with the development of new technology and network 
technology in general, we have proliferated secret and top 
secret information networks to support the activities of a 
larger national security and homeland security portion of 
government, and the industrial base that participates in it.
    There are simply more ways and more direct ways for the 4.5 
million people that have a security clearance to create a 
classified record, and the template for every one of them on 
those networks says what is the classification level, and it 
provides a tool to assist in choosing to classify that record. 
It does not say ``does this need to be classified? Yes, no. 
What harm would come from this?'' It is simply a digital 
recitation of whatever the other document was. An email that 
comes to you already classified and I reply, I add no 
additional classified information to it, that email is also 
marked as classified. In the counts that ISOO attempts to do 
with some accuracy, they get harder and harder to do because 
you have created, proliferated digital classified items.
    That infrastructure and the culture that the users across 
government live in is one of protection. Your job is not to 
release this information. Your job is to protect this 
information. There is a one-way incentive structure in place.
    There is a culture change needed that can only come from 
the top, that can only be reinforced by policy, practice, 
tools, and training. I commend the activities of DNI Haines and 
others in government who have begun to utilize the release of 
current classified information to influence the decisions that 
are made in national security and operational contexts such as 
we have seen in the run-up to Ukraine and in dealing with China 
as a rising power. That is a signal that it is a possible thing 
to consider, but it is only at the highest level that people 
are granted the privilege to think that way, and we have to 
figure out a way to train people and support the change in 
behavior that they can actually question, ``Does this really 
need to be classified?''
    I cannot tell you how many emails I received back in the 
day, when I was living every day in classified, ``Hey, do you 
want to go to lunch?'' and somebody has a default classifier. 
That is emblematic, I think, of the challenge and the drivers 
for it.
    Chairman Peters. This Committee will look at all the 
different drivers that are involved, but I just want to ask 
specifically about one that you mentioned, Ms. Goitein 
mentioned as well, artificial intelligence and machine 
learning, something this Committee is investigating. We had a 
hearing last week about the promises of artificial learning but 
also the concerns and the challenges associated with it, and we 
have to think that through. You mentioned in your testimony how 
machine learning and artificial intelligence gives us a tool to 
manage a massive amount of data, which we know that is 
appropriate to be thinking about.
    But tell the Committee not just the opportunities but talk 
to us about the pitfalls of using artificial intelligence and 
machine learning to deal with this issue.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I think the greatest concern would be 
where decision rights lay on the product that the AI puts 
forth, to whether or not that would require review. If we have 
petabytes of data to search through to find the needle that is 
of the public interest, and then to have it considered as a 
needle found and not thinking about the whole haystack, I think 
that is ultimately a decision that rests with a human. But it 
has been served up through a process that is trusted and, 
demonstrably so in the technological ways, to then say here are 
the few needles that you need to think about and the argument 
to protect or not protect can be judged based on that.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you. We will come back to you a 
little later. I want to get Ms. Goitein in here.
    You talked about the classification or declassification 
process after 25 years and mentioned why we have a backlog that 
is not working effectively, in your opening comments. But I 
would like you to drill down more. Give us some specifics as to 
why that is failing and things that this Committee should 
consider changing, and maybe not just having a flat 25 years or 
perhaps just enforcing that. I would love your thoughts.
    Ms. Goitein. Absolutely. As I mentioned, the Executive 
Order says that all information of permanent historic value 
must be automatically declassified at years whether or not has 
been reviewed, and that is a quote. But in practice, a lot of 
the documents do not even get to the National Archives. They 
are not even accessioned until the agencies have performed 
their own manual review--nothing automatic about it--and there 
are nine categories of information that are exempt from 
automatic declassification. In theory, that is what they are 
looking for.
    They are also looking to see if other agencies might have 
equities in those documents, and then they will send the 
documents to those other agencies. That often happens 
sequentially, which adds a lot of time. Some of these nine 
exemptions, if you add them all together they cover a lot of 
ground, probably too much ground, and some of them are worded 
extremely broadly, so they give the agencies a lot of 
discretion. If the agencies find a single word that needs to 
remain classified that is exempt, that will withhold the entire 
document rather than simply redacting that word. That is called 
a ``pass-fail approach.''
    In addition, there is a statute, the Kyl-Lott Amendment is 
what it is called, that requires agencies to do a line-by-line 
review of these documents unless they can certify that the 
documents are highly unlikely to contain any nuclear 
information. These agencies are extremely risk averse. They are 
not going to designate large categories of information as being 
highly unlikely.
    The combination of this sequential, lengthy, manual review 
with a pass-fail approach with the Kyl-Lott Amendment means not 
only that this process takes years and years, but also that an 
extremely unimpressive percentage of documents come out the 
other side of this process declassified. Roughly half of 
documents that are reviewed end up being declassified, and 
there is a backlog of about 600 million pages of documents that 
have not even been reviewed. That is what automatic 
declassification looks like today.
    Chairman Peters. Great. Six hundred million pages, line by 
line.
    Ms. Goitein. That is a lot of work.
    Chairman Peters. Yes. Good luck. So definitely we need 
reforms.
    Ranking Member Paul, you are recognized for your questions.
    Senator Paul. This is a great panel today. We rarely have 
an issue where both sides seem to agree on it. I think one 
suggestion would be if we were to do a bipartisan bill trying 
to fix this problem that we constitute a working group, 
including the four members who have testified here today, since 
they probably have more experience in this issue than any 
Members of Congress, any Senators or any of our staff. If we 
had a working committee with these four and a few others, I 
think we would avoid the pitfall of having good intentions and 
then passing something that does not work, which is a pretty 
common occurrence in government.
    I think there are a lot of reasons why it does not work. 
One of the fundamental things is the separation of power. In 
almost everything that we ever do here, where we give an 
exemption to the Executive to allow them to have the unilateral 
power they use it. It is well intended. We say, ``You have to 
do this unless national security superimposes,'' but they 
always use that and they will always have the incentive to use 
it.
    We either have to have congressional power over funding or 
some sort of independent agency. I almost would imagine sort of 
like a Federal judge or somebody that has judicial experience 
to sort of review these but has the power to make the decision. 
If the Executive makes the decision it has to be appealed by 
Congress, Congress has to somehow be able to override, or 
somebody has to be able to override the Presidential decision.
    Then the question I had for Mr. Blanton was, you mentioned 
there was a committee that was working that was reviewing this. 
Was this just old documents, over 25 years, or was this more 
recent documents? You mentioned some oversight committee that 
seemed to be working that was now backlogged.
    Mr. Blanton. The Interagency Security Classification 
Appeals Panel.
    Senator Paul. ISCAP. OK.
    Mr. Blanton. Because it rules for the requestor. It got 
totally backlogged because it actually started ruling for the 
requestor.
    Senator Paul. Was it old, over 25 years, or newer?
    Mr. Blanton. Mandatory declassification review, so it can 
be new or old. New or old.
    Senator Paul. OK. It worked at first but now it is 
overwhelmed because they have too much staff.
    Mr. Blanton. Because the agencies did not take those 
decisions and plug them back into the classification guides. 
There was no learning. We had to fight those battles over and 
over, the same battles.
    Senator Paul. That could be part of the reform 
legislation----
    Mr. Blanton. Exactly.
    Senator Paul [continuing]. Is making sure that those 
decisions become a precedent for another decision, another 
similar decision.
    Mr. Blanton. Exactly. I just point back to your reference 
to the Moynihan Commission. The title of that commission was 
Protecting and Reducing Government Secrets. It sounds like a 
contradiction. It is not. If you protect the real secrets you 
have to disgorge the non-secrets.
    Senator Paul. I have been to hundreds of classified 
hearings and never heard anything classified, and most of the 
important stuff is already in the newspaper, and I read about 
it in the newspaper, and some of it is ridiculous. The idea 
that the FBI and the Department of Energy have concluded that 
they think this, in all likelihood, came from the lab in Wuhan 
is not a secret. If you had somebody's name, that is a secret. 
I have never been to a hearing where I was told the name of a 
source or how somebody got something, and really, frankly, I do 
not want to know it for any possibility of that leaking. There 
are real secrets that we have but almost nothing that is 
classified is a real secret.
    Ms. Goitein, you mentioned in your written testimony that a 
wedding ceremony in Dagestan, cables from that were classified, 
what kind of robes they wore and what they did over this 
wedding ceremony. That is ridiculous.
    But I was told yesterday by the Secretary of State, he will 
not give me any cables and he will not give me any information 
that is unclassified because the Executive Branch has 
unilaterally decided they will not give information unless the 
chairman of a committee signs off on it. I have four or five 
chairmen I am trying to get to sign records releases. They will 
not give any, but who made this decision? Not Congress. Not the 
people. They made the decision to protect it.
    But this is the problem we have. I want to fix the 
classified problem, but even the unclassified information they 
are withholding from us. I want to see like government grants 
on people who applied for coronavirus research that were 
rejected and accepted, and the research proposal that involved 
the lab in Wuhan. I cannot get it because they deny this, and 
most of it is not supposed to be classified. We have a real 
problem.
    It is even worse than that. Some committee chairmen will 
say, like the head of Armed Services will say, ``We will sign a 
request for this information but it is not supposed to leave 
the committee.'' There is report that they did in HELP 
Committee, and I am on both committees, and I wanted to bring 
it over here because I am the Ranking Member. The HELP 
Committee is preventing me from bringing that over so Senator 
Peters can see it. It is crazy the segmentation of the things 
we do.
    But I think the best way to fix it is and I really think it 
would be a great idea to have a working group of people from 
the outside that would help us craft the information so we do 
not have the same pitfalls. What I would hate is we do a rubber 
stamp of something that looks good, sounds good, and does not 
work, and it really has to involve all of this.
    The reforms, you talked about having them learn from the 
precedents. Any other reforms, Mr. Eddington, that you would 
suggest?
    Mr. Eddington. An awful lot of what my colleagues have 
already talked about I think is essential. But I will point to 
previous success stories. We have talked about a lot of 
failures here. But things happen when Congress decides they 
need to happen. This is how we get the JFK records, 
assassination material, out, the Imperial Japanese war crimes 
and Nazi war crimes records out. This is stuff coming directly 
from the Congress.
    That is why, in my written statement, I propose a national 
declassification bill, that would mandate, essentially, that 
anything that is 25 years older or older shall be essentially 
presumed to be unclassified, unless there are very specific 
criteria that are met. Now the criteria that I talk about are 
drawn from the existing Executive Order 13526. But there are 
important words that are not in that Executive Order. Liza has 
pointed to some of them. My favorite word is ``current.'' That 
word does not appear in there, so that is what gives NSA and 
others the ability to hang onto stuff for 50, 75 years, or 100 
years. That is the No. 1 thing.
    On the issue of congressional prerogatives, let us remember 
that the word ``secret'' only appears in the Constitution in 
one place. It is not Article 2. It is Article 1, Section 5, 
dealing with this body, Congress. Congress was the original 
classification authority (OCA). It let that power essentially 
slip away to the Executive Branch, and in my judgment that is 
exactly the reason we have a problem.
    The last group of your colleagues who I think really 
understood this well were Senator Church, Senator Tower, and 
the others on the Church Committee, because when they were 
doing their report they made it very clear to President Ford, 
we are going to listen to you when we tell you what we are 
going to include in this report, but the final word about what 
goes into our product, our committee report, that is us. That 
is Congress.
    That is exactly the standard you all need to return to. Do 
not turn your material, do not turn your reports over to the 
Executive Branch and let them tell you what is or is not 
classified. You are the original classification authority and 
that is in the black-letter text of the Constitution. Thank 
you, Dr. Paul.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you.
    Senator Blumenthal, you are recognized for your questions.

            OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR BLUMENTHAL

    Senator Blumenthal. Thanks, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to you 
and the Ranking Member for having this hearing.
    We attend a lot of classified briefings, and I would say at 
the end of probably more than half of them I say to the 
briefers, often very high-ranking members at the Pentagon or in 
the intelligence community, ``Our adversaries know we know what 
you told us.'' We know our adversaries know that they know we 
know. We know they know. They know. The only one who do not 
know are the American people, and very often it is information 
that is vital to the American people assessing a threat to our 
national security. If I began to tell you now what those 
subjects are I would get in a lot of trouble. Nobody would 
shoot me, but I would be, in effect, shot on the floor of the 
U.S. Senate. It would become a major issue--Blumenthal 
discloses classified briefing.
    The real losers here are the American people, not about 
some historic event 25 years ago but about current threats to 
our national security, where we could mobilize more support 
publicly for defense spending, in certain areas, if the 
American people knew what the ongoing threats are.
    I am going to be somewhat adventurous here--the information 
we get is from aerial surveillance, where companies in the 
private sector are already producing the information because 
they have satellites just like our military does. I have seen 
aerial surveillance of the balloon that went over our country, 
the Chinese balloon, which traces it back to when it 
originated, not from the Pentagon but from a private company 
doing the same kind of aerial surveillance.
    The present system is beyond broken. It is actually 
counterproductive. It promotes secrecy at the expense of our 
national interests and security simply to prevent often 
embarrassment to public officials, who would prefer that the 
public not see what they are doing. We all would love to be the 
final arbiters of what the public knows about what we are 
doing, but it does not happen that way in a democracy. I have 
seen the history here. You go through it in your testimony. 
Nothing has happened after every one of these commissions. 
Nothing. None of the Moynihan recommendations adopted.
    When we sort of preach here--meaning we on the panel 
preach, not you--it really is not necessarily a sign that we 
are going to accomplish something now. But I would like to take 
some of these recommendations, for example, from the Moynihan 
Commission, and propose them in a more comprehensive way rather 
than piecemeal, in the way that we have adopted doing it. I do 
not know that it would require another commission.
    But I would like to know from you if you were to prioritize 
five recommendations made by the Moynihan Commission or by one 
of the other numerous bodies that have made recommendations, 
what would they be? I know we will not have time necessarily to 
go into all of your suggestions or recommendations, but it 
would be helpful, I think, to get the five things, taking 
Senator Paul's apt remark that the experts are here. You do not 
need to form a commission with you folks on it, but something 
really ought to be done, and the American people want an end to 
this secrecy for all the reasons that have been stated in a 
very forceful, bipartisan way.
    I am happy to begin going down the line. We will run out of 
time, and so your written responses, I think, would be very 
helpful.
    Ms. Goitein. I will try to be quick because I know all of 
us are going to have ideas, and I was looking at the list that 
I had the summary of the recommendations that I made in my 
written testimony and I had basically 10 sets of 
recommendations. I was choosing the top five.
    But certainly I think we need to start with technology 
development and implementation of advanced technologies. You 
are not going to find that in some of the older commissions' 
reports, but it is key to the success of the system now. I 
mentioned in my oral remarks that we should have a White House-
led task force to narrow the criteria for classification, that 
we should require agencies to have accountability systems for 
overclassification. I think that is very important. There are 
other ways, as well, to rebalance the incentives that I 
mentioned in my written testimony.
    Then reforming automatic declassification by empowering the 
National Declassification Center to declassify documents 
without lengthy agency review, but also to include what is 
called a ``drop dead date.'' This is what Tom was speaking 
about earlier. It is a sunset, which is a period of time after 
which documents would simply cease to be classified. They would 
not have to be declassified.
    Then the last one is that I think Congress should amend the 
provision of the National Security Act that talks about 
protecting against the unauthorized disclosure of sources and 
methods, because that provision has been misconstrued to allow 
and even require the withholding of sources and methods 
regardless of whether their disclosure would actually harm 
national security.
    Those are my top five.
    Mr. Blanton. I totally agree, and I could stop there, but I 
would add the top recommendation of the Moynihan-Helms-Combest 
Commission was for Congress to pass a statute to authorize the 
classification system and take that away from the Executive 
Orders that just make a mish-mash of the whole thing, a 
statute. Then in that statute, the core principles of that 
statute need to be what Liza just said, that any withholding of 
any kind, not just classified area but in the unclassified 
areas that Senator Paul is talking about, Executive should have 
to identify the harm from release and have a balance test 
against the benefit from release--cost-benefit analysis, harm 
test.
    To come back to my own testimony, sunsets on the front end 
will compel better thinking by the original classifiers, 
because they have to make a risk assessment that right now is 
just a drop-down menu. Oh, want to go to lunch? Oh, is that 
secret or confidential? That is all it is. It is as reflexive 
as the old days when it was a rubber stamp, except it is a 
drop-down menu.
    A statute and then those balancing pieces on the front end 
and on the back end, I think that is the core.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. Very briefly, I would suggest attention to 
one of the recommendations the PIDB made in an earlier report 
around prioritization. While we are working on capabilities 
that can deal with data and paper and digits in the aggregate, 
something needs to be done now, or one thing that can be done 
now is for the Congress to use its voice to indicate what the 
public interest, in the ways that Patrick was talking about 
with the JFK assassination records. It does not have to be an 
as auspicious and historical event as that, but if there is one 
that has not been addressed, put that out there as a priority 
for the NDC and the agencies to work on, to show a good outcome 
for the classification system. Prioritization is a difficult 
challenge, but I think a necessary one for separating the wheat 
from the chaff that is in the 600 million pages of unreviewed 
documents and other big piles. Thank you.
    Mr. Eddington. In my written statement, Senator Blumenthal, 
I have essentially model legislation that would do an awful lot 
of what Tom and Liza are talking about. I agree with Dr. Paul. 
If you put the four of us in a room over a weekend we could 
probably give you a pretty nearly finished version of what you 
might want to take a look at. I will leave it there.
    Chairman Peters. We will be continuing to work--we are 
working with all of you so far, and we are going to continue to 
work with you so we get something done. We will make sure that 
happens.
    I need to step away for another committee hearing briefly, 
to ask some questions downstairs. Ranking Member Paul will take 
the gavel until I return.
    Senator Paul [presiding.] Senator Marshall.

             OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR MARSHALL

    Senator Marshall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member. 
I do sincerely appreciate holding this hearing.
    As Senators we all take an oath to defend the Constitution, 
and what I have seen as Senator that not only am I not allowed 
to see much of the information we need, whether it is 
classified or unclassified, but certainly America does not. 
Whenever we allow the Federal Government to live in darkness, 
it is a threat to our Constitution and a threat to our 
republic. I way underestimated how important this transparency 
issue is and how we are all more accountable when things are 
out in the open.
    Certainly I am a frustrated Senator right now, and want to 
do what we can do--it seems like the de facto position is to 
classify things as opposed to the de facto position of let 
Americans see it.
    My first question is for Mr. Fitzpatrick. Under President 
Clinton, it took a year for the NSC senior director to 
basically update this overclassification issue. I do not mean 
to make you defensive. I am sure you wanted to do something as 
well. You had four years to make an impact on this. You had 
committees and meetings. What progress did you make? But more 
importantly, what were the obstacles for you to update the 
classification system?
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I served in the last year of the Obama NSC 
and two and half-ish years of the Trump NSC. The Obama NSC, my 
time there, that was that administration's Executive Order 
13526. It was the State of the order that that administration 
wanted, and so it was not a priority to conduct another policy 
review on an Executive Order it had issued. Which is not to say 
it did not revise--any administration does not revise its own 
orders. That was not a priority. In fact, my timing coming into 
the administration was focused on wrapping things up for that 
administration and the transition to the next.
    It was also not established as a policy priority in the 
Trump administration. The attention for my office, which came 
down through the chief of staff there, did not prioritize that 
work.
    I point this out explicitly, and point back to my testimony 
which suggests that it will take an external force or a 
congressional mandate to establish a requirement that the 
President prioritize this work and report back on specific 
milestones and outcomes. That example worked, and I used the 
security clearance reform and example in my testimony. I often 
refer to the security clearance reform problem as the No. 1, 
second tier national security issue in government, and knowing 
that the national security community never gets out of tier 
one.
    Overclassification, my opinion and estimate, is a tier 
three issue. It is a peripheral activity in government. Without 
somebody taking that and putting it at the center and within 
the focus of leadership----
    Senator Marshall. Is it a priority for this Administration, 
do you think?
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I am not able to speak for this 
Administration. I am familiar that they have issued some 
guidance to agencies to bring ideas forth but I am not familiar 
with the status of those.
    Senator Marshall. Mr. Blanton, my next question is for you. 
Would a two-tiered classification system work better than the 
current three? If so, would you force agencies to move all 
information currently classified as Confidential down to 
Unclassified or Unclassified for Official Use Only (OUO), as 
opposed to raising it to Secret? Would that diminish 
overclassification?
    Mr. Blanton. That is a great question, Senator. My view is 
we have to disgorge the confidential level material, not just 
change the label on it. It goes back to something I mentioned 
to Chairman Peters at the very beginning. Yesterday, inspired 
by Liza's optimistic belief in machine learning, I asked Chat 
Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (ChatGPT) your question--how 
should we modernize this nation's information security system.
    Senator Marshall. I have been waiting for this.
    Mr. Blanton. Let me tell you, answer No. 1, this system is 
way too simple. It does not even begin to comprehend the 
multiple threats that we face, such as in cyber, that a limited 
number of labels. We need more of them. Then it ended with an 
error message.
    We tasked it again. The second time ChatGPT says no, the 
problem with the security classification system is there are 
three levels of secrecy. There should only be two, Secret and 
Top Secret. Did not get an error message after that.
    Senator Marshall. This system agrees with Senator Marshall, 
it sounds like. All right.
    Mr. Blanton. The problem there is just simply the 
bureaucratic imperative that we have all heard about.
    Senator Marshall. Thank you so much. I am going to go back 
to Mr. Fitzpatrick. Why is ISOO been so ineffective overseeing 
the classification system and holding agencies accountable for 
overclassification?
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I think it is challenged on a resource 
basis. In order to actually oversee the activities of the 
classification system it is necessary to measure them, which 
ISOO does, but it is also necessary to go and visit agencies 
and conduct inspections and see exactly how the numbers that 
come back in reports are arrived at by the agencies. The 
staffing levels of ISOO have been reduced to a point where it 
cannot do that effectively.
    Senator Marshall. OK. Yes, my next question, I will go back 
to you, Mr. Fitzpatrick, and others can chime in if they want 
to. How can we ensure that the United States government 
releases all the JFK records in our lifetime? This seems to be 
the bar that America--if this is shrouded in secrecy, this sad 
chapter of America's life, if this is shrouded in secrecy, 
everything else is as well.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I suppose a review of those statutory 
requirements in that law, in light of the releases that have 
come and the withholding that has resulted from that guidance, 
might produce a different set of criteria to force the outcome 
that you state.
    Senator Marshall. Mr. Eddington, would you add anything?
    Mr. Eddington. Senator, you and your colleagues have the 
power, if necessary, to provide additional funding, if that is 
a problem. I do not know if that is necessarily the case or 
not. But if there is any doubt as to whether or not additional 
information is out there, give them a drop-dead deadline. I 
think Tom and I have a mind meld, a Vulcan mind meld on this 
practically. Give them an absolute deadline on this stuff.
    I have to say, I am an Article 1 guy. Have the Government 
Accountability Office (GAO) literally climb all over them and 
take a look at whether or not they have actually been as 
thorough as they should have been in looking for documents.
    We do not have enough--and Tom has talked about this a 
lot--we do not have enough back-end checks on this stuff. This 
is why we have a problem with surveillance in this country. I 
hate to keep coming back to this. I know this is supposed to be 
about dealing with the classification system. But there is 
almost never enough back-end checks on this stuff, and not 
enough auditing. That is one of the reasons why a lot of time 
you all end up legislating in the dark. You have an opportunity 
to fix that here if you choose.
    Senator Marshall. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks so much 
to the panel. Great answers.
    Senator Paul. Senator Hassan.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR HASSAN

    Senator Hassan. Thank you, Ranking Member Paul, and thanks 
to all of our witnesses for being here today.
    I want to start with a question to Ms. Goitein, please. 
Government's top priority is to keep its citizens safe, secure, 
and free. Classifying certain information is important to 
protecting national security such as intelligence sources and 
methods, to be sure, but this Committee has also heard from 
experts in the public and private sectors about the challenges 
with information sharing between government agencies and 
critical infrastructure owners and operators. When we think 
about cyber in particular right now, what I hear from the 
private sector is, ``We cannot get any information that would 
help us do what we need to do to keep safe.'' It is information 
sharing necessary to help prevent terrorist attacks, combat 
cyber threats, and more.
    In your experience, Ms. Goitein, how have you seen 
overclassification inhibit information sharing that is critical 
to public safety and security?
    Ms. Goitein. Thank you for that question. I think it is a 
major problem, and in fact, the 9/11 Commission talked about 
overclassification and how overclassification had actually 
stood in the way of sharing information among intelligence 
agencies that could have helped to prevent the attacks. We paid 
a heavy price, possibly, for overclassifying information.
    What the 9/11 Commission pointed to was a culture of 
secrecy that is a relic of a Cold War, and that culture, which 
pervades a lot of the agencies we are talking about, is rooted 
in assumptions from the Cold War about who the enemy was and 
what we had to do to protect ourselves against the enemy that 
no longer hold. As you are pointing out, in today's threat 
environment sharing information is often critical to protecting 
national security. That really is an enormous problem, and it 
raises its head in all kinds of areas. My written testimony has 
some other examples of situations where failure to share 
information has been problematic.
    I also, if I could, want to briefly respond to Dr. 
Marshall's question about whether this is a priority for this 
Administration. I did want to point out that the National 
Security Council last June began an interagency process to look 
at the Executive Order and the classification system. That 
process, at least at the time, was given a year. If this 
Administration comes out with an Executive Order that includes 
all the reforms we are talking about today in June, that will 
greatly diminish the need for legislation, although Congress 
will still need to ensure that there are adequate funds. 
However, if it appears that no such order is forthcoming in the 
near future, or in the foreseeable future, or if the order does 
not have adequate reforms, then again that is the situation 
where I really think Congress needs to step in to protect 
democratic accountability, the rule of law, oversight, and as 
you said, national security.
    Senator Hassan. I appreciate that very much, and that is a 
good marker for us to look at.
    I want to talk to you too, Ms. Goitein, about the financial 
costs here. I am Chair on the Subcommittee on Emerging Threats 
and Spending Oversight (ETSO), which is tasked with protecting 
and saving taxpayer dollars. Toward that end, I am concerned 
about ways in which overclassification of Federal documents 
contributes to waste, fraud, and abuse.
    What are the financial consequences of overclassification? 
Specifically, what factors contribute to those consequences?
    Ms. Goitein. Overclassification greatly increases the 
amount of effort and resources that need to be put into 
protecting the information. It also requires costs to be spent 
on clearing secure personnel. I think the reason we have over 
four million people who have security clearance to access 
classified information is because even people who are 
performing relatively low-level or non-sensitive tasks actually 
need a clearance to do their work.
    Certainly the systems that are used to process classified 
information, the physical storage for classified information, 
all of these cost money. I think we do not even know how much 
money they cost. The last figure that we have, which is from a 
few years ago, I think, is $18 billion, but the director of 
ISOO has flagged, in various ways, that he is not confident in 
the accuracy of that information. I think it is likely to 
actually be much more than that.
    Of course, we are not talking about the indirect costs, the 
inefficiencies and the weaknesses in some of the policies that 
are a result of information not being shared and vetted and 
improved through transparency and public participation.
    Senator Hassan. Does overclassification allow Federal 
agencies to hide waste, fraud, and abuse?
    Ms. Goitein. Absolutely. It is one of the main reasons, I 
think, why the classification system is misused.
    Senator Hassan. I want to follow up with you on that, but I 
want to get to a couple more questions. A question to Mr. 
Fitzpatrick. The backlog of government documents that are 
overdue for declassification is large, as you have noted, and 
likely too big to be addressed by human review alone, as we 
were just talking about.
    You touched on this already with Senator Peters and with 
Senator Marshall, but we have talked about technology solutions 
that can assist Federal workers in addressing the backlog 
without jeopardizing ongoing security matters. Based on your 
experience in the Federal Government, which Federal agency 
should lead or be involved in developing these technology 
solutions?
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. Thank you for the question. It is 
incredibly important. I believe that the information technology 
budget of the U.S. Government is already spending dollars on 
artificial intelligence and machine learning. One of the 
challenges here is to take the solutions that are being built 
for other purposes and apply them to this problem. It would 
take somebody at the Federal Chief Information Officer (CIO) 
level, and my recommendation, guided by an ISOO director that 
is charged with the responsibility to say, ``Listen to these 
agencies. They are starved of these resources. If they had 
them, here is what they would do.''
    The ideas are there, the technology application is, I 
think, the key thing, and it has to happen from the OMB budget 
level.
    Senator Hassan. OK. Thank you.
    One last quick question to Ms. Goitein. You testified that 
the Federal Government's current incentive and penalty 
structure encourages individuals to err on the side of 
overclassifying information rather than declassifying 
information. At the same time, classification obviously is 
essential to protecting national security.
    How do you recommend striking the right balance between 
reducing incentives to overclassify while protecting our 
national security?
    Ms. Goitein. I think we would have to go a long way in the 
other direction before we had to worry that we were making it 
too easy for people to not classify information. I think there 
is a lot of room to work with.
    I do think, absolutely, there need to be administrative 
penalties for mishandling classified information, failing to 
protect classified information, in cases where it is quite 
clear that that information required protection.
    But one thing that I think does need to be done is to 
provide a safe harbor for officials who make good-faith 
decisions not to classify or not to mark information in 
situations where the classification status of that information 
truly is ambiguous. Right now I do not think officials feel 
free to exercise their judgment, their reasonable judgment, in 
that direction.
    Then on the flip side, as I was saying earlier, we need to 
have some kind of accountability for people who are misusing 
the classification system for reasons unrelated to national 
security.
    Senator Hassan. Thank you very much, and thank you, Mr. 
Chair.
    Chairman Peters [presiding.] Thank you, Senator Hassan.
    Senator Lankford, you are recognized for your questions.

             OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANKFORD

    Senator Lankford. Chairman, thank you. Thank you all for 
bringing your testimony. Really appreciate your engagement. I 
was able to sit in earlier and be able to hear your oral 
statements, as I am back and forth in multiple hearings today. 
I appreciate your engagement and your thoughtfulness on this.
    A quick story. I went to the National Archives several 
years ago and I said, ``Show me something that people do not 
get to see.'' They pulled out a hand-done drawing of Pearl 
Harbor, and it had X's on it and markings on it. I said, ``What 
am I looking at?'' They said, ``This was a radar operator at 
Pearl Harbor that was tracking the Japanese coming in, and 
everywhere there is an X is when he radioed in and said to the 
folks at Pearl, ``I am picking up a radio signal.'' They 
signaled back, ``It must be people flying in from California.'' 
There were like five X's and then it stops. They said, ``This 
document was highly classified for decades because it showed we 
knew the Japanese were coming and missed it, so it stayed 
classified for decades. Here it is.''
    It was interesting dialog and it was also an educational 
moment for me to be able to hear classification and how it is 
used historically and how it can still be used today.
    My questions are on a couple of things on this. There is a 
flip side of this. There are covert operations that do happen 
that protect our national security worldwide, that some of them 
do last decades, and as long as we have that penetration it 
stays classified. If we do an automatic declassification in 25 
years that can threaten covert operations, but we also have the 
Pearl Harbor map that it is just someone trying to cover up 
their mistake as well, that is out there.
    There are multiple layers of classifications. You have 
Sensitive, you have Classified, you have Top Classified, you 
have Covert Operations, you have Compartmented, you have all 
these different pieces here. How do we strike a balance on 
automatic declassification and still protect covert operations 
that are still ongoing?
    Ready, set, go.
    Mr. Eddington. As a CIA guy, why don't I go first, or 
former CIA guy. I will go first here.
    I wholeheartedly agree with you, Senator Lankford, which is 
why, in the proposal that I have put forward--and I will just 
talk about confidential human sources.
    Senator Lankford. Yes. You have family members that can be 
exposed. If that person is gone their family is still around.
    Mr. Eddington. That is exactly right. In my proposal I am 
focusing here on current confidential human sources, and by 
``current'' I mean whereby they have provided information on 
criminal activity, let us say in an FBI or other law 
enforcement context, or information of a foreign intelligence 
value within the last five years.
    Now, if that is the case, that is going to get extended out 
for a very long period of time so long as that is an active 
source. It is possible that we would need to talk about maybe 
some tweaks to what I have discussed here, but I think that 
kind of approach that recognizes that when something ends and 
there is no life at stake, if you will, the information ought 
to be available in a much more timely way than it is right now.
    But I absolutely take your point with respect to covert 
action, and I want to make sure that obviously we do not go 
anywhere other than the unclassified here. There are absolutely 
activities that take place that do stretch literally over 
decades, and we would want to make sure that those kinds of 
activities are protected.
    That being said, one of the cores of my proposal here 
involves an absolutely prohibition on using the classification 
system in any circumstance to hide waste, fraud, abuse, 
criminal conduct, et cetera. I think you need to have that in 
place because as Liza has indicated--and I have many examples 
that I can share with the Committee--the classification system 
has been repeatedly misused to conceal those very kinds of 
things. That is my quick take on that. Thank you.
    Senator Lankford. Yes, ma'am.
    Ms. Goitein. The solution that I have advocated for 
declassification involves removing multi-agency equity reviews 
at the 25-year mark, but not getting rid of the exemption at 
that point. I have advocated having this steering committee, 
this working group, led by the White House, narrow those 
criteria because I think they are too broad, but certainly some 
of the examples you were giving, those would still be exempt 
from declassification. We just would not have a multi-year, 
endless process and these open-ended exemptions that result not 
enough information being declassified.
    Even the drop-dead date that I mentioned, which is further 
on in time--roughly 40 years is what I put forward--even at 
that point there would be categories of information that should 
be exempted. Those would include confidential human sources and 
key design concepts of weapons of mass destruction, and there 
would be an option for agencies to seek case-by-case exceptions 
beyond those, that could be approved by ISCAP. But the key 
distinction there, again, is that the information would not 
have to be declassified. If it did not fall within one of these 
exceptions that I have mentioned, it would simply cease to be 
classified, and that is the key there.
    These solutions that we are talking about would absolutely 
preserve the government's ability to keep secret the very 
narrow category of information that really does need to still 
be secret after 25 or 40 years.
    Senator Lankford. We have had a new designation show up 
recently on documents that get brought over to our staff. It 
has ``For Official Use Only (FOUO), Law Enforcement 
Sensitive.'' The first time we saw it we were like, ``What does 
that even mean?'' This is not something that is in a sensitive 
compartmented information facility (SCIF). This is just 
something that appears as a new designation. Magically, there 
is a new setting, and basically like, we do not want this out 
so we are going to create a designation for this.
    Now we have done what we should do with that. We have 
ignored that and said, ``That is not a real designation on 
it.'' But there is this constant push to say we are not going 
to be able to get information out and we do not want it 
released out to the public on it.
    We understand the challenge that we are on, dealing with 
any administration. I do really like the concept of having a 
place of appeal, basically. I do not know how many documents 
that we get that are redacted, that the whole page is black, 
basically, with redactions on it, and we have no place to 
appeal to go fight for it. Often we end up FOIA-ing the 
documents, or some outside group does, and they get it and we 
do not, on it. That is absurd on it. But to have a place of 
appeal that is set up, what we were talking about before, would 
be helpful so we are not fighting an agency, saying, ``It is my 
document and I will tell you what is classified and what is 
not.''
    Mr. Fitzpatrick, you are leaning on the button like you 
want to say something.
    Mr. Fitzpatrick. I think you make an excellent point about 
the realm of information control that happens outside of what 
is defined as classified national security information. I was 
smiling at your words because there is not a defined meaning 
for FOUO. Again, to the point Liza made about the post-9/11 
information sharing, connect-the-dots efforts that happened in 
the early 2000s, realizing that the challenge of too much 
information control blinded, perhaps, our ability to see this 
threat coming.
    But the discovery of that as a problem, the study, rather, 
of that as a problem revealed that there are 118 different 
FOUOs. The Bush Administration had some recommendations about 
controlled unclassified information. The Obama Administration 
had a different take that tried to limit the ability of a 
government agency to utilize a control like that and to make 
them more uniform.
    What was discovered in that process, which was to say only 
agencies who have a law, regulation, or governmentwide policy 
can put controls on information, if it says you can control 
this information, only you can do that, the number of times 
that that appears in statute and regulation is far more than 
anybody thought, and the oceans of information that it covers 
is far more than anybody thought. What was hoped to be a 
limiting and a transparency initiative actually uncovered this 
vast ability to control more, or what could be controlled. It 
has not succeeded in releasing more information.
    Senator Lankford. OK. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Lankford.
    Senator Johnson, you are recognized for your questions.

              OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR JOHNSON

    Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Senator Marshall 
brought up the JFK files. I would recommend that anybody that 
is interested in that to read JFK and the Unspeakable by James 
Douglass, and you will find out why the agencies are probably 
still reluctant to actually release more of that information. 
Again, that is information from yesteryear that is important to 
reveal the truth about history.
    I want to talk about information in the here and now, that 
we need to govern action in the here and now, to fix problems 
in the here and now. Let us also set aside classified 
information. Let us talk about unclassified information that we 
do not have access to. Mr. Douglass talked about how Congress 
has willingly given away its classification authority. We have 
also allowed our oversight capabilities to completely atrophy, 
or almost completely atrophy. We have allowed that to happen. 
There is no enforcement mechanism.
    I want to use the example I used yesterday in the Senate 
Finance Committee with Secretary Becerra. I asked him, ``First 
of all, Mr. Secretary, do you think it is important that we 
understand where the coronavirus came from?'' He said, 
``Absolutely.'' I said, ``Is your agency, HHS, are you leading 
an effort to determine that?'' He kind of said some 
gobbledygook and then he said, ``But we are not getting 
cooperation.'' I said, ``Well, interesting you said that. We 
are not getting cooperation from your agency.'' Then I gave him 
a couple of examples.
    There are two areas that the American public can get 
information out of the government. One is FOIA requests, and 
unfortunately that often has to go through a court and have 
that be court-ordered, although it should not be, and then 
through congressional oversight, right? I have two examples of 
both.
    This was a document--these are the famous Anthony Fauci 
emails, OK. Through a FOIA request people got them early, and 
what we did is shortly after we had five Members of this 
Committee--there is actually a law, 5 U.S. Code (USC) 2954, 
that says if five Members of this Committee requested 
information, the government shall provide it. Under that 
statute we wrote the letter. We got this document, OK? This is 
dated February 4th. The classification here is Exception 4, is 
why it is redacted. That has to do with trade secrets or 
confidential commercial or financial information.
    This is the same document recently produced under FOIA, to 
the general public. It is not redacted. Now I know what is 
under the redactions. ``Serial passage in ACE2 transgenic 
mice.'' That is what was covered up. Anthony Fauci with a 
question mark, is going, this is not--February 4th, he is 
already recognizing that maybe the coronavirus came from a lab, 
from experiments with those humanized mice. That was denied 
Congress in our oversight capability.
    A couple of days earlier, a similar type of thing. This is 
what we got in congressional oversight, all redacted. This is 
what was obtained under FOIA request. Again, we can see under 
the redactions now, again, not because the agency gave it to 
us, but because a court ordered it.
    It is interesting. This is classified under Exception 
Number 5, which is deliberative process, inter-or intra-agency 
communications. What is interesting about this email chain, it 
includes Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust. He does not work 
for a U.S. Government agency. You have already blown the 
privilege in terms of confidentiality. Again, they are not 
following the law.
    Through the accommodation process we asked for all 4,000 
pages. We narrowed it down to 400. They would not give them to 
us. They allowed us to read it in a reading room. We could take 
notes, no copies. Over the course of a year, up until about 
January 2022, we got 350 of the 400 pages we requested. Since 
January 2022, we have been fighting tooth and nail for the last 
50 pages.
    This is what the FOIA request got, OK. This is what it 
looks like. OK? There is obviously some important information 
in this last 50 pages, and we cannot get it.
    Now I will say the only reason we got the 350 pages is 
because Chairman Ossoff, to his credit as Chairman of the 
Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation (PSI)--I am Ranking 
Member--signed a request for these documents and then made some 
phone calls to start the process of production to us.
    My message is mainly targeted or directed to Chairman 
Peters and Chairman Blumenthal. Congress has to reclaim its 
oversight capability. We need some kind of enforcement 
mechanism. I would love to pass a law, but again, we have laws 
on the books. They are not complying with the laws. They are 
flagrantly not complying with the laws. But there is no 
enforcement mechanism. They know that. The Administration knows 
that, so this problem just gets worse.
    The only mechanism we have right now is public pressure 
obtained by bipartisan efforts. My plea, Mr. Chairman, is join 
us in these requests for information that the American public 
deserves. There should be nothing partisan about the origin of 
COVID. Our response to COVID occurred under two 
administrations. There is nothing partisan about that. This is 
information the public deserves to know, but also policymakers 
need to know so we can act, so we can fix problems, because I 
do not think anybody can take a look at our response to COVID 
and say it was a dramatic success. No, it was a miserable 
failure.
    Mr. Eddington, the question I have for you is, particularly 
in a political environment, when you have the White House 
controlled by one party and a branch of Congress controlled by 
that same party, If the Administration gives us the middle 
finger there is just no enforcement mechanism. We cannot even 
hold them in contempt. If we are to hold them in contempt, if 
you have a political party in one chamber able to do that, the 
Department of Justice is not going to prosecute that.
    What kind of enforcement mechanism can we have for Congress 
to reclaim its oversight authority?
    Mr. Eddington. Senator Johnson, thank you very much for the 
question. The impeachment mechanism can be used against any 
civil officer of the government, from the President of the 
United States on down to the most lowly general service (GS)-5 
clerk.
    To borrow your paradigm here, one of the things that 
frustrated me when I worked in the House of Representatives was 
learning that when Speaker Pelosi had the opportunity to put an 
end to the Stellar Wind program, the illegal, warrantless 
surveillance program, which FISA Section 702 is the grandchild 
of, she claimed that she had no authority to act, she did not 
have staff in the room, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. She is 
a very bright woman, a very capable woman.
    What I could not understand for the life of me is why she 
did not ask for everybody's business cards. Now you are 
probably wondering why. After she had collected those business 
cards she should have thanked them and said, ``I just needed to 
make sure that I had your names right so I could get them 
spelled correctly by legislative counsel for the impeachment 
resolution that I am going to introduce against you, all of 
you.''
    Respectfully, and I do mean this respectfully, you do have 
a tool, and I would be willing to bet that a certain gentleman 
from Ohio, who happens to be heading up a specific subcommittee 
or committee in the House of Representatives, would probably be 
willing to work with you to begin to incentivize bureaucrats 
within the Executive Branch, to follow the law. That is my 
recommendation, sir.
    Senator Johnson. Thank you, Mr. Eddington.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Senator Johnson.
    Ranking Member Paul has some remaining questions you are 
recognized for.
    Senator Paul. I join Senator Johnson in hoping we can get 
bipartisan requests for records. One of the arguments to do it 
on our side is the records eventually are going to come out on 
the other side, and basically Republicans only are going to 
lead the charge and the explanation and the expose of those 
records. If we were to do it on this side, in a bipartisan way, 
we would be able to access those records, and there would be 
another interpretation, both of us, together or separately, of 
these records. If we have to wait until the other sides gets 
out it will look like we have stonewalled them, they get the 
records, but then it is going to be all basically a Republican 
investigation.
    One other item I just wanted to get to was while we all 
seem to agree on the problem, we all seem to agree on a lot of 
the solutions, the one thing that sometimes divides us is how 
we pay for things, and there was some mention of needing more 
resources. I think that is dollars.
    When we look at this, it is my hope that instead of always, 
we just say, ``We need $10 billion more,'' well, where is 
someplace we could actually take it from? I hope you will think 
about that.
    I think that it was sort of tangentially mentioned, if you 
have a sunset on things that might save some money because you 
do not have to go through a gazillion records because you have 
sunsetted them. We might want to put a dollar aspect on that. 
If we are developing a bill over many months, let us put a 
dollar amount on automatic sunsets and getting through a lot of 
that. That could be a lot of savings that could be freed up to 
go to committee that has to review this, that does not have 
enough resources.
    Also if we classified less on the front end. Now how do you 
get the Executive Branch to classify? One other thought I have 
is that maybe each executive branch that classifies things, it 
should come out of their existing budget. What if the budget of 
HHS--I do not know why they would be classifying things, but if 
HHS wants to classify things maybe they are going to say, ``Oh 
no, it is going to cost me a billion dollars of my budget to do 
it,'' so it is a disincentive to classify. But ways of shifting 
cost as opposed to all being new costs. I am not opposed to 
some cost, but I think if we can take it--we already give a 
gazillion dollars to everybody. Let us try to take something 
they are using inappropriately and make it used appropriately. 
Does anybody have an idea on that? Eliza?
    Ms. Goitein. Yes. I think it is really striking that the 
security classification budgets that agencies have are devoted 
overwhelmingly to classifying and protecting information and 
not to declassifying information. The percentage of those 
budgets that are spent on declassification, the last set of 
statistics that are available I think the percentage was half 
of a percent is spent on declassification.
    One possibility is to require 10 percent of an agency's 
security classification budget to be spent on declassification, 
right there. That not only means more resources for 
declassification, it also means less resources for 
classification. It kind of takes on both.
    I do not think that will be enough. I think there will have 
to be extra resources. But as you have pointed out, I think 
there are enormous savings on the back end of this as well, and 
we have to take that into account.
    Chairman Peters. Thank you, Ranking Member Paul, and I 
agree. I think this is a cost-saving mechanism, although there 
might be some transition cost if we are moving to AI systems, 
machine learning, and we have to explore the pros and cons of 
all of that as well, but you will need some investments. You 
have to sometimes make investment to save money, and as we are 
thinking that through I think is important, so thank you.
    Keep thinking of those ideas. We are all about saving money 
and doing things more efficiently and thoughtful, and we 
appreciate the four of you continuing in this discussion. We 
will aggressively seek you out as we are working on legislation 
in a bipartisan way to accomplish this.
    I want to first off just thank Ranking Member Paul, again, 
for holding this hearing with me here today. I would also like 
to thank all of our witnesses. Thank you for taking time and 
joining us in this very important discussion and for providing 
further insights into how we improve the classification system 
to improve both transparency and efficiency.
    Today our government creates a greater volume and variety 
of classified documents than we ever have in history. As we 
heard from our witnesses, overclassification, outdated 
technology, inefficiencies in declassification all result in 
significant costs to the country, and an outdated 
classification system reduces public trust, inhibits government 
oversight, and threatens, quite frankly, our national security.
    Today's hearing has made clear that investing in 
technology, like artificial intelligence, making classification 
and declassification work more efficiently, and incentivizing 
transparency can restore trust in how the government safeguards 
sensitive information. Additionally, your testimony has shown 
that Congress must take a more active role in the 
classification policy, and as Chairman I am committed to 
working on bipartisan legislation, and I look forward to 
working with Ranking Member Paul on these issues in the coming 
weeks and months.
    The record for this hearing will remain open for 15 days, 
until 5 p.m. on April 7, 2023, for the submission of statements 
and questions for the record. This hearing is now adjourned.
    [Whereupon, at 11:34 a.m., the hearing was adjourned.]

                            A P P E N D I X

                              ----------                              

[GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]

                                 [all]