A bipartisan group of senators introduced two pieces of legislation on Wednesday that would make major changes to the security classification system in an effort to classify less material and tighten access to the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA), John Cornyn (R-TX), Ron Wyden (D-OR), and Jerry Moran (R-KS) introduced the legislation in an effort to reform the classification system after members of the Senate Intelligence Committee have struggled to conduct oversight of the mishandling of classified documents by President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, and former Vice President Mike Pence.
MARK WARNER SAYS US SHOULD ‘CLASSIFY LESS’ FOLLOWING CLASSIFIED DOCUMENT LEAK
Lawmakers only recently received access to the trove of documents after pushing for months to learn more about the items seized by the Justice Department, which maintains the existence of special counsels in the Trump and Biden cases limited its ability to share information with Congress. The DOJ has also argued the nature of the sensitive information could compromise the investigation.
The senators also aim to combat leaks of sensitive and highly classified material with specific provisions in a separate bill after a 21-year-old serviceman was accused of leaking classified information about the war in Ukraine into a chat on the encrypted communications platform Discord. It then made its way onto other social media platforms.
“We’ve got a byzantine, bizarre, bureaucratic system that has not kept up with the times, has not moved at all with digitalization,” said Warner, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, at a press conference on Wednesday. “So, consequently, we continue to over classify huge amounts of information, while at the same time not fully protecting our nation’s most important secrets.”
The Classification Reform Act of 2023 would designate the director of national intelligence as the main point person for classification and declassification. Currently, there’s no one in charge of classification, and decisions are made across individual agencies. The bill would ensure information only remains classified when the harm to national security outweighs the public risk. It would enforce a maximum 25-year period for classification and would only allow agency heads or the president to extend classification protections beyond that duration. It would tax agencies based on how many classified records they generate and require a security review of presidential and vice presidential records to ensure classified documents are not marked as personal records. The legislation would also require minimum standards for executive branch insider threats programs, in an effort to prevent future leaks.
“It would make sure that there is an insider threat common standard across the communities,” Warner said in response to a question from the Washington Examiner about how the legislation would prevent leaks of classified material. “There are ways you can make sure you monitor how many copies are being made. There are ways to make sure people are not walking off with documents.”
“It goes to the point that basically everybody has made, if you have by default virtually everything classified, that the ability to keep that level of security high goes down,” Warner added.
The Sensible Classification Act of 2023 will organize classification authority, dedicate more resources to declassifying materials, invest in new technology to improve the classification system, and evaluate the number of existing security clearances with sufficient justification.
“I just want to mention a more fundamental reason why we need to review our classification and declassification process, our democracy,” Cornyn said during the press conference. “Our ability to govern ourselves depends on the public getting access to information about what our government is doing and what government officials are doing.”
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, Congress enacted reforms to cut through intelligence silos and ensure that information-sharing was occurring across federal agencies. But the group of senators said the federal government has yet to modernize the system, which is affecting the information-sharing process.
“Even after the records no longer meet the requirements for classification, they just keep piling up and piling up and never see the light of day,” Wyden said. “Sometimes, the agencies can’t find the records. Sometimes, they are hampered by the fact that the systems don’t talk to each other. Get this. The result is in 2023, documents actually have to be printed out and walked around town to get everybody to sign off before they are classified. So, we are not even in the right century with respect to technology on these crucial issues.”
The senators said officials at the White House have been made aware of the bill and admitted there are elements of the bill that likely could frustrate them.
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“There will be some parts of the [intelligence community] that may have consternation, and we know we are being pretty aggressive here, but this is a debate whose time has come,” Warner said.
Warner said they have not had in-depth discussions with their counterparts in the House on the legislation and whether they intend to introduce a companion bill in the lower chamber.
