Twenty years ago, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission made headlines by announcing a plan to throw into the Potomac River all the rubber stamps used by his agency. He said that this was the only effective way to eliminate the stamping of documents as confidential.
A similar pronouncement today might not generate the same degree of publicity. Instead, it might bring a citation from the Environmental Protection Agency for illegal dumping.
Regardless, rubber stamps are rather old-fashioned in the computer era. The same designations can be added in a variety of ways through word processors.
The stamping of agency documentsvia ink or inkjetis one of those low-level but persistent practices of bureaucracies. One descriptive term for the practice is administrative markings. An administrative marking is a sign, stamp or similar designation that characterizes the nature of information in a document. An unpublished congressional study from the late 1970s found more than 100 markings in use in the federal government.
Administrative markings generally become invisible in a practical sense. Documents with markings circulate all the time. But like background music or hallway clutter, their very ubiquity makes most people fail to take much notice of them.
The most importantand requiredmarkings are those for national security documents. Under Executive Order 12958 on security classification, documents classified as being in the interest of foreign policy or national defense must be marked confidential, secret or top secret.
But even the national security markings lose their effectiveness. Over the years, I have heard from high-ranking officials that their secretaries make the decisions about the classification levels for documents.
Sometimes, a document is classified at the highest level only because no one will read it otherwise. The classification system is greatly abused.
Still, at least there are published rules about the use of security classification markings. Most other agency markings are usually undefined and have little common meaning. My favorite is limited official use. The reader who notices that marking has no idea what can or cannot be done with the document.
I recently had a chance to review the marking policies and practices for a small federal agency. About two dozen different markings were in use, some based on statutory requirements, some on executive orders and some made up by agency personnel. The result was low-level but persistent confusion about usage and meaning. Interestingly, many officials in the agency said they would welcome a formal policy.
Here are a few thoughts about what a policy for administrative markings should try to accomplish:
The release of a record will be decided on at the time of the request. A carefully marked document may still be released and an unmarked document may still be withheld.
In the Pentagon Papers case, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart wrote, When everything is classified, then nothing is classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless.
That is surely also true of all administrative markings.
Robert Gellman, former chief counsel to the House Government Operations Subcommittee on Information, Justice, Transportation and Agriculture, is a Washington privacy and information policy consultant. His e-mail address is [email protected].
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