"Controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination"

By Cernig

At the Washington Post today, Walter Pincus cites Newshogger's friend Smintheus (Michael Clark) at DKos as the first to break a story about Bush's latest obsession with secrecy and newspeak.

Bush's memorandum, signed on the eve of his daughter Jenna's wedding, introduced "Controlled Unclassified Information" as a new government category that will replace "Sensitive but Unclassified."

Such information -- though it does not merit the well-known national security classifications "confidential," "secret" or "top secret" -- is nonetheless "pertinent" to U.S. "national interests" or to "important interests of entities outside the federal government," the memo says.

The information could be, for example, the steps taken to protect power plants from terrorists, or which pipelines are most vulnerable to attack.

Left undefined are which laws or policies generated the requirement for protecting such information, and which interests are pertinent. But Bush's memo does refer to the "global nature of the threats facing the United States" and to the need to ensure that the "entire network of defenders be able to share information more rapidly" while protecting "sensitive information, information privacy, and other legal rights of Americans."

The president declared that the purpose of the new classification is "to standardize practices and thereby improve the sharing of information, not to classify or declassify new or additional information." But some critics described it as continuing an expansion of secrecy in government and a potential bureaucratic nightmare.

Michael Clark, a contributing editor to the blog Daily Kos, who first wrote about the Bush memorandum, said the White House "seems to have used the crafting of new rules as an opportunity to expand the range of government secrecy." Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy, described it as a "not even half-baked" exercise in policymaking.

In his own post on the subject, Michael writes:

The new term ('controlled') indicates the intended outcome (i.e. secrecy), whereas the old term ('sensitive') had provided a justification for keeping 'Unclassified' material secret. That suggests immediately that the Bush administration wants the CUI classification to justify itself - to cut off by definition any appeal for publication of a document.

He continues to note that the memo allows policies which "require protection from unauthorized disclosure", as well as information, to be designated as "Controlled" and that while the new classification should only apply to "pertinent" information or polices, no definition of "pertinent" is made.

Nice work, Michael. And very nice to see a blogger get credit from the mainstream.