Secrecy is a form of government regulation.

Excessive secrecy has significant consequences for the national interest when policy makers are not fully informed, the government is not held accountable for its actions, and the public cannot engage in informed debate.

Some secrecy is important to minimize inappropriate diffusion of details of weapon systems design and ongoing security operations as well as to allow public servants to secretly consider a variety of policy options without fear of criticism.

The best way to ensure that secrecy is respected, and that the most important secrets remain secret, is for secrecy to be returned to its limited but necessary role. Secrets can be protected more effectively if secrecy is reduced overall.

Apart from aspects of nuclear energy subject to the Atomic Energy Act, secrets in the federal government are whatever anyone with a stamp decides to stamp secret. This inevitably produces problems where even the President of the United States may make mistakes that might have been avoided with a more open system.

A new statute is needed to set forth the principles for what may be declared secret.

The Commission's key findings were:


Senator Moynihan reported that approximately 400,000 new secrets are created annually at the highest level, Top Secret. That level is defined by law as applying to any secret that, were it to become public, would cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security."1 In 1994, it was estimated that the United States government had over 1.5 billion pages of classified material that were at least 25 years old.


In 1995 President Bill Clinton's Executive Order 12958 updated the national security classification and declassification system. This Executive Order established a system to automatically declassify information more than 25 years old, unless the government took discrete steps to continue the classification of a particular document or group of documents.

Chairman.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Vice Chairman; Congressman from the 19th district of Texas.

Larry Combest

former CIA Director.

John M. Deutch

. Mr, former Director of the National Reconnaissance Office and Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space.

Martin C. Faga

Director of Missile Defense Programs in the Washington Operations Office of the Space and Strategic Missiles Sector of Lockheed Martin Corporation.

Alison B. Fortier

career foreign service officer in the U.S. Department of State.

Richard K. Fox

Ranking Democratic Member of the House International Relations Committee.

Lee H. Hamilton

former Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Jesse Helms

Ellen Hume, Executive Director of PBS's .

Democracy Project

. Harvard Professor, Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies and Chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; author of the Clash of Civilizations.

Samuel P. Huntington

Clinton White House Deputy Chief of Staff.

John Podesta

member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB).

Maurice Sonnenberg

Cold War secrecy[edit]

The Commission findings regarding government secrecy in the early Cold War period have led to a reevaluation of many public perceptions regarding the period. By 1950, the United States government was in possession of information which the American public did not know: proof of a serious attack on American security by the Soviet Union, with considerable assistance from an enemy within. Soviet authorities knew the U.S. government knew. Only the American people were denied this information.2


One revelation of the Venona project intercepts is that many Americans who spied for the Soviet Union were never prosecuted. To do so the government would have to reveal what it knew.3 On 29 May 1946, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a high administration official a memorandum reporting "an enormous Soviet espionage ring in Washington." Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson was (falsely) at the top of the list. Truman distrusted Hoover and suspected Hoover of playing political games. Acheson's inclusion at the top of the list automatically discredited other accusations which were on target, Alger Hiss and Nathan Gregory Silvermaster.[1] In late August or early September 1947, the Army Security Agency informed the FBI it had begun to break into Soviet espionage messages. Truman had never been told of the existence of the Venona project, and always insisted Republicans had trumped up the loyalty issue for political gain.


The prosecutors in the internal-security cases of the 1940s did not know they had not been given all, or even the best government evidence, against the Rosenbergs, and others. The Venona project materials would have been conclusive in establishing the cast of characters in the Soviet spy networks.5 Government secrecy allowed critics of the Rosenberg and Hiss cases to construct elaborate theories about frame-ups and cover-ups. For years the Rosenbergs' defenders demanded that the government reveal its secrets about the case. When Secrecy Commission forced the disclosure of documents, the secrets revealed the government's case was even stronger.6 "Over the years," said Ronald Radosh, "the Rosenbergs' defenders have loudly demanded the release of government documents on the case, only to deny the documents' significance once they are made public."7 As archives of the Cold War are opened, the original case made against Soviet espionage in the United States has received ever more conclusive corroboration.8

Testimony of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate Hearing on Government Secrecy, 7 May 1997.

^1

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience, (New Haven: Yale University Press 1998), pg. 54.

^5

Ibid, pg. 62.

^6

Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, The Rosenberg File, 2d ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pgs. 471–72.

^7

Moynihan, Secrecy, pg. 52.

^8

Ibid, pg. 62.

^9

Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 233–34; Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Economy and Society), 1922.

^11

Statement of Sen. Daniel Moynihan before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, 26 July 2000

P.L. 103-236; April 30, 1994.

Commission's Authorizing Statute

Moynihan Commission Report