|
The Commission on Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy, also called the Moynihan Secrecy Commission, after its chairman, U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was a bipartisan statutory commission in the United States. It was created under Title IX of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act for Fiscal Years 1994 and 1995 (P.L. 103-236 SEC. 900) to conduct "an investigation into all matters in any way related to any legislation, executive order, regulation, practice, or procedure relating to classified information or granting security clearances" and to submit a final report with recommendations. The Commission's investigation of government secrecy was the first authorized by statute since the Wright Commission on Government Security issued its report in 1957. The Commission issued its unanimous final report on March 3, 1997. ==Key findings== The Commission's key findings were: *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 operation 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. 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." 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. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Moynihan Commission on Government Secrecy」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|