Yesterday, POLITICO’s Brian Bender reported on a new Biden administration effort to “pierce the veil” of excessive federal government secrecy. The mechanism: a new National Security Council-led initiative to reform America’s insanely broad and totally dysfunctional system of classifying and declassifying U.S. government records.

The “both sides” tone of much of Bender’s piece–that declassification advocates have points in their favor, but government bureaucrats have legitimate concerns too–is emblematic of the kind of lazy reporting on this issue that makes it seem like just another inside-the-Beltway dust-up that has no actual impact on people outside of Washington. The truth is that at best, government secrecy fosters waste, inefficiency, and gross mismanagement at taxpayer expense. At its worst, our secrecy system provides a shield for criminal conduct, including murder or deaths that otherwise could have been prevented.

Let’s talk about the former first.

In 2017, Cato initiated Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation over documents regarding two cancelled National Security Agency (NSA) programs, codenamed THINTHREAD and TRAILBLAZER, respectively. The backstory is that by the early- to mid-1990s, NSA was confronting the fact that its traditional, analog signal-based collection and analysis systems were being overtaken by the digital communications revolution. Two approaches to problem emerged–one championed by a small, internal NSA team in the Signals Automation Research Center (SARC), the other by then-NSA Director Michael Hayden.

The SARC team had built from scratch a new and revolutionary digital network exploitation system called THINTHREAD. The SARC’s creation could ingest huge volumes of digital data, sort out potential real threat data from the rest of the message traffic, and encrypt anything involving the communications of Americans possibly involved with a hostile foreign power prior to seeking a probable cause-based warrant to decrypt the suspect communications for possible FBI investigative follow up. The THINTHREAD prototype was created for a mere $3 million, according to program participants I and others have previously interviewed.

TRAIBLAZER, in contrast, was a system to be built and operated by defense contractor SAIC (now Leidos). As the documents obtained by Cato via the FOIA litigation demonstrated, TRAILBLAZER not only never worked, it cost the American taxpayer nearly $700 million as of late 2006. The final price tag was likely far more, but NSA has never released the full set of documents about the TRAILBLAZER debacle.

Why does all of this matter? Because as Cato’s FOIA litigation also demonstrated, the THINTHREAD prototype was a success–and had it been fully fielded as Congress directed in late 2000, it’s very likely the 9/11 attacks would’ve been prevented, and the lives of nearly 3000 Americans saved.

And the issue of lives lost brings me to my second real-world example of the pernicious costs of American government secrecy: the Chelsea Manning whistleblower case and the ongoing U.S. government legal war against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.

As I’ve noted previously, at issue in Chelsea Manning’s leak of U.S. Army video footage of an AH-64 Apache gunship attack on Iraqi civilians and Western journalists in Baghdad in 2007 is the fact that the video was classified SECRET. The attack was a war crime, and the fact that the Army classified the video to try to prevent its release was done in violation of Executive Order 13526, Section 1.7(a) of which expressly forbids misusing the classification system to conceal criminal conduct. Yet nobody in the Army has ever been held accountable for misusing the classification system to conceal that war crime, and therein lies the key problem: EO 13526, like any other executive order, can be enforced or not at the discretion of the executive branch.

Unmentioned in Bender’s piece is any suggestion that it should be a federal felony for any U.S. government official to knowingly classify a document to conceal waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, or criminal conduct. But that is exactly one of the real reforms that’s needed to prevent the kinds of abuses noted above. If history is any guide, the impetus for such a change will have to come from Congress.

Indeed, the past major success in declassification efforts have started with House and Senate members who cared deeply about the issue. In the case of records relating to President Kennedy’s assassination, it was the late Senator John Glenn (D‑OH). And thanks to Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D‑NY) and then-Senator (now Governor) Mike DeWine (R‑OH), Nazi and Imperial Japanese government war crimes records finally came to light.

Whether one or more new Congressional champions of classification reform and bulk declassification of historical records emerges will be a better indicator of the chances of real change in this area than any executive branch-driven process, one that will likely allow security state bureaucrats to sabotage the effort before it really begins.