Washington, DC…The National Archives National Declassification Center (NDC) will host its third public forum on Wednesday, August 29, at 10 a.m. in the William G. McGowan Theater of the National Archives Building in Washington, DC.  This event is free and open to the public.  Please enter via the Special Events entrance on Constitution Ave. and [...]

Recently, the agency updated its Open Government Plan for 2012-2014.  Over the next two years, work around the agency will continue to improve transparency, participation, and collaboration.  NARA will strengthen its culture of open government by focusing on common values and restructuring the agency to better serve the American people.  A new mentoring program will [...]

On Friday, 9 March, I was joined by Director/ISOO John Fitzpatrick and Agency Services Executive Jay Bosanko in a meeting with representatives from OMB and several public interest groups. Although we all discussed several items of interest related to reducing classification and expanding governmental transparency, the majority of our discussion was a give-and-take focused on [...]

Although ISOO does a yeoman’s job of administering MDR appeals, the delay in some cases runs years, and the time elapsed from the original MDR request can amount to more than a decade.  How can this ISCAP appeal process be streamlined? ISOO Response:  The ISOO provides administrative and logistical support to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals [...]

This time, an answer from our colleagues at the Department of Energy (DOE). Would it be possible to prevent the inadvertent disclosure of RD/FRD with a less burdensome review process than that currently required by the Kyl-Lott Amendment?  DOE RESPONSE:  For electronic and microfilm records, certain agencies are looking into the application of recent advances [...]

There were several questions that were submitted for the public forum, but not answered as we ran out of time.  Over the next several days, I will post questions and provide answers from forum participants.  As always, follow-on comments are welcome!  The first question and answer follows: I am concerned that the declassification of State [...]

The National Declassification Center will be holding a declassification conference from November 7 – 10, 2011, at the National Archives II at College Park.  The theme of the conference is “Releasing and Protecting National Security Information through Declassification.”  The conference is in keeping with the NDC’s mandate to develop effective, transparent, and standard declassification work [...]

Quality control review is one of the most important parts of the NDC process. In the early days of Executive Order 12958, agencies began to expand review programs to ensure that sensitive information was not released when the automatic declassification deadline arrived. To accomplish their goals, programs were established before sufficient government wide equity recognition [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post, the biggest interagency issue related to the new process was to follow the President’s direction, issued in a memo that accompanied Executive Order 13526 (http://www.archives.gov/isoo/pdf/implementing-memo.pdf), and apply risk management to the declassification process. So why is risk management needed? First, we need to examine who is performing the [...]