DATE: Monday, March 10, 1997                TAG: 9703080007

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B8   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Editorial 

                                            LENGTH:   47 lines

MAKE SECRECY EXPENSIVE< A COMMISSION DEMANDING LESS SECRECY MUST CHANGE THE INCENTIVES.

A federal commission on information classified by the government has concluded that ``a culture of secrecy'' prevails. It causes far too many documents to be stamped ``secret'' and filed forever.

No joke, Sherlock, one is tempted to respond. But commission chairman Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., puts an interesting spin on the issue by noting that this represents an insidious case of oppressive - and expensive - intellectual regulation. Instead of government telling us what we can do, it tells us what we can know. But changing the culture won't be easy.

President Clinton issued an executive order that was supposed to take effect last year. Documents more than 25 years old are to be automatically declassified by the year 2000. But the Defense Department and the CIA, which between them account for 83 percent of the 1.5 billion affected documents, have declassified less than 5 percent of the promised number.

The impetus is on the side of classifying. There is no penalty for doing so. Three million government employees have the power to keep secrets, and a better-in-the-safe-than-sorry attitude is inevitable.

To turn matters around, the commission recommends an independent office to decide what should be classified, a national declassification apparatus and a 10-year life span for classified documents unless it can be shown that declassification would cause ``demonstrable harm.''

Such steps might work, or they might produce only a new layer of bureaucracy and further wheel-spinning. Somehow, the incentives must be made to work in favor of less secrecy, not more. At present, the cost of classifying is hidden, but the cost of declassifying is obvious - in manpower if nothing else.

So agencies regard classifying a document as free, and leaving it that way as cheaper than declassifying. An alternative would be a declassification fee levied not at the end of the process but whenever a document was stamped secret. If agencies had to pay for every secret they made, there'd be fewer of them.

And far fewer people should have the power to hide government actions from public scrutiny. As commission member Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., noted, many government secrets are created not to protect national security but to ``protect national security officials from embarrassment and inquiry.''

Until there are penalties or costs associated with making secrets, the practice will continue.

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