Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release - April 17, 1995
STATEMENT BY THE PRESIDENT
Today I have signed an Executive order reforming the Government's system of secrecy. The order will lift the veil on millions of existing documents, keep a great many future documents from ever being classified, and still maintain necessary controls over information that legitimately needs to be guarded in the interests of national security.
In issuing this order, I am seeking to bring the system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information into line with our vision of American democracy in the post-Cold War world.
This order strikes an appropriate balance. On the one hand, it will sharply reduce the permitted level of secrecy within our Government, making available to the American people and posterity most documents of permanent historical value that were maintained in secrecy until now.
On the other, the order enables us to safeguard the information that we must hold in confidence to protect our Nation and our citizens. We must continue to protect information that is critical to the pursuit of our national security interests. There are some categories of information for example, the war plans we may employ or the identities of clandestine human assets -- that must remain protected.
This order also will reduce the sizable costs of secrecy -the tangible costs of needlessly guarding documents and the intangible costs of depriving ourselves of the fullest possible flow of information.
This order establishes many firsts: Classifiers will have to justify what they classify; employees will be encouraged and expected to challenge improper classification and protected from retribution for doing 80; and large-scale declassification won't be dependent on the availability of individuals to conduct a line-by-line review. Rather, we will automatically declassify hundreds of millions of pages of information that were classified in the past 50 years.
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