Sept. 24 Daily News editorial

The Obama administration rolled out a new policy Wednesday that will make it more difficult for the government to derail lawsuits by invoking state secrets privilege. Beginning Oct. 1, a panel of Justice Department lawyers will have to be persuaded that state secrets are genuinely at risk before the government could claim this privilege, according to Washington Post writer Carrie Johnson. The new policy also raises the standard for state secrets to information that, if released, would cause significant harm to “national defense or foreign relations.”

The state secrets privilege currently can be invoked with the approval of just one Justice Department official, and with little or no evidence presented to indicate that release of the information involved would compromise national security. Rarely have the courts rejected claims of state secrets privilege, allowing lawsuits to go forward.

One noteworthy instance when a court did push back came earlier in a lawsuit brought by five men who said they were flown to a secret CIA prisons overseas for harsh interrogations. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco rejected the governments claim, noting that the Justice Department wanted to prevent even the judges from reviewing the information, “immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law.” That ruling prompted the administration to take a hard look at the government’s use of the state secrets privilege, according to the Post’s Johnson, leading to the new policy announced Wednesday.

The policy brings a welcome measure of accountability to a process that has long been open to abuse. It represents a commendable step toward more government transparency. But it’s a very small step.

The bigger problem, with regard to government transparency, is the largely unchecked authority of literally thousands of bureaucrats to wield classification stamps. They easily are producing new secrets many times faster than a relatively few personnel assigned the task of reviewing classified documents can make public old secrets. The result is a mountain of secrets — many 50 or more years old — which grows by the day.

Ted Gup, author of “Nation of Secrets: The Threat to Democracy and the American Way of Life,” calculated that the government created a staggering 14.2 million secrets in 2005 alone — a figure that works out to 1,600 new secrets every hour, night and day, throughout the year. Securing those secrets cost as much as $7.7 billion a year, according to Gup.

The dollar cost of growing and maintaining this mountain of secrets is a small concern. It’s toll excessive secrecy takes on government transparency and the risks it poses for national security that should concern us the most. Yes, unchecked classification of information in the name of national security can be a threat to our security. That was among the conclusions of the September 11 Commission. Members of the panel warned that the sheer volume of secrets, along with the many levels of classification and “need-to-know” safeguards, often rendered good intelligence useless.

The September 11 Commission proposed a remedy. It would seem a simple but effective way to rein in the great number of federal bureaucrats who daily classify information — create an independent body that would have final world on all classification decisions. In 2005, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced legislation that would create that body. Perhaps it’s time Congress took another, more serious look at Wyden’s proposal.