The 'Instruction' issued on Friday should not be confused with halfhearted attempts by prior administrations to convince Americans there is actually adequate oversight performed at the DoD on a regular basis.
From the 'Instruction' (warning: PDF file)
a. OSD, the Military Departments, the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Joint Staff, the Combatant Commands, OIG DoD, the Defense Agencies, the DoD Field Activities, and all other organizational entities within the DoD (referred to collectively in this instruction as the “DoD Components”).
Statement from the Pentagon:
“The OIG must have expeditious and unrestricted access to all records…, regardless of classification, medium (e.g. paper, electronic) or format (e.g., digitized images, data) and information available to or within any DoD Component, and be able to obtain copies of all records and information as required for its official use once appropriate security clearances and access are substantiated for the OIG DoD personnel involved,” the instruction states. See “Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense Access to Records and Information,” DoD Instruction 7050.03, March 22, 2013.
The fundamental differences in the new policy are stark. Up till now, oversight attempts could easily be circumvented by inter-department agency heads or their staff by simply ordering classified information stored on media types not made accessible to inspectors in previous instructions. Now, as long as OIG inspectors have the proper security clearance; no one outside the SecDef himself is permitted to block access of any media or material to inspectors, for any reason.
That is very different from years past.
By stressing that the Inspector General’s access is independent of a record’s classification, medium or format, this language elaborates and bolsters the text of a previous version of the instruction, which did not make those distinctions.
Furthermore, the new instruction specifies, “No officer, employee, contractor, or Service member of any DoD Component may deny the OIG DoD access to records.” Only the Secretary of Defense may invoke a statutory exemption to limit IG access to certain intelligence, counterintelligence, or other sensitive matters, which he must then justify in a report to Congress.
Moreover, inspectors and other agency officials are now permitted to review and make changes to the classification system itself. Even now, functional definitions of the terms "over-classification" and "misclassification" are nonexistent. However, perhaps now, those distinctions can finally be worked out between the SecDef, various DoD agency heads, and Congress. According to the instruction, the first evaluation is due on September 30th of this year.
In fact, the Inspector General of each executive branch agency that classifies national security information is now required by the Reducing Over-Classification Act of 2010 to evaluate the agency’s classification program. Each Inspector General was directed “to identify policies, procedures, rules, regulations, or management practices that may be contributing to persistent misclassification of material.”
Incidentally, the Department of Defense is the most prolific classifier in the U.S. government.
To me, this is huge, folks. Huge.. HUGE.
The story's @ the FAS Project on Government Secrecy.