Strictly Unclassified: Some Thoughts on Secrecy and Openness
A new commentary by Allen Weinstein, Archivist of the United States.

At NARA, we are in the business of assuring access. There can never be a classified aspect to our mission. Classified agreements are the antithesis of our reason for being, and NARA will never again be a party to such agreements.

Our focus is on preserving records and ensuring their availability to the American public while fulfilling the public’s expectation that we will properly safeguard the classified records in our custody. Agencies have the prerogative to classify their requests to NARA if disclosure of the reasons would cause genuine identifiable damage to national security. However, what NARA does in response to such requests and how we do it will always be as transparent as possible.

If any records are removed in the future for defensible reasons of national security, the American people will always, at the very least, know when that occurs and how many records are affected.

Source: NARA’s Prologue (Summer 2006)

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