
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 5, 1990                   TAG: 9004040982
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Short

REPORT: U.S. CUTS BACK ON SECRETS

After seven years of trying, the government thinks it finally has an accurate count of how many secrets it creates: 6.8 million a year.

That's a 35 percent decrease from the previous count, but nearly all the drop came when the Navy decided it really didn't originate more secrets than the rest of the government put together.

It's still just an estimate but it appears that the "top secret," "secret" and "confidential" stamps were wielded 6,796,501 times in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30.

"It appears that this unprecedented drop is primarily the result of more accurate counting, rather than an actual tremendous decrease in classification activity," said Steven Garfinkel, who heads the Information Security Oversight Office, created in 1982 when then-President Reagan rewrote all the rules for classifying documents.

In his annual report to President Bush, released Tuesday, Garfinkel praised the Navy for finally figuring out what he has been trying to count each year.

The government doesn't actually count its secrecy decisions each year. It samples the number of times some offices decide to classify information. Then it projects those numbers to reflect the number of decisions in all offices.

by CNB