A deluge of electronic records is taking a toll on the government’s mostly pen-and-paper system for declassifying records: that’s the big takeaway of a report to the president from the National Archives and Records Administration’s Information Security Oversight Office.
ISOO reports in recent years have spelled out variations of the same warning — that the government’s recordkeeping for secret and sensitive documents has reached a breaking point, and that it can’t keep pace with what director Mark Bradley has called a “tsunami” of electronic records.
The office’s annual reports have also reiterated the same solution: replacing aging IT systems and automating more of the redaction process to help employees keep up with a demanding workload.