Analysis: Push to open government elevates risk of data leaks

The Obama Administration's push to make government data more open and easily accessible is elevating the need for standardized data classification and information management approaches across federal agencies, security experts say.

Without such standards, federal agencies run a higher risk of accidentally exposing protected data in their rush to comply with the President's mandate for greater transparency and open government, they said.

The caution comes in the wake of a recent incident where the U.S Government Printing Office accidentally published on its Web site a document containing sensitive but unclassified information on dozens of U.S. civilian nuclear sites. The 267-page document had been compiled as part of a report being prepared by the federal government for the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA. It had been marked as "Highly Confidential Safeguards Sensitive," by none other than President Obama.

The reason it had been published was probably because the GPO had a different process for handling sensitive but unclassified (SBU) documents than the agency that handed it to them, said Karen Evans, former de facto CIO of the federal government.

SBU documents are those that are considered sensitive enough to merit some level of protection from disclosure but not that sensitive as to merit a classified status. A large number of government documents presently fall under this category.

Because each agency has its own process for defining, labeling and protecting SBU information, there is little consistency in the way federal agencies handle such data, sometimes even internally, Evans said. Currently, there are 107 unique markings and more than 130 different handling processes and procedures for SBU information. That can create unexpected problems given the current push towards greater information sharing among agencies and the open-government movement, she said.

As part of his promise to reverse some of the secrecy and over-classification of data by the previous administration, the President has been pushing agencies to make data more accessible to the public. His administration has also been urging agencies to use Web 2.0 tools, blogs and social networking services such as Facebook, and Twitter for pushing out unfiltered information to the public.

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