§6232 Protection Against Inadvertent Release of Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data

Summary

Require the Secretary of Energy and the Archivist to create a plan, after talking with members of the National Security Council and consulting the Secretary of Defense and other agency heads, to stop accidentally releasing nuclear Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data during automatic declassification. The plan must say that records will be checked page-by-page unless they are clearly unlikely to contain such data, describe how to decide a record is unlikely, set rules for training and supervising people who do the reviews, say how and when automated tools will be used, explain how the Secretary of Energy (with the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives) will check agency compliance, provide a way to settle agency disputes, list needed money and staff, and give a schedule for putting the plan into action. Starting October 17, 1998, agencies must review records page-by-page before declassifying them to make sure no Restricted Data or Formerly Restricted Data appears. If such data is found, the Secretary of Energy and the agency head must agree before the record can be declassified. Sixty days after the plan is sent to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, the page-by-page rule does not apply to records the plan labels as highly unlikely to contain those data. The Secretary of Energy must send the plan to the two Armed Services Committees and the President’s national security assistant, report past accidental releases before October 17, 1998, and then report every even-numbered year starting in 2010 on any accidental releases found in the prior two years.