Rethinking the origins of national security classification

Abstract This article reconstructs the bureaucratic and legal processes that culminated in the creation of the modern national security classification system in Executive Order No. 10,290, issued by Harry Truman in 1951. It argues that classification was shaped by processes of improvisation endogenous to the federal bureaucracy, which produced the problems of overclassification, definitional vagueness, and ambiguous constitutional status that have haunted the secrecy regime until the present. In so doing, it provides new insight into the development of the modern presidency, the national security state, and American democracy, and suggests possible paths to reform the contemporary pathologies of the classification system.