INTERNET ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS RELATED TO ACTIVITIES OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Congressional, Public and Intergovernmental Affairs
Media Contact: Joanna Stancil
(202) 586-5806
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Human Resources and Administration
Program Contact: Douglas Bielan
(202) 586-8010
The Department of Energy is committed to maximizing public access to information about Departmental activities. The expanded use of the Internet is among the most effective initiatives. In addition to general organizational and mission-oriented information, topics available within the Department of Energy's Home Page cover a range of special initiatives.
SPECIFICALLY
- The Department established a "Department of Energy Home Page" on the World Wide Web in 1994; it contains click-on icons for accessing 28 distinct Home Pages representing various elements of the Department. Subsequently, the Department has added Home Pages for 9 separate program offices, 7 laboratories or mission-unique facilities, and 9 "special projects," making a total of 53 primary Home Pages available to the public. The Department of Energy Home Page can be found at http://www.doe.gov.
- The 53 primary locations contain a multitude of topic or document specific pages, files, and
databases with enough information to fill a large library several times over. All the information is
accessible through the Department of Energy Home Page, and more is being added every day.
Some examples of these are:
- OpenNet, which provides access to a database of recently declassified documents;
- Corporate documents and reports such as the Department's Strategic Alignment Initiative;
- The National Energy Policy Plan;
- Opportunities for industry, such as the Technology Transfer/Industrial Competitiveness program;
- Procurement information;
- The Department's National Environmental Policy Act Web Home Page which provides environmental analysis, tools, and links to other environmental activities required under the Act; and
- The Human Radiation Experiments Database.
- In October, the Department linked the Openness Initiative Home Page with the overall Departmental Home Page on the World Wide Web. The linkage supports the Secretary's commitment to the public to make declassified information as publicly accessible as possible.
- To improve and simplify discovery and access to the myriad of resources within the Department of Energy complex, an information locator function is being added to the Department of Energy Home Page. The information locator is part of the Administration's National Information Infrastructure initiative to provide the public with a Government Information Locator Service.
- Internet Department of Energy Home Page access has been, or is being, provided at all Department of Energy Reading Rooms so that the public can browse electronically as well as use hard copy resources.
BENEFITS
- Presence on the Internet vastly expands accessibility, which was previously limited to local libraries and reading rooms. Since its inception, the Department of Energy Home Page has quickly grown to more than 25,000 customer entries per month representing use of nearly 500,000 information segments.
- Specific topical Home Pages allow focused research by interested citizens. For example, the Home Page for human radiation experiments contains more than 250,000 pages of scanned historical documents, which are accessible through a full text search, allowing unprecedented access to important historical information.
- The public will have access to Government information locators that will provide a "virtual card catalog" of holdings within the Department of Energy. These locators will also provide assistance on how to access that information. The goal of the Department's effort, and of the Government Information Locator Service effort overall, is to make existing information more readily available to the public.
WHO ARE THE KEY STAKEHOLDERS?
- The Public. Concerned citizens are able to investigate topics of interest and gain desired information. A better informed citizenry can more knowledgeably participate with the Department in the provision of quality service to the nation.
- The Department of Energy and the United States Government Employees. Employees of the Department of Energy and the Government as a whole will benefit from database automation and access, as well as from improved feedback from a well-informed citizenry.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. What sort of computer work station configuration do I need to use the World Wide Web?
A. To use the Web effectively, a computer user will need communications access to the Internet, an application known as a "Web Browser," and several "Helper" applications.
Q. What kinds of access to the Internet are available?
A. The most common form of access to the Internet is through local area networks, which simplify the access process by providing a common "gateway" that is shared by all users of the network. For people who do not have access to a local area network, a modem can be used to access an Internet service provider who makes a gateway available for a fee. Using a high speed modem (at least 14,400 bytes per second) and a special Internet protocol communications program, individuals can dial into the service provider's network, which provides "as available" Internet access.
Q. What does the "Web Browser" application provide?
A. A Web Browser is a computer application that provides a visual interface to information contained on the World Wide Web and allows for navigation among the locations on the Web. Browsers are available both commercially (Netscape) and as free software (Mosaic). Browsers are available for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX work stations. In addition to letting you view information and navigate, a browser provides the capability to address specific Web sites, save information on your computer, print information, save Web site addresses, and perform other useful functions.
Q. What do the "Helper" applications provide?
A. Helper applications add utility to browser applications such as viewing graphics, expanding compressed files, viewing animations, and listening to sound files. The specific applications vary from computer to computer and are generally free or available at low cost, and, in most cases, are obtained via the World Wide Web.
Q. What does the Department of Energy provide on the World Wide Web?
A. The Department of Energy has dozens of sites on the World Wide Web representing program offices, laboratories, special projects, and the myriad of activities the Department undertakes as part of its mission. Access to the sites can be achieved through the Department's Home Page, whose address is http://www.doe.gov.
Q. What is the Government Information Locator Service?
A. The Government Information Locator Service is an initiative sponsored by the National Information Infrastructure Task Force in order to make information more readily available to the public. As directed by the Office of Management and Budget, Federal Departments and Agencies are required to generate a locator service that provides "pointers" to information and resources throughout the Government.
Q. What is contained in the Government Information Locator Service?
A. The Government Information Locator Service records will give basic background information about available resources, not access to the resources themselves. Information contained in the Government Information Locator Service records includes a title, a brief description, the organizational owner of the information, a point of contact, and several cross references.
Q. How can people get access to the Government Information Locator Service?
A. The Government Information Locator Service requirements stress the use of electronic media to distribute the information. To that end, the Department will be publishing its Government Information Locator Service records on the World Wide Web as part of the Department of Energy Home Page, http://www.doe.gov. Information dissemination organizations within the Government, such as the Government Printing Office, will also act as intermediaries in distributing Government Information Locator Service information.
Q. Is it difficult to use the computers at the Department of Energy Reading Rooms to search for information?
A. No. Assistance is available from the staff at the Reading Rooms.
Q. How can I get access to declassified Department of Energy documents if I do not have direct access to the Internet and, therefore, to OpenNet?
A. If you have access to a Department of Energy Reading Room, it can provide you with access to the OpenNet through its computers. If there is no Department of Energy Reading Room near you, you may get in touch through a local library, college, university, or school; such institutions frequently have computer facilities with access to the Internet. Alternatively, if you know the material you are seeking, you can call a Department Reading Room, a Public Affairs office, or the Office of Declassification at Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to find out how to obtain the specific material.
DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY RESEARCHES USE OF ADVANCED COMPUTING FOR DOCUMENT DECLASSIFICATION
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Congressional, Public, and Intergovernmental Affairs
Media Contact: Barbara Wetherell
(202) 586-5806
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Nonproliferation and National Security
Program Contact: A. Bryan Siebert
(301) 903-3521
The Department of Energy has hundreds of millions of pages of classified documents which are being reviewed in order to release information that is no longer classified. The current system of reviewing these documents is a manual system that is slow, tedious, labor intensive, and inefficient. The Declassification Productivity Initiative combines the efforts of several contractor organizations, national laboratories, and academic institutions to seek new ways in which to apply technology to improve the speed, accuracy and efficiency of the review process. The work is now developing automated tools to accelerate the delivery of reviewed and declassified documents. In addition, progress is being coordinated with the work of other Government Agencies to develop cooperative efforts to share information and eliminate duplication. In the process, the Declassification Productivity Initiative is supporting the development of computer standards to make declassification automation systems and tools compatible throughout the Government.
SPECIFICALLY
- The Declassification Productivity Initiative, by studying the declassification process, will assist in developing process improvements that will maximize the efficiency of our manual system. It will also simultaneously gather information on the way a human reviewer thinks about and processes a declassification. This knowledge is critical to building more advanced automation tools for future enhancements to our system.
- The Declassification Productivity Initiative is conducting applied research in cooperation with academic institutions and private organizations specializing in the fields of linguistics, computerized document capture and transformation into machine readable formats (scanning), knowledge based systems, and systems engineering.
- The Declassification Productivity Initiative responds to recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences which recently published its findings on the overall Department of Energy declassification effort. These recommendations call for improvements in the use of automation tools to: accelerate the release of information to the public, develop more effective handling methods (i.e., reduce the amount of physical handling of paper documents); and to experiment with "artificial intelligence" as a screening tool to identify documents that might contain classified material.
- The Office of Declassification is developing a prototype computer system to assist reviewers in document declassification by detecting sensitive text information that may contain classified information. This Text Analysis Project, developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is based on demonstrated laboratory technology and has shown encouraging results in differentiating between classified and unclassified text.
- The Office of Declassification formed the Declassification Productivity Research Center, located at the George Washington University, to serve as the focal point for collecting and sharing information on the full range of topics related to technologies and research applicable to the automation of declassification and automated document processing.
- The Office of Declassification is aware that similar declassification automation efforts are underway at other Government Agencies. The office has therefore begun a campaign under the Declassification Productivity Initiative to establish a basis for sharing ideas and research thereby saving limited research and development funds. One of the leading components of this work is to develop a set of computer data standards to be used within the Government that will ensure data compatibility for declassification actions across all of the Government.
BACKGROUND
- The current Department of Energy document declassification process requires an extensive independent manual review by two highly trained reviewers, each an expert in nuclear technology. Manually reviewing each document and, where necessary, removing or sanitizing the classified material from a paper document is very time consuming and has a high potential for human error. In addition, many documents must be reviewed by more than one Agency. This necessitates transferring copies of the paper documents with high administrative costs for packaging and shipping.
- The Office of Declassification has previously applied automation technology to the development of searchable classification guides. This tool has become an invaluable resource to the declassification reviewers of the Department of Energy.
- The Declassification Productivity Initiative was conceived as the centralized facility within the Department of Energy to draw together and integrate all research and development that showed a potential for improving the quality and quantity of the declassification review process. Conceptually, the Declassification Productivity Initiative envisions using automation technologies for scanning the paper document, applying optical character recognition to convert the document into a machine readable form, applying online redaction marking and preparation of sanitized documents, electronically sharing documents with other Agencies, and automating the preparation of necessary correspondence and coordination memoranda.
- Many Agencies and academic institutions have been conducting independent research into a variety of related topics with little or no integration of those efforts for our common benefit. Consequently, the Declassification Productivity Initiative is evolving into a central part of a Government-wide venture to automate and standardize document declassification efforts.
BENEFITS
- The in-depth study and analysis of the processes of declassification will help us to improve the efficiency of our manual systems while simultaneously building the knowledge base necessary to begin automation of the process.
- Automating the declassification process will substantially increase efficiency and increase the amount of information released to the public.
- New automated declassification tools will increase national security by reducing the potential for accidental release of sensitive information.
- As the number of classified documents is reduced, the security costs for storage and safeguards will be reduced.
- The Declassification Productivity Initiative will improve the quality of the sanitized documents that we provide to our customers and provide for more consistent and uniform document reviews.
- New technologies, especially automated secure file transfers, will accelerate the way in which we coordinate reviews with other Agencies and offer the potential for enormous savings in administrative handling and transportation expenses.
- The technologies envisioned by the Declassification Productivity Initiative have many potential applications in industry as well.
WHO ARE THE KEY STAKEHOLDERS?
- The taxpayer, as the ultimate stakeholder, will reap savings from improved declassification productivity throughout the Federal Government.
- Environmentalists, historians, researchers, scientists, and industrial workers, as well as local, State, and other Federal personnel, will benefit from the increased information available.
- Freedom of Information Users. Citizens submitting Freedom of Information act requests will have greater access to the data they seek.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. What is the status of the Department of Energy evaluation of the declassification process?
A. We have a core team of technical specialists that has begun detailed work based on a comprehensive draft plan. In 1995, as part of a cooperative effort with the George Washington University School of Engineering, students performed a preliminary study of the declassification workflow and modelled their results.
Q. Have there been any concrete results from the evaluation of the declassification process?
A. It is still very early, but there have been some significant results so far. The 1995 cooperative effort with the George Washington University School of Engineering produced a preliminary study of the declassification workflow. That look at the declassification process encouraged us to take a fresh look at our approach to implementing the President's Executive Order 12958 on the declassification of documents containing National Security Information.
Q. What does the prototype system that you are developing at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory do?
A. The prototype, called the Text Analysis Project, reads text documents in computer form, attempts to identify sentences that are "potentially classified," and provides a rationale for that determination. "Potentially classified" means that there is a strong likelihood that the sentence is classified in accordance with current guidance.
Q. How far along is the Text Analysis Project?
A. It is in the early prototype stage, covers only very small areas of Department of Energy classified information, and has had only limited testing. In a limited test in 1995, in which the Text Analysis Project attempted to differentiate files that contained classified text from unclassified text files, the project identified the files with classified information with an error rate of approximately 22 percent.
Q. How does the Text Analysis Project prototype work?
A. The prototype contains a set of rules that represent knowledge about what is classified information, a simple understanding of sentence structure, and a dictionary/thesaurus of terms common in Department of Energy classified documents. It uses those resources to identify sensitive portions of classified documents.
Q. What is the status of the Declassification Productivity Research Center, and what are the first tasks that it will undertake?
A. The grant establishing the Declassification Productivity Research Center was approved at the end of September 1995; the center is now being organized with the mission of fostering interagency cooperation and to serve as a conduit through which to share information and ideas. Its first task will be to work with all Agencies involved with the declassification of documents to establish data standards for the exchange of information between classified systems.