The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) today urged House and Senate appropriations committee members to demand that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) stop designating information that is not crucial to national security as “sensitive.”
In a letter to the appropriators, POGO stressed that a provision in the House version of the DHS appropriations bill that would change how the agency classifies information as “Sensitive Security Information” (SSI) needs to become law. The Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Government Accountability Office have found that DHS, specifically the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), has labeled even widely available information as SSI to cover up embarrassing information.