Executive Order 13526

Executive Order 13526 was issued on December 29, 2009, by United States President Barack Obama. It is one of a series of executive orders from US Presidents outlining how classified information should be handled. It revokes and replaces the previous Executive Orders in effect for this, which were EO 12958 (text) and EO 13292 (text).

Issuance
As a component of the Obama Administration's initiative to improve transparency and open-access to the Federal Government and the information it produces formally introduced upon taking office in late January 2009 and as a result of an agency-wide review and recommendation process ordered in May of that same year, the issuance of EO 13526 was ultimately prompted by several factors.

One factor was the large backlog of documents scheduled to be automatically declassified on December 31, 2009, and how to deal with that reality. Another factor was delivering on a campaign promise.

These latest regulations, at the time, went into full effect on June 25, 2010, except for sections 1.7, 3.3, and 3.7, which were effective immediately on December 29, 2009.

Significant changes
EO 13526 restated the authorized list of designees who can originate classification, in effect rescinding any previous designations made by officials or agency heads to subordinates.

A significant provision of EO 13526 is the creation of the National Declassification Center. The major focus is the idea that information should become declassified systematically as soon as practicable. Specific time limits are mentioned for different kinds of information, but there is also the provision that information that still needs to be classified can stay classified. Mechanisms are outlined for periodic reevaluation of the need to classify information, even if the result of the evaluation is to keep the information classified

Criticism
It has been claimed, but not substantiated, that many classified documents are still illegally blocked from FOIA requests and treated as such despite the fact that classification must not be used to "conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; or to prevent embarrassment".