In the 1980s, the Reagan administration required federal employees seeking or retaining security clearances to sign nondisclosure forms SF 189 and SF 312. The forms threatened loss of clearance and felony prosecution for releasing information that had not been formally classified but was deemed “classifiable.” Steve Garfinkel, then director of the Information Security Oversight Office, told Congress that the term could cover anything that “could or should have been classified”—potentially “virtually anything.” About 1.7 million employees and contractors signed before Pentagon whistleblower Ernie Fitzgerald refused, helping trigger a congressional challenge. Senator Charles Grassley described the policy as an attempt to place “a blanket of silence” over government-generated information.
Congress first barred spending to implement SF 189 in 1988; after an executive-branch constitutional challenge, lawmakers rewrote the restriction in 1989 as the annual anti-gag appropriations rider. Its mandatory addendum says the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989 and the Lloyd–La Follette Act of 1912 override restrictive nondisclosure language, and the rider has reportedly been renewed annually since 1988. Critics later argued that successor labels such as “Sensitive But Unclassified” and “Sensitive Security Information” preserved similar loopholes, including an attempted NASA restriction on climate scientist James Hansen. The statute remains significant but limited: it creates no clear private remedy and must be renewed each year.
