In this summer of 2006, two civilians who were lobbyists for a pro-Israeli organization are being prosecuted under the 89-year-old Espionage Act for receiving and retransmitting material -- supposedly involving national defense secrets -- from a Pentagon official.

Meantime, the Bush administration is sharply rebuking newspapers -- including that old standby, The New York Times -- for publishing classified information revealing to our terrorist enemies some of the domestic methods being used to track their cash and communications.

The debate over whether the press should err on the side of caution (and "patriotism") in respecting government calls for secrecy -- or whether the press sometimes has a higher duty to reveal government deception or practices that threaten our own liberties -- is important and useful.

But just as it would be hard to conduct a tug-of-war while standing in quicksand, so it's hard for this debate to reach useful conclusions unless there's some consensus on just what "secret" or "classified" really mean.

In a report released June 30, the Government Accountability Office reviewed a "nonprobability sample" of 111 classified Defense Department documents from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in an attempt to find out "whether all of the information marked as classified met established criteria for classification."

("Nonprobability" refers to the fact the sample was incredibly small. The GAO reports that between 2000 and 2004, the Pentagon generated about 13.4 million new classified records per year -- 66.8 million in all. About 1.8 million defense employees now have some power to classify documents.)

Nonetheless, the GAO report, which was sent to Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn. (chairman of the subcommittee on national security of the Government Reform Committee) and disclosed on the Secrecy News Web site of Steven Aftergood, concludes, "A lack of oversight and inconsistent implementation of DOD's information security program are increasing the risk of misclassification."

Of the 111 classified documents reviewed, the GAO questioned classification determinations of 29, about one out of every four. A majority of those questioned "pertained to whether all of the information marked as classified met established criteria for classification."

Pentagon officials agreed that in five documents "the information was unclassified and in a sixth document the information should be downgraded."

In a broader administrative criticism, the GAO found that 92 of the 111 documents had some marking error, such as failure to include declassification instructions as required.

Not only that, it turns out there's no standardization between agencies as to what various markings on a document really mean. For example, some agencies use an "R" to indicate a record is to be "Released," or declassified. But others use an "R" to indicate a record is to be "Retained" -- kept classified. The letter "D" can be equally ambiguous.

"One of the agencies uses a 'D' to denote 'deny automatic declassification' and an 'R' to denote release," the report says. "While the other agency uses a 'D' to denote 'declassify' and an 'R' to denote 'retain.'"

Added to a frequently observed tendency on the part of bureaucrats everywhere to "cover their butts" by erring on the side of secrecy (after all, heads might roll if something that was supposed to be kept secret were released, while few will ever know or care if yesterday's lunch menu is inappropriately stamped "Top Secret"), the clear implication of this finding is that the value of keeping any given document secret can rarely be determined merely by what some clerk has stamped on it.

No, this doesn't mean there should be no secrecy whatsoever. Hushing up a flaw in some weapons system -- preventing a battlefield enemy from exploiting the problem till it can be "patched" -- obviously still has value, as does secrecy about troop movements.

But it does mean the government has a higher burden of proof than merely showing a "Secret" stamp when it comes time to establish that classification was justified.

Far too often, government documents are considered "secret till proven otherwise." But in a government of limited powers, delegated and jealously guarded by a "civilian" populace who remain in overall charge, the default setting must be just the opposite. What bureaucrats are doing with our money must be open and public, unless a good reason can be shown to the contrary.