Abstract
Through the analysis of legal and infra-legal norms, interviews, and requests for information via Law n. 12,527 (2011), this article proposes to understand, within the Brazilian Armed Forces, the regulation and management of the classification regarding the secrecy of information based on the security of the state and society. For this, it analyzes the qualification of the classification institutions; the attribution, maintenance, reassessment, and declassification of secrecy; forms of external control; and the possibilities of eliminating such documents when already disqualified. It is concluded that the complexity of the classification process regarding confidentiality in the armed forces poses challenges to its evaluation and governance, with two questions remaining open: one is the broad discretion when interpreting and assigning degrees of secrecy; another is the regulatory limbo regarding the publication of these documents after being declassified since other hypotheses for safeguarding information coexist. Therefore, the Brazilian information classification system serves the purpose of restricting information to public agents’ need to know, but it is not in itself a public transparency tool.
Keywords
Confidential information; access to information; public transparency; classification of documents; armed forces