All of the following are ways to promote the sharing of information within the federal government EXCEPT?

The answer

The option that is NOT a way to promote information sharing is "Automatically declassifying information that is shared." This comes from the Center for Development of Security Excellence (CDSE) Derivative Classification course. Legitimate methods promote sharing while keeping the classification intact. Automatic declassification would strip protection from national-security information simply because it moved between offices, which no authority permits.

Classification and sharing are two independent decisions. You can share classified material widely with anyone who has the proper clearance, a need-to-know, and a signed nondisclosure agreement, and the information stays classified the entire time. Declassification, by contrast, is a formal action performed only by an Original Classification Authority (OCA) or through a scheduled/automatic declassification timeline set in the original classification decision, not something that happens as a side effect of sharing.

Why auto-declassification is wrong

Under Executive Order 13526, information keeps its classification level regardless of how many cleared people receive it. Declassification requires a specific determination that the information no longer needs protection, or the expiration of a preset duration (often up to 25 years, or event-based). If sharing automatically declassified data, an adversary could obtain protected intelligence the moment it was passed to a coalition partner. That would defeat the entire purpose of the classification system and could cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security, exactly what classification exists to prevent.

The approved ways to share

The genuinely sanctioned methods the course lists include:

• Sharing across the federal government with cleared personnel who have a need-to-know.
• Sharing with state, local, tribal, and law-enforcement partners through established channels.
• Sharing with coalition and foreign partners under approved foreign-disclosure and release procedures.
• Using secure systems and portals designed to move classified data between authorized users.

Every one of these preserves the markings, control statements, and dissemination caveats already applied to the document. The common thread is that the protection travels with the information. The distractor breaks that rule, which is exactly why it is the exception.

The bigger picture

Derivative classifiers reproduce or restate information from an authorized source and carry forward its markings; they never create or remove classification on their own judgment. Effective sharing depends on trust that markings mean what they say. If sharing could quietly declassify data, no one downstream could rely on the markings, and the whole framework of controlled dissemination would collapse. So the safe rule to memorize: sharing spreads access, it never changes classification.