Agencies have six months to make sweeping changes to the way they classify and share information, under a new executive order by President Barack Obama.

Some of those steps will mean major operational changes — but the question many experts are asking is whether Obama's executive order will ultimately change deep-rooted cultures at agencies, many of which promote hoarding and withholding information instead of sharing and releasing it.

Classification rules have changed little in recent decades, but federal employees have been interpreting them more liberally: The number of records classified each year has more than doubled since 2001.

One of the most notable directives in the Dec. 29 executive order calls on agencies to synchronize their classification regimes. It does this by directing employees to share classified information with others — as long as they hold proper security clearances — without first getting approval from the agency that originally classified the material. That requirement, like most others in the executive order, will take effect in June.

Accomplishing this will require agencies to develop common classification rules, experts say. The government only has three classification levels — top secret, secret and confidential — but agencies interpret them differently.

That's why the executive order directs agencies to review and simplify their classification guides within the next two years.

"Some agencies — State, Defense, others — have hundreds of such guides," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "Agencies need to get an early start on the order's requirements, because two years will go quickly."

Obama's order also directs agencies to err on the side of transparency: "If there is significant doubt about the appropriate level of classification, it shall be classified at the lower level," it reads. Several former homeland security and intelligence officials acknowledge that feds tend to use higher levels of classification than needed.

"There's a tendency for the person with the strictest view on secrecy to prevail," Michael Chertoff, a former Homeland Security secretary, told Federal Times. "It's always easier to dial back on secrecy than to retroactively make something secret after it's been released and discussed publicly."

That presumption of secrecy makes it harder for agencies to share information with each other, according to experts.

"There's been a lot of discussion, after the failed Christmas bombing, about the importance of information-sharing within the government," Aftergood said. "That's achieveable — if common classification standards are put into place."

It's unlikely that Obama's executive order would have helped agencies "connect the dots" on the failed Christmas bombing. Experts and intelligence officials say the failure to stop Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian-born bomber, was the result of bad analysis, not a lack of information sharing.

"The U.S. government had the information, scattered throughout the system, to potentially uncover this plot and disrupt the attack," Obama said Jan. 7. "Rather than a failure to collect or share intelligence, this was a failure to connect and understand the intelligence we already had."

In other words, agencies could not discern and piece together the right bits of information from the fire hose of information they receive.

Chertoff agreed, saying that classification levels weren't the problem.

"Everyone in the National Counterterrorism Center has the security clearances they need to view this information," he said.

But the order — which directs feds to use the lowest possible level of classification — could help to reduce the barriers that still exist between agencies.

One example: A report issued last week by Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn — the top U.S. military intelligence officer in Afghanistan — found that overclassification and poor information-sharing are hindering the intelligence effort in Afghanistan. Flynn's report described dozens of "stovepipes" within different military branches and civilian agencies.

"Any kind of information controls interfere with information being shared," said Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "We should really focus our controls on the really sensitive records, and reduce the controls on everything else."

Those barriers aren't just at the federal level, either. A 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office found that the federal government struggles to share information with state and local governments.

Chertoff said the executive order could be challenging for DHS, though, because the department collects so much information from private companies — the Transportation Security Administration collects mountains of data from airlines, for example.

"If your [private-sector] partners don't think you'll protect their information, they're not going to be as willing to work with you," he said.

More work to be done

The Obama order also requires training about declassification, and avoiding overclassification, every one or two years, depending on an employee's level of classification authority. Employees who don't undergo the training will lose their classification authority. Agencies are also required to review their internal classification guides, which determine what information should be protected. That's a daunting task: More than 2,000 guides are in use.

"The training in declassification, and avoiding overclassification, is important, because it's going to help push through the cultural change," said Fuchs, of the National Security Archive. "And the language [of the order] is designed to send the message that we don't want reflexive secrecy."

CIA spokeswoman Paula Weiss said the agency "will work closely with our intelligence community counterparts to ensure the implementation of this executive order. [We're] committed to sharing as much as we can with the American people while protecting secrets that help preserve the nation's security."

A spokesman for the Defense Department, Lt. Col. Eric Butterbaugh, said the Pentagon is "in the process of working out the implementation details."

Experts hail the executive order as an important step, but they say there's more to be done. Fuchs said she'd like to see more accountability for federal employees who abuse their classification authority. And Aftergood said the White House still needs to streamline the declassification system, which can take many years.

The executive order also does little to address overuse of the "sensitive but unclassified" designation, which has proliferated in recent years. In May, for example, the Government Printing Office accidentally posted a sensitive but unclassified Nuclear Regulatory Commission report on a public Web site. A GAO report released last month found that the document's release "does not appear to have damaged national security," suggesting that it was misclassified.

Obama also said he has directed his national security adviser to work on a more comprehensive overhaul of the classification system. The White House did not say when that work will be finished.