Hey, does so much of this stuff really need to be classified?
With classified documents turning up in a Florida resort storeroom and a Delaware garage housing a vintage Corvette, maybe a better question than, “Is this evidence of nefarious activity?” would be, “Is this evidence that the government classifies way too much information?”
Top-secret security clearance is held by about 1.3 million Americans, spread across the intelligence community, military, federal law enforcement agencies, State Department, White House, congressional oversight committees, personnel in other branches of the government — even the Commerce Department! — and contractors who handle classified information as part of their duties.
These paper-pushers shove a daily mountain of classified material into the world. But the 99.7 percent of the U.S. population that does not have top-secret clearance has no way of judging whether critics of “overclassification” — and there have been plenty of them over the past two decades — are justified in their complaints. But we have our suspicions.
The 9/11 Commission Report warned in 2004 that “current security requirements nurture overclassification and excessive compartmentation of information among agencies. Each agency’s incentive structure opposes sharing, with risks (criminal, civil, and internal administrative sanctions) but few rewards for sharing information. No one has to pay the long-term costs of overclassifying information, though these costs — even in literal financial terms — are substantial. There are no punishments for not sharing information.”
Complaints about overclassification have continued. In 2013, the Federation of American Scientists lamented the trend. In 2016, the Brennan Center for Justice warned, “the government is classifying too many documents” and labeled the government’s system for classifying documents “dysfunctional.” In 2019, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press cautioned that “overclassification is an even bigger problem in an age of leak-hunting,” and later that year, the Atlantic magazine’s Mike Giglio concluded, “American officials classify too much information, from the trivial to the politically inconvenient. The overreliance on secrecy invites abuse.”
Even one guy who ran the whole executive branch came to that conclusion. In 2016, during the controversy surrounding former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s private email server, President Barack Obama said, “There’s classified, and then there’s classified. There’s stuff that is really top-secret, top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state, that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open source.”
And yet, despite all these complaints . . . very little actually changes. Obama himself had signed the Reducing Over-Classification Act in 2010, yet six years later he was still decrying how much notso-revelatory information was labeled classified. The philosophy described by the 9/11 Commission remained very much intact at most government agencies.
Heck, documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remain classified nearly 60 years after the fact. The National Archives says of declassifying JFK assassination material that “postponement decisions now affect less than 4,400 documents in the Collection” — like that’s a good thing. The National Archives says releasing the remaining documents could inflict “identifiable harm to military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or conduct of foreign relations where the identifiable harm is of such gravity that it outweighs the public interest in disclosure.” Really?
In the contretemps over presidents Donald Trump and Biden possessing classified documents they shouldn’t have, Democratic partisans will insist that Trump ought to be prosecuted while Biden merely made harmless error borne of disorganization; Republican partisans will argue the reverse.
No doubt there are differences between the two cases, but it’s hard to argue that one warrants jail time while the other merits a shrug. And let’s not forget that federal prosecutors proved pretty laid back about the mishandling of classified material by public officials including Sandy Berger, David Petraeus, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
Former vice presidents and former presidents should follow the law. But if the Oval Office, West Wing, Naval Observatory and related offices are stuffed with material that probably didn’t need to be classified in the first place, it increases the odds of an official moving into civilian life with some classified documents mixed in with their personal papers.
The federal government should classify less material and declassify more material faster — as it is, the declassification process is so glacially slow that it makes bureaucratic responses to FOIA requests look like a McDonald’s drive-through. Unfortunately, that argument never gained much traction in normal circumstances, and now it sounds like excuse-making for Trump or Biden, or an argument that prosecutors should cut either or both men some slack.
For all we know, the highest levels of government might well have already studied the problem in depth, and determined overclassification is so rampant that separating classified from unclassified material would be impossible.
But that study is probably classified.