The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets
Matthew Connelly’s “harrowing” new book “dramatizes a hidden crisis,” said Brian Hochman in The Washington Post. We all know that Donald Trump and Joe Biden are both under investigation for the classified documents recently found in their private possession. But such discoveries point to how out of control the classifying of government documents has become. The federal government currently classifies another three documents every second, adding to an ever-expanding pile so vast that no one in Washington can even estimate its size. Connelly, who’s a Columbia University historian, warns that the public’s ability to monitor what its government is doing in its name has been gravely compromised, and he’s absolutely right. “The loss to historical understanding is catastrophic.”
That’s hardly the only danger Connelly highlights, said Patrick Radden Keefe in Foreign Affairs. The paradox of our government’s addiction to classification is that it has made sensitive information more vulnerable to leaking. Because so much government work now requires handling information that’s classified, the number of federal employees granted top-secret clearance keeps growing and has now reached 1.3 million. At this point, “the math becomes simple”: Given how easy it is to copy and share digitized data, and that 1.3 million people can, there’s no preventing significant leaks of the government’s secrets. Remember when stolen NSA cyberweapons were used in 2016 to shut down businesses around the world? As far as we know, the source of that leak has yet to be identified.
Connelly is doing more than sounding an alarm, said Tim Weiner in The New York Times. Ten years ago, he assembled a team to try using a search engine and machine learning to sift through declassified documents and predict the redacted language. The goal is to reveal what government doesn’t want us to know, and perhaps the project eventually will succeed. Unfortunately, the results so far are “a handful of needles in a mountain of hay.” Let’s hope Connelly’s alarm achieves more.