Current Classified Document Scandals Show The Government Is Still Classifying Way Too Many Documents
from the if-everything's-a-secret,-everyone-will-have-secrets dept
Maybe the problem isn’t the stacks of classified documents sitting around the houses of presidents, vice presidents, and other administration officials. Maybe the problem is the system that declares all these pieces of paper too secretive to be handled carelessly or hoarded impertinently.
That’s the thrust of David Dayen’s excellent piece for The American Prospect, which argues the government’s obsession with classifying nearly anything for nearly any reason is the real villain here.
America has a problem with classified information. But this problem isn’t the one you’ve been hearing about for the past few weeks, with the revelations of President Biden and former Vice President Mike Pence turning up documents improperly stored in their homes and offices. It’s also different from the problem of Donald Trump hoarding classified information at Mar-a-Lago—though the circumstances of Trump asserting the right to take the documents and obstructing the efforts of the Archives to take them back make what he did qualitatively different, and far worse.
No, the problem with classified information is that there’s so much of it, so much useless, meritless, groundless classified information. Tens of millions of pieces of paper are so labeled, millions of people can see them, and yet the vast majority of such material would not remotely endanger the nation if it entered the wrong hands. In fact, much of it is just plain embarrassing to the government, or worse, a cover-up of illegal acts.
The current scandals aren’t making anything better. Every instance is an opportunity for opposing party members to engage in whataboutism while downplaying their favored parties’ indiscretions. Left untouched is the root issue: the casual classification of innocuous or politically inconvenient documents.
Case in point: in 2012 the Defense Department classified its memo on avoiding over-classification of non-sensitive documents. And, while it’s true, the Defense Department may house more sensitive information than most federal entities, the problem isn’t limited to those most directly engaged in national security.
The DOJ does it, too, despite its agencies doing their work on the home front, rather than engaging America’s enemies elsewhere in the world. An oversight report showed the DOJ made 95 million “classification decisions” in 2012, a 25% increase over the number made in 2010, a not insignificant 77 million. Ironically, 2010 was the year Congress passed the Reducing Over-Classification Act (ROCA). Two years after its passage, the DOJ showed a 25% increase from its already over-classified, pre-ROCA era.
In addition to the embarrassment it’s causing for the nation’s top government officials, over-classification is causing a problem that may never be solved. Even if the federal government wanted to declassify documents, it can’t declassify no longer sensitive information as quickly as it’s being classified.
The (overwhelmed) agency that monitors classification within the government, the Information Security Oversight Office, has testified repeatedly that overclassification is rampant. There were 49 million classification decisions in fiscal year 2017 and this was seen as a decrease. As former ISOO employee Evan Coren has written, the agency’s staff was cut in half from 2011 to 2021. The ISOO currently has 620 people working on classification issues—as compared to nearly three million people who have security clearances making around 50 million decisions per year.
That’s an insurmountable problem. And it would remain insurmountable even if the government had any interest in surmounting it. But, as can be inferred by the constant cuts to declassification efforts, the government doesn’t want fewer classified documents. The public may want that, but the public’s desires are often diametrically opposed to those of their so-called public servants.
Fewer classified documents would just lead to more transparency. More transparency leads to more accountability. That’s a slippery slope the government doesn’t care for. And, at least for the moment, the mere existence of seemingly omnipresent classified documents has become a handy tool for partisan politicking, something politicians love almost as much as opacity and power freed from the burden of responsibility.
Filed Under: classification, donald trump, joe biden, mike pence, overclassification
Comments on “Current Classified Document Scandals Show The Government Is Still Classifying Way Too Many Documents”
From over forty years’ experience in the aerospace industry, I can report anecdotally than many managers in that business view classification as an indicator that a project is important. (Anything that’s worth doing, the government wants to keep secret, right?) ‘White world’ projects get deprioritized.
No doubt people who work in DoD’s procurement organizations are aware of this phenomenon, and so there’s a perverse incentive to overclassify to ensure that the work gets done in a competent and timely manner.
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There is another factor at play too, the more documents you classify the more bureaucracy you need. As Oscar Wilde put it: The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy
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I thought it would be the program that has the highest rate of return gets the most applause.
I had something to say...
but the Feds classified it before I hit return
Perverse incentives and uneven risk
I deal with classified documents, and while I’ve seen something classified once to keep it out of the hands of the rival project manager across the hall, most of the over-classification I see is due to the lopsided incentives at play.
At every classification refresher training, we get bombarded with dire warnings about what will happen if we inadvertently let slip something that should have been classified at a higher level. Of course, there’s also a nod given to the idea that over-classification is also bad. However, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a story about someone being punished for over-classifying something. Spillage, on the other hand, can cost someone their job or land them in prison.
It’s a bit like the DMCA in a way, guessing wrong has a severe penalty, but only in one direction. Because of this, most people I know tend to err on the side of caution and sometimes mark things at a higher classification level than maybe they should be. Because making the other mistake is a lot more costly.
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This is exactly it. If you classify something that didn’t need to be, no harm, no foul. But if you forget to classify something that should’ve been, well now literal lives could be on the line. So people just don’t exert any effort to think about if something shouldn’t be classified because it makes their job easier.
The DMCA penalty is a great parallel. Unless there are actual penalties for wrongly classifying something that shouldn’t’ve been, nothing will change. And do we really expect generals and higher ups to put orders in place that would do that? No. We’d need Congress to do so, but they’re too busy fighting make-believe boogiemen.
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Yeah, in that environment, i’d literally stamp everything “i’m not allowed to see this” and pass it up the chain, if they want everything over-classified.
Hell, maybe they shouldn’t be allowed to see it.
The current scandals do NOT show anything about the overclassification of government documents. This article is just taking current headlines as an excuse to raise a similar sounding but distinct bugbear. There is no indication that any of the documents retained by Trump, Pence, or Biden were overclassified.
The Pence and Biden scandals are most likely the product of using classified information in a busy environment where non-classified info is also used (like the White House). The cliff-edge between administrations where people need to be working with classified information one day, but cleared out of the office the next doesn’t help, and the Trump-Biden transition was especially bad.
There is some indication that Trump’s motive in keeping the classified documents was for his own ego, therefore his retention of documents again has nothing to do with overclassification, and everything to do with not electing narcissistic assholes to the presidency.
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Also both Pence and Biden did the right thing and notified the right people when the documents were discovered, and Biden’s been actively making an effort to clear out his home and anywhere he’s worked of classified material.
Trump, on the other hand, actively played hardball and his lawyers lied about handing over all the documents when the government came to collect them, resulting in the raid, and considering documents were found in places he regularly worked, one can make a good case that he wasn’t ignorant of the fact he still had them.
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Also, to the best of my knowledge neither Biden nor Pence lost their clearance to access classified documents, and they are both long-term politicians. It’s not a good look for them to have such documents in their homes, but it’s not necessarily a surprise that something goes amiss while working with such documents daily over the course of decades. There’s no indication that there was anything untoward in keeping the documents, and as long as procedures are being followed with their return, then there doesn’t seem to be anything to be concerned about. It’s the sort of thing that would be dealt with quietly, except that Trump’s greater violations were so loud and public.
Whereas, Trump after just a couple of years working with such documents had boxes and boxes of them in his private property, some of which were SCIF documents that should not have been removed from the room they were stored in, let alone carried across state lines. He constantly refused to return documents until the FBI were forced to raid his properties, which he fought against, he still is refusing to co-operate, and there’s enough circumstantial suspicion over why he had the documents (Saudis are known to have visited Mar A Lago while docs were there, Jared mysteriously gets $2 billion from the Saudis around the same timeframe).
There’s nothing connecting the 3 cases other than the presence of documents, and typically Pence and Biden seem to be going through the adult, honest way of doing things, while Trump is throwing a tantrum and looking guilty as all hell of some serious crimes.
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Yes, so stipulated
But average people still go away to jail for the crimes that Clinton, Biden, and yes, Trump all committed. At least Trump has the defense that he could’ve declassified that stuff had he wanted to.
None of it is as bad as Clinton, mind you, who had classified information….just open…to the internet. And then destroyed a whole of of it. In violation of a court order. Using dedicated cyber security tools…and physical hamnmers. Again, destruction of evidence in violation of a court order.
I fully believe that the fed government classifies way too much petty shit. CYA at it’s apex and taken to dumb extremes.
But I am much, much more concerned about the two-tiered justice system we have developed.
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How is that a defense? This thing I did might not have been a crime if I had done another thing that I didn’t actually do. Not to mention that the warrants that turned up all those documents don’t even have anything to do with whether the documents were classified.
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“At least Trump has the defense that he could’ve declassified that stuff had he wanted to.”
Maybe he could have – but he didn’t. No matter what he tells you, you can’t declassify documents with the power of your mind, there’s a procedure that leaves a record.
Whatabout all you want, he’s still guilty of what he did.
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Exactly. Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice should all have stood trial for their sloppy handling of confidential information.
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And Biden also has that privilege.
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If it’s something he could have done but didn’t do…then it’s not a defense.
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Ah yes, the same crime Biden, Pence and even Clinton, I believe, who, when confronted, complied with the investigators, admitted their fault and acted like adults, while Trump tried to cause a shitstorm and whatnot.
Ah yes, the same systems Trump used, the Russians hacked and gave ONLY the Clinton stuff to Trump, via their toady Assange.
Ah, yes the Republican-majority Supreme Court that overturned Roe vs Wade and are now trying to fuck Section 230 and possibly 1A over as well. The same Republican-majority Supreme Court that EVERYONE should be concerned about of they aren’t white supremacists.
Any chance of having the discussion this deserved is shot.
There are people claiming that Trump did is the same was what Biden did and there is no fscking way to deal with them.
They were just like a tourist group, imagine of him blocking the door and hiding behind an armed man protecting him, to handing out ar 15 pins to upset the libs.
In the grand scheme of things, this issue will never been solved. More secrets, more secrets, more secrets is how the government operated & more often than not they can’t explain why it has to remain a secret & there is no mechanism to force them to explain.
What’s that phrase I keep hearing around here? “Content moderation at scale…”
Classification and Declassification of government documents are just forms of moderation.
Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!
Writer is confused
So much of what is being said is based on the number of “classification decisions.” When someone working with classified material writes and email, it needs to be classified. If notes are taken at a meeting, it needs to be classified, If you perform some analysis of a situation and use classified material as a reference, it needs to be classified. If code is written in a classified environment, it needs to be classified. The result of most work requires a classification decision to be made. The decision could be, and often is, to mark the document as “unclassified.” (Note: a distinction needs to be made between the verb classify (past tense classified) and the adjective classified. One is a decision made about what classification to use, whereas the other is a way to describe something that has been given a classification.) Unclassified means that something lacks classification, i.e. it is not classified.
With the “war on terror” and the subsequent focus on nation states, there is a lot of work being done in places that handle classified information. That work will absolutely increase the number of classification decisions that are made. And yes, many of those decisions will be to assign classifications. It is true that there are incentives to over-classify. While much is made of this, it is likely not done to the extent that hype would lead anyone to believe.
I will argue that the descriptions of what it means to be classified are over-exaggerated. What does it even mean to cause “grave damage?” Making things more complicated by adding even levels and rules won’t lead to things being any better than they are. With only the few levels of classification that exist today, there are already problems in disagreements between agencies. Adding any more caveats will only serve to make the problem worse.
In the end, it hardly matters. There are a lot of headlines about Trump, Biden, and Pence. There are very few people who would leave a position with so many boxes of paperwork that they could not be reviewed in detail. What most people care about is transparency and the access that the public has to the goings on within the government. Classifications play a role in these decisions, but at most a peripheral one. FOIA requests go through thorough reviews. Even unclassified documents will be subject to a ton of redaction. Classified documents are also given a great deal of scrutiny in this process. If something is over-classified, it will be detected here, and possibly changed. But the reluctance to release a document is never hinged on the classification marking. The decision is made on the perceived sensitivity of the material in question. That won’t change with any “overhaul” of the classification system. And if more transparency is something pushed by those in power? It could happen with the classification system that exists today. Once again, it comes down to the situation release decisions that are made. They can be more or less restrictive at any point.
Problems on both ends
Over-classification and under-enforcement.
There are too many documents getting classified, and too little security on then classified documents.
If the security is lowered because they know that they over-classify, then it’s a case of two wrongs that don’t make a right.
If they are just too lazy to properly enforce handling of classified documents, it’s just compounding two wrongs into a bigger issue.
(As a sidenote, this is not completely new information. At the very least, this subject was also raised when Clinton was blasted for her handling of classified documents.)
The result is obviously an administrative and legal mess. That now involves former and current presidents, vice-presidents and more. Because security is only handled as an after-thought. To be fair, the government is far from the only entity being guilty of this (many private businesses also handle security as an after-thought… if at all), but it is specially impactful here as some actual secrets that can impact international relationships (including wars) are handled with the same carelessness as misclassified documents.
Too much
My stance on classification is well described here: don’t do it.
Oven if you ignore the material with no records, Trump declassified more documents than most, if not any, president in history. Millions of documents with the stroke of his pen.
The solution is a transparency president. One who simply say “fuck it”.
Again, I’m a localist. We have no business being in other country’s business. If we stop getting involve in nonsense that doesn’t directly concern us, we are no longer a threat to target. If we’re not a threat, most countries will leave us alone.
The whole secrets and spies crap is left over nonsense from the Christian crusade against atheist communists.
We need to stop classification period. No more closed congressional hearings. No more spies. No more secrets operations.
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