Classificationgate: What The F*ck Is Going On With These Classified Documents?
The government's ridiculous system of classifying documents, how it keeps you in the dark, and why you should care.
This week, former Vice President Mike Pence became the latest victim in a series of attacks against a group of poor and defenseless top-level current and former officials caught up in “Classificationgate” — one of America’s dumbest political scandals. And while it’s hard to feel sorry for the likes of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and Mike Pence (though, maybe some more than others), Classificationgate has reached a point of meriting a brief word.
Classificationgate, as you’ve probably inferred, refers to the recent phenomenon of officials who have been found to have improperly handled or retained classified documents they had access to during their respective times as officials with top secret security clearance. Of course, each official’s mishandling is different in degree and kind (though, depending on who—or which media outlet—you ask, you will get different answers as to whose mishandling is “worse”). But if there’s one thing we can and should all agree on, it’s that Classificationgate is as much an indictment on this country’s archaic, overzealous, and anti-democratic classification system as it is an indictment on the carelessness of a few geriatric politicians. Here’s why.
What Even Is A Classified Document?
The U.S. government uses three levels of classification to designate the sensitivity of information:
Confidential: information whose release could damage U.S. national security.
Secret: information whose disclosure could cause “serious” damage to U.S. national security.
Top Secret: information whose disclosure could cause “exceptionally grave” damage to national security.
Despite much of the media frenzy around “classified” documents being mishandled by these officials, we don’t actually know much about the level of classification (never mind the content) of the classified documents (but we do know that at least some of the documents found at the Trump and Biden residences were designated Top Secret).
Why This Is All (Likely) Much Ado About Nothing
For starters, having access to confidential information doesn’t make you special—no matter how many times your mom tells you otherwise. There’s an estimated 3 to 4 million people with security clearance in the United States. Over 1 million of those people have Top Secret clearance. To put that in perspective, about half a million Americans complete a marathon each year (although Instagram certainly makes us feel like it’s more).
So, you may say: “A lot of people have security clearance to access these documents that Biden, et al. supposedly mishandled, that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be able to keep track of a small number of classified documents.” Well, for one, you shouldn’t say “et al.” — it’s obnoxious. And two, you’d be wrong again. Although the data on the exact number of classified documents in existence is increasingly less accessible because (shockingly) government agencies have actively tried to avoid keeping track of such things, one scholar estimated that as of 2004, 8 billion pages had been classified since 1978. Historian Matthew Connelly says that, on average, records are marked as classified three times every second. Moreover, although classified information can only remain classified beyond 25 years if it meets one of the statutory exceptions, which are surely used liberally, there are only some 2,000 people in the country tasked with declassifying documents (all of whom have regular administrative agency jobs in addition to the task of declassifying documents). And, after wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and profound technological advances, the number of classified documents has ballooned since the turn of the century, and continues to trend on a logarithmic scale.
At this point, you could try to argue (although I question why you’re still fighting me on this, maybe it’s because you’re one of the 4 million with security clearance?): “Well, it may be true that millions of people have access to these documents counting in the hundreds of millions, but this is a new and novel problem exacerbated by rapid and profound technological advancements, so it’s no ones fault that we’ve found ourselves in this predicament.” Unsurprisingly, you’re wrong again. An Obama-era estimate found that as much as 90% of classified information did not need to be so at that time, or ever. This tracks with a U.S. Department of Defense estimate from 1956 that came to the same conclusion. Now, with the proliferation of digitally produced classified information since the Obama administration study, experts believe the number could now be in excess of 95% or even 99%.
We’ve made a lot of fuss about the mishandling of classified documents by certain officials, but whether there’s anything that could actually jeopardize the national security—or even just keep you from falling asleep—in any of those documents, remains to be seen.
Why You Should Care
As a last-ditch attempt to salvage your position, you may say: “Why should I feel any sympathy for Biden, Trump, Clinton or Pence? They are/were public officials who have to follow the rules regarding the handling of classified documents, no matter how absurd or impossible to adhere to.” And, finally, you may have a point. But, that’s not why you should care.
You should care because this “climate of augmented secrecy” affects you in direct and profound ways—four ways, to be exact:
It costs you money; lots of money. Specifically, the classification process costs the U.S. taxpayers an estimated $18 billion a year, bigger than the budget of the U.S. Treasury.
It is leveraged by the media to draw your interest (get you to watch their segment, click their article, etc.), pit your political camp against the other, and generally stoke societal fervor and unhelpful, over-simplified, debate.
It is leveraged by partisan politicians (which I guess, really, is just a politician) as fodder for general divisive discourse—conservatives jump on it when it’s Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, while liberals jump on it when it’s Donald Trump or Mike Pence.
Finally, and most importantly, it affords the government a vast and unrefined cloak of secrecy that the government uses, in certain infrequent but not-so-rare occasions, to mask government conduct and programs that, if revealed to the public, would cause widespread public uproar (famous examples include the Pentagon Papers, the information Chelsea Manning leaked to Wikileaks, and the government surveillance information leaked by Edward Snowden). This point is critical, as classification not only allows the government to shield nefarious conduct from public scrutiny, but it also allows the government to then go after leakers if the information ever gets out (Ellsberg, Manning and Snowden were all charged under the Espionage Act for their respective leaks). The result is that huge swaths of government conduct are kept secret—much of it mundane and uninteresting, but some of it of utmost importance to the public interest—and anyone who dares shed light on unscrupulous government conduct is severely dissuaded from doing so by the very real threat of imprisonment (or, arguably worse, being exiled to Russia). Fun fact: The Obama administration prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act for leaking sensitive information to the public than all previous administrations combined.
To summarize, as one scholar on the subject eloquently put it:
Bottom line? [T]he classified universe is, as best I can estimate, on the order of five to ten times larger than the open literature that finds its way to our libraries. Our commonsense picture may well be far too sanguine, even inverted. The closed world is not a small strongbox in the corner of our collective house of codified and stored knowledge. It is we in the open world—we who study the world lodged in our libraries, from aardvarks to zymurgy, we who are living in a modest information booth facing outwards, our unseeing backs to a vast and classified empire we barely know.
Not to sound like your conspiracy-theory-believing uncle, but the government is shielding a vast amount of information from us—information that would not harm the national security—purely out of convenience, self-preservation and an abundance of caution (whether it’s about aliens or geopolitical dynamics of the South Sudan, who’s to say). And if knowledge is power, it sure seems like a group of government employees have the upper hand over the average American right now.