When I was a congressional staffer working on international environmental issues, at one point I spent several weeks in Europe, meeting with EU officials in Brussels; U.N. officials in Geneva, Switzerland; and at a conference with science diplomats in Vienna.
In Geneva, I had the pleasure of working with my uncle, a long-time science diplomat at the U.S. Mission to the U.N. there, on climate change, endangered species and other issues.
One day when we were in his office, he handed me a document marked “classified.” I was surprised, since I didn’t have a security clearance allowing me access to classified information. But the document was just the when and where of an ordinary meeting we were attending.
And one possible reason classified documents go astray is that too many documents are classified in the first place, experts say. The federal government classifies more than 50 million documents each year, according to The New York Times.
Concern about overclassification dates back as far as 1956, when a Defense Department committee set up to tackle the issue during President Eisenhower’s first term said overclassification had reached “serious proportions” and recommended an overhaul.
In many agencies, officials “face no downsides for over-classifying something,” says Oona Hathaway, a professor at Yale Law School and former special counsel at the Pentagon. “But if you under-classify something, really dire consequences could come for you.”
Of those more than 50 million documents classified every year, just 5 to 10 percent warrant the classification, Hathaway estimates, based on her experience at the Pentagon.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, a member of the Intelligence Committee, says: “One of the reasons why perhaps people become lackadaisical and less than vigilant in protecting classified information is the experience of most members of Congress when you go … get briefed [in a] secure facility on whatever it is the administration wants to brief you on and you come out of there saying, ‘I could have watched cable news and read the newspaper as much as they were willing to tell me.' And so, they think, ‘Well, this is not that big a deal. You say it’s secret, but this is not a secret. It’s open source stuff. …’"
U.S. officials have offered to brief as soon as this week the “Gang of Eight” — the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House and Senate and of both intelligence committees — on their investigation into the classified documents found at former President Trump’s Florida residence and President Biden’s Delaware home and former private office, The Associated Press reported on Sunday.
But the briefing isn't expected to include direct access to the documents that were seized, AP says. Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked for that access in a letter last week to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines.
So will we, the public, be able to assess the actual significance of these documents? Seems like it’ll be classified.