Adam Schultz/The White House via AP
President Joe Biden speaks with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone from his private residence in Wilmington, Delaware, December 30, 2021.
Somewhere in Plains, Georgia, an aide or 98-year-old Jimmy Carter himself is rifling through old boxes, searching for any document from the late 1970s marked “classified.” I’m not sure what threats there are to the Republic from high-level information about Rhodesia or the Warsaw Pact slowly decomposing in a filing cabinet, but the National Archives is on the case, directing former presidents and vice presidents to scour their properties for any official secrets. (Carter has found classified documents “on at least one occasion” and returned them quietly to the Archives, according to the Associated Press.)
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 recent revelations of classified documents tucked into the attics of former leaders should lead to a reckoning about the nature of classification. But now that the subject has meandered into our tribal politics, and into the spotlight of a media bursting with former intelligence community officials, I’m worried that things will only get worse. Horse-race reporters view the overlapping document scandals entirely on the basis of how each party can wield the issue. Partisans now have an incentive to hype up the wrongness of being caught with classified material. Everyone can pretend like they’re in a John le Carré spy novel, viewing political enemies in terms of how they might misuse classified documents.
There of course exists information that the government would do well to keep to themselves. But that is a tiny fraction of what is made secret in Washington. Why? One reason is that any of the thousands of people authorized to classify information has near-total power to do so, and they use it to keep things that have no impact on national security from the eyes of the American public. Secrecy has become the default expectation.
Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in the 1990s that the only way to keep the few bits of essential information secret was to not compulsively classify everything that would be awkward to have out in the world. A report he issued in 1997 contained recommendations that were mostly not adopted.
In 2016, the House Oversight Committee found that as much as 90 percent of classified material doesn’t need to be classified.
When the House Oversight Committee examined this in 2016, they found that as much as 90 percent of classified material doesn’t need to be classified; this is in line with what the Defense Department, of all agencies, estimated 60 years earlier. The national-security subcommittee chair at the time was a member from Florida named Ron DeSantis, and he said at the time, “Some of this stuff is ridiculous and there’s an incentive to just simply cake on more classification.”
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.
Dana Priest and William Arkin’s “Top Secret America” series for The Washington Post remains the gold standard in describing the secrecy industry, with a focus on the network that built up after the September 11 attacks. “No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work,” Priest and Arkin wrote. Over the previous decade, 33 building complexes were built for intelligence work to house classified documents, and 50,000 intelligence reports produced a year—more than anyone has the ability to even read.
Priest and Arkin concluded that it was impossible to know whether all this secrecy was making people safe. In fact, the opposite could be true, as the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press wrote in 2019: Excessive security and classification measures cut off information between agencies and make it harder to coordinate efforts. The 9/11 Commission raised this as an issue in its report.
Yale professor Beverly Gage has written that documents as absurd as a directive from the “Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge” to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of “Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus” was redacted from a Freedom of Information Act request, often the last resort to liberate classified material. “PowerPoint presentations and spreadsheets and text messages” are among the material being classified today, according to historian and author Matthew Connelly. In the Hillary Clinton email scandal, classified material included news reporting about drone strikes, which appeared in public for all to see.
You can easily find experts decrying this overclassification tendency. The problem is that there’s no incentive for traditional media to express this amid the scrum over presidents with classified documents at their residences. It’s an easy scandal to articulate, for one (person X has thing he/she shouldn’t have). It allows the warring party factions to utilize the catnip topic of bad-faith hypocrisy arguments—you said having classified material was bad, but now your guy has it!—rather than approach the issue of why things are classified in the first place.
Perhaps more important, the number of “former intelligence officials” populating cable news has boomed, all with an incentive to hype up the importance of classified material. Politico can quickly find a former senior FBI official to write an op-ed that says “most people appreciate that [classified] information is important to the diplomatic, military and national security interests of the United States,” spinning all sorts of cloak-and-dagger scenarios about hostile foreign leaders exploiting information. He managed to spin the idea that a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario. Real James Bond stuff.
Intel embeds in the media are going to great lengths to say that overclassification is “no excuse” for sloppy handling of documents; this is the equivalent of saying that a gun massacre is not the right time to talk about the prevalence of guns. There are far too many classified documents, and these scandals are a perfect opportunity to make that clear.
It’s going to be hard to reverse this tendency now because it’s become hardwired into our hyper-polarized politics. But it’s worth trying. The lockdown on information is antithetical to the founding of the country, and does little or nothing for our personal security. The language around secrecy—that we must do “damage assessments” for harms to random documents sitting in Joe Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, basement—presumes that everything with the word “classified” on it can trigger the end of America itself. In reality, the classification system is a farce, and the sooner we rein it in, the better.
