Amid the dual controversies over Trump and Biden’s possession of classified documents—we should be addressing an even bigger problem.Amidst the drama and debate over the Trump classified documents scandal and what (thus far) appears to be the Biden classified documents non-scandal, we are failing to discuss the overarching scandal—which is the U.S. system of classifying sensitive documents itself.
Given
the heat of this political moment, perhaps that is understandable. But as
important as it is to get to the bottom of both classified documents cases, if
we are really interested in keeping America’s secrets safe, we need to take a
step back and see the bigger picture.
A Tale
of Two Controversies
If you
could read the minds of current or former senior U.S. government officials,
you’d see they’re truly disturbed by the news of classified documents being
discovered in locations associated with President Joe Biden. For the vast
majority of them, in fact, the stories hit home more closely than the
revelations of former President Donald Trump’s misappropriated, mishandled
classified documents.
That is
because the U.S. government is awash in literally trillions of pages of
classified documents, and the proper handling of those documents is a challenge
for all who use them as part of their daily government work. In my 30 years in
Washington, I have spoken to a number of officials who have accidentally taken
classified documents home with them, perhaps tucked away in an otherwise
innocent looking stack of papers or file folder. Because the penalties for
doing so are so severe, the reaction is often deep anxiety bordering on panic.
You work
to make sure it never happens but sometimes it does. And when it does, there is
a proper way to handle the problem—which is precisely the way the Biden team
has appeared to handle it. You inform the proper authorities within the
organization with which you are or were associated. And you return the
documents immediately.
The
handling and care of such documents is hammered home to all who work in the
government. The fear of a mistake and its consequences therefore are also
common. That is why while the story of the discovery of the Biden documents
hits close to home and makes uncomfortable the current and former officials
with whom I have spoken, the way former President Trump treated the classified
documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago makes them angry.
Because
based on what we currently know about them, the two cases could not be more
different. Despite GOP efforts to suggest the two are the same, they could not
be more different. Trump expressed a desire to hold on to the documents. He was
told he could not. He took them anyway. He was repeatedly told he had to return
them and he refused. He lied about whether he had them. He resisted government
efforts to reclaim them. He has argued they were his documents and did not
belong to the government. He has argued he declassified them although evidence
suggests he did not. He flouted the law and very likely broke it. There is zero
evidence nor is there even the slightest hint Biden did anything of the sort.
Ultimately,
it is likely that the parallel special counsel investigations into these cases
will reveal just that. Fortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland has made
the decision to treat the two cases in the same way to show that he is being
even-handed…but also because in the end, it will underscore the differences
between the two cases.
None of
that will stop Republicans from trafficking in false equivalencies. And the
ensuing debate is likely both to last until the next election and to obscure
what is a story that is perhaps more consequential than much of what is being
debated. That story is the degree to which America’s system for classifying and
protecting our secrets is broken.
A Badly
Broken System
One of
the reasons so many officials have feared the circumstance in which Biden now
finds himself is because so many encounter classified documents in their
day-to-day work. Classifying so many documents makes the likelihood of errors
higher. But it also makes it harder to share or find information necessary to
policymakers. And the cost of classifying trillions of pages of documents is
billions of dollars a year. Further, in our system, classified documents are
seen by many to be “more important”, more attention-grabbing, than unclassified
ones—which leads to excess classification which leads to valuable information
being harder to access and utilize.
Experts
have sounded the alarm about this problem for decades, and every few years
there is even a call to fix it—but it never happens. A 2019 article in The
Atlantic called “The U.S. Government Keeps Too Many Secrets” by Mike Giglio
noted that “eight blue-ribbon U.S. government commissions have addressed the
subject since World War II.” Instead, more classified documents pile up in
secure locations and, periodically, unsurprisingly, elsewhere. (I myself have
been making this argument for a long long time. To pick just two instances, in
the MIT Technology Review in 2005 and in Foreign Policy in 2012. I raise it
again here not because of the specifics of either of the two current cases, but
because those cases could be used as a catalyst to revisit our thinking on this
front.)
Former
director of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security
Agency General Michael Hayden characterized this to me as “a real problem” that
will demand a concerted effort to fix. But he warned, should we fail to address
it, “real secrets” will be compromised.
Former
Acting CIA Director Michael Morrell notes that while he feels that the Central
Intelligence Agency itself generally handles the classification of documents
properly, “I believe that CIA does not declassify anywhere near what they
could/should under the law.” He describes this as largely a resource issue.
Another senior career intelligence official with whom I spoke added that he
felt other branches of government, particularly those “outside the intelligence
community” were guilty of over-classifying documents, of marking them
“Confidential” or “Secret” or “Top Secret” when it was “absolutely not
warranted.”
Amy
Zegart, a Stanford University professor of political science and national
security expert, expanded on this point: “Overclassification is a far more
serious problem than most people realize. The more classified something is, the
harder it is to share inside the U.S. government. The result: information gets
marooned in different bureaucracies, making it harder to connect the dots.
Overclassification also inhibits the government's ability to get information,
insights, and help from the outside world.
Offering
an illustration, Zegart says, “In cyber, for example, even the phrase
‘offensive cyberoperations’ was classified until the mid-2000s. Not what
offensive cyberoperations were, the targets, or the technologies involved. Just
the phrase. That’s nuts. Getting more minds in and out of government thinking
about hard problems is essential, and over-classification makes that difficult,
frustrating, and sometimes impossible.” Zegart has been actively involved in
efforts to help U.S. Cyber Command and other agencies defuse this problem.
In his
article in The Atlantic, Giglio quoted national security expert Elizabeth
Gotein, who said the problems in our classification system over
overclassification are “rampant.” Gotein, in a 2016 article in The Nation
argued that “officials encounter multiple incentives to err liberally on the
side of classification” and, as a consequence, it is estimated that 50 percent
to 90 percent of classified documents could be safely released. (She notes that
while the Obama administration made an effort to reduce classifications, in
2014 there were nearly 80 million decisions to classify information. Her
article was published around the time of the furor regarding what, if any,
information in Hillary Clinton’s emails was classified or should have been.
Gotein argued that not understanding how the system works distorted voters’
understanding of that controversy seven years ago.
Former
CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni once relayed to me the results of a
study he conducted, regarding the classified info he received daily. He told me
that 80 percent of officially designated “classified” material he received was
actually available via open sources. Of the remaining 20 percent, Zinni said,
80 percent was discoverable via open sources if you knew what you were looking
for. In other words, only four percent was uniquely available via classified
channels.
Go back
further and you will find a 2013 article by Ronan Farrow in The Guardian in
which he wrote, “Trillions of new pages of text are classified each year. More
than 4.8 million people now have a security clearance, including low level
contractors like Edward Snowden. A committee established by Congress, the
Public Interest Declassification Board, warned in December that rampant
over-classification is ‘imped[ing] informed government decisions and an
informed public’ and, worse, ‘enabl[ing] corruption and malfeasance.’”
That was
a decade ago, and yet we’re enduring not one but two presidential scandals tied
to classified information.
But
noting the regular clarion calls to fix this system, and the limited concrete
steps that have been taken to do so, it’s fair to characterize our
unwillingness to fix a system this badly in need of repair for three-quarters
of a century as one of the biggest national security scandals of our time.
If it
turns out that Donald Trump was holding on to classified documents with the
intention of using them to enrich himself, or if he was sharing them with
foreign countries or their agents, it would be a crime of historic proportions.
If it is found it was simply his arrogance that led him to hold on to the
documents, it is still egregious.
The
Biden case should be investigated just as thoroughly. Both the current and the
former president should be held to the same standard. Should wrongdoing have
taken place in either case, whomever is responsible should be held to account.
That said, having followed the revelations in both instances carefully, it is
my bet is that once all the facts are in, the two will be seen to be as even
more different than they appear right now: the Trump case one of clear and
willful violation of the law, the Biden case one of error but constant and
attentive compliance with those same laws and procedures.
But
however those two cases are resolved, after the smoke has cleared from the
political firestorms that will swirl around them for months to come, it would
be helpful if we used our heightened awareness of these issues to finally take
action and modernize the design and security of the information system upon
which our government depends. That means far fewer classified documents, far
fewer people with the power to classify and declassify documents, and a system
that is easier to use, more secure, and less likely to invite abuse or error.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/way-too-many-government-documents-are-classified