By David K. Shipler
Many
years ago, the Communications Officer on the US Navy destroyer where I was
stationed went into a panic. He had misplaced a booklet, marked “SECRET”
containing encryption keys. He scoured the radio shack where the document was
usually kept, went through the officers’ wardroom where we ate, and ravaged his
desk in the stateroom we shared. Nothing.
He was
a young ensign and was sure he was going to prison. I helped him look. We both
had Top Secret clearances, so there was no risk of my seeing something I
shouldn’t. We overturned our mattresses. We emptied drawers and lockers.
Finally, on a whim, I fished around in the narrow slot between a desk and a
bunk and—voila! There it was. My roommate was saved.
Would
that all officials were as terrified of classified documents going astray. But
no, as Donald Trump and Joe Biden have demonstrated, and as countless lower
functionaries have surely done out of sight, carelessness seems as ubiquitous
as classification itself.
There are two main reasons for
this. One is overclassification of material that needn’t be kept secret, or
whose need for secrecy has expired. The other is a decentralization of
authority over the reams of classified documents that flow across some
government desks. Those in certain positions are so used to shuffling papers
with one of the three basic classification levels—Confidential, Secret, or Top
Secret—that they evidently get too casual.
“Misplacing classified documents is
very common—happens all the time,” the BBC was told
by Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive at George Washington
University. He added that certain information, such as a president’s travel
schedule, is classified beforehand but need not remain secret afterwards. Yet
those documents are often never put through the declassification process.
In addition, virtually every
communication sent by an embassy to the State Department in Washington is
classified, at least at the low Confidential level, even including reports of
news stories that everybody can read in the local media. It’s too bad that Ben
Franklin didn’t come up with some proverb for this like, “Absurdity numbs the
conscience.”
Nevertheless, mishandling classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way can be charged as a felony. And knowingly removing classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities is a misdemeanor.
