In today’s open-source headlines . . .
Go ahead and say it. “If it had been me, I’d be ________.” (Fill in the blank yourself. My editor is G-rated and strict.) That’s likely true whether we’re thinking of the Petraeus or the Clinton compromise. I won’t begin to compare and contrast the two cases.
But, you’re probably right. If it had been one of “us,” there’s no way the government would expend so many resources—both manpower and money—to dig to the very bottom of a very deep problem: cleared employees at State are juggling servers and mobile devices like cats.
Director James Comey testified to Congress, “Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers . . . and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. . . . Piecing all of that back together—to gain as full an understanding as possible of the ways in which personal e-mail was used for government work—has been a painstaking undertaking, requiring thousands of hours of effort.”
The State of the State Department
Still, I doubt we’ll see any big exodus from State. If you are only one of many implicated in an agency trouble by security failures (you can call them security challenges if you close one eye and squint the other), you may very well skate. Comey described in his 2,300 word media briefing, “[T]he security culture of the State Department in general, and with respect to use of unclassified e-mail systems in particular, was generally lacking in the kind of care for classified information found elsewhere in the government.” Challenges.
According to Comey’s press briefing remarks (good reading just to understand the depth and process of the FBI investigation and what it means for information to be classified), State’s got challenges. Comey said, “Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
Nobody’s retiring in lieu of prosecution for mishandling classified information. Not at State. Not anywhere in the Loop.
The problem’s deeper than State. President Obama said “he was concerned about how the State Department handles classified information but cast this as part of a government-wide challenge in the age of email, texts and smartphones.” Now you’re home free—it’s everybody’s challenge.
Is Overclassification the real Elephant in the Room?
But the problem’s deeper than just mishandling classified information. President Obama’s broader view recognizes part of the larger challenge: over-classification. He said that “if one classified too much, the benefits of the information evaporated because it took too long to process.”
He’s got to fix that.
What? Wait. Public Law 111–258 of October 7, 2010? The Reducing Over-Classification Act? Oh, yeah.
Well, that was a valiant effort. But a couple of years after the President signed the Act—and everyone had a chance not to implement it much—the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) reported that “in a minor act of legislative malpractice, Congress failed to define the meaning of the term ‘over-classification’ (as it was spelled in the statute). So it is not entirely clear what the Act was supposed to ‘reduce.’”
That’s o.k. Just refer to Executive Order 13526 signed a year before P.L. 111-258 was signed. As the Department of Justice’s Inspector General’s audit notes in footnote #28, “’over-classification’ can occur when information is marked classified but does not fall into any of the eight categories of information specified by EO 13526. In addition, ‘over-classification’ occurs when information is classified at too high of a level, such as information that might be marked Top Secret but for which unauthorized disclosure would not cause ‘exceptionally grave damage to national security.’”
Got it.
