Imagination runs wild in the absence of facts. The most tantalizing detail is that 11 sets of documents were classified. It sheds light on the classification system by which the government withholds information from its own people in the name of national security for all.
More than a million people have top secret clearance
It’s actually a very large universe of people with access to top secret data. The Director of National Intelligence publishes what is described as an annual report, “Security Clearance Determinations,” although the most recent I could find was from 2017. In it, more than 2.8 million people are described as having a security clearance as of October 2017 — more than 1.6 million have access to either Confidential or Secret information, and nearly 1.2 million are described as having access to Top Secret information. There are additional people who have security clearance but do not currently have access to information. This includes civil servants, contractors and members of the military.
Services control their own privacy data. They are supposed to declassify it
That doesn’t mean more than 1 million people have access to whatever top secret documents were lying around Mar-a-Lago. Each classification agency has its own system and is supposed to participate in the declassification of its own documents. Trump’s defenders argued that he had put in place an order to declassify documents he moved from the Oval Office to the residence during his time in the White House, although professionals said that claim could not be true. “The idea that the president can declassify documents just by moving them from one physical location to another is nonsense on so many levels,” Shawn Turner, a CNN analyst and former director of communications for the US National Intelligence Service, said during of an appearance on Monday in Media in Politics”.
There is an official procedure
Turner said the process for declassification must include a signature from the agency that classified the information in the first place in order to protect the intelligence-gathering process, its sources and methods. Presidents have periodically used executive orders to update the official system by which classified information is declassified. Most recently, then-President Barack Obama put into effect Executive Order 13526 in 2009. This is still the official policy since neither Trump nor President Joe Biden have made it known.
The government may soon change the process
Biden launched a review of how classified data is handled earlier this summer. Here is an exhaustive report by the Congressional Research Service on the declassification process. Biden’s review will review the three general levels of classification.
Classification levels
CNN’s Katie Lobosco wrote a very good primer on data privacy last week. Here is its description for the three classification levels: Top Secret — This is the highest level of classification. Information is classified as Top Secret if it “could reasonably be expected to cause extremely serious harm to national security,” according to a 2009 executive order outlining the classification system. A subset of top-secret documents known as SCI, or sensitive classified information, is reserved for certain information derived from intelligence sources. Access to an SCI document can be further restricted to a smaller group of people with specific security permissions. Some of the materials recovered from Trump’s Florida home were marked SCI Top Secret. Secret — Information is classified as Secret if the information is determined to cause “serious harm” to national security if disclosed. Confidential — Confidential is the least sensitive classification level applied to information that could reasonably be expected to cause “harm” to national security if disclosed.
What kind of things are top secret?
Former CIA officer David Priess, who is now editor of the website Lawfare, told “New Day” that regardless of the specific classification, it is information the government has an interest in not making public. It could be information gathered about North Korea’s nuclear program or Russian military operations, for example.
Spills can be catastrophic or fatal
The government often gets this kind of information by asking people to risk their lives or by using technology they don’t want adversaries to know about. Speaking about it Monday morning, Priess got emotional. “Revealing this information put people’s lives at risk,” he said. “It’s no joke. We know people who died serving their country this way.”
What took so long?
The bigger question than what has been classified, Priess argued, is why, if the government knew the documents were at Mar-a-Lago, it took investigators so long to get them. In order for a president to declassify anything, he argued, there still needs to be a paper trail so everyone knows something has been declassified. “If they’re not marked as declassified and other documents with the same information aren’t also declassified, did it actually happen? If there’s no record of it, how do you know?”
We may not know more for a long time
The problem now may be that the imagination will be free as to what is in the documents. It could be a long time before American voters figure out exactly what this was all about. “Technically, we won’t see any further action on this case in the legal docket unless and until the DOJ brings criminal charges against any individual,” CNN legal analyst and former federal prosecutor Elie Honig also told the New Day’. RELATED: DOJ objects to release of evidence in Mar-a-Lago search warrant probable cause affidavit There is already some speculation that rather than seeking charges, the government was simply trying to secure the data. Classified information can remain that way for years and years — between 10 and 25, according to the declassification directives signed by Obama. The standard is that if something no longer needs to be classified, it should be declassified. And if it needs to be classified beyond that 25-year period, it can be.
Look at the top secret documents of the past
The FBI, CIA, and State Department all have online reading rooms of previously classified data released through the Freedom of Information Act. None of this is very recent. But the case of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago documents seems special, and there are already bipartisan calls from Sens. Mark Warner and Marco Rubio — the top elected officials on the Senate Intelligence Committee — to Director of National Intelligence Avril Lavigne Haines and Attorney General Merrick Garland are asking for more information about what the FBI seized.
Examples of prosecutions
Prosecutions for the mishandling of classified data can involve high-profile individuals. For example, retired general and former CIA director David Petraeus gave classified information to his mistress, who was writing a book about him. He eventually pleaded guilty, paid a $100,000 fine and was placed on two years’ probation. What data did it mishandle? From CNN reporting at the time: During his time as a commander in Afghanistan, Petraeus kept personal notes including classified information in eight 5-by-8-inch black notebooks. Classified information (includes) identity of secret officers, war strategy, notes from diplomatic and national security meetings and security code words. Others are less well-known — like Asia Janay Lavarello, a Defense Department civilian working at the U.S. Embassy in Manila, who moved classified documents to her hotel room and home while working on a dissertation. He served three months in prison.
