I appreciate classification rules are murky, but I’ve got a factual question: suppose there are three copies of the same document, all marked “topSecret”. They are identical in content.
Can the President declassify the copy that he’s got, but not the copies held by the Director of the CIA and the Director of the Defence Intelligence Agency? So he can handle it normally, show it to guests at this dinners, and talk about it, but the two Directors are bound by the classification and secrecy rules?
Or is it the content that is classified, not the particular document? If so, does that mean that if the President declassified his copy of “A Fieldguide to America’s Nuclear Weapons”, then anyone who has a copy of the Fieldguide is free to publish it?
AFAICT, no. It is information that is affected by the classification/declassification process, not individual physical copies of that information. The process wouldn’t make much sense otherwise, would it?
I’ve been reading articles on declassification, and the answer appears to be no. Once a document is declassified, then that’s it’s status, period. However, I haven’t found anything that comes out and says it directly; it’s implied in the procedure as given here, though.
“Merely proclaiming a document or group of documents declassified and doing nothing more would not suffice,” Bradley Moss, a Washington, D.C.-based lawyer who works on national security cases, told PolitiFact.
Follow-through is required.
“He had to identify the specific documents he was declassifying, he needed to memorialize the order in writing for bureaucratic and historical purposes, and he needed to have staff physically modify the classification markings on the documents themselves,” Moss said. “Until that was done, the documents, per the security classification procedures, still have to be handled, transmitted and stored as if they were classified.”
That parallels what numerous other news articles say.
Mostly, I think it’s one of those questions nobody ever thought necessary to ask before.
And again, the object of classification is ultimately information within the documents. If you’re reading a classified document that says “The name of our Sooper Sekrit Agent in Country X is Joe Shlabotnik” and you make a note of that fact on the back of an old grocery store receipt, that information is still just as classified as it was in the original document, and you must handle it in accordance with the prescribed procedures appropriate to that classification level.
They certainly do, actually. Header and footer markings are mandatory as well as cover sheets. A lack of classification markers doesn’t make something not classified but if you copy something classified onto a napkin you’re required to label it.
I had a Secret-level security clearance once (and you better believe I googled the question “can I reveal my former security clearance status?” pretty carefully before posting that).
I was an IT grunt for a defense contractor, working on a project that was associated with a few classified numbers. I don’t even remember what the numbers represented (frequencies of some kind?), and I never learned nor had any opportunity to learn what they actually were. Any project document referring to their existence just called them “Number A”, “Number B”, and so on.
To be able to do my project work that might involve encountering a document that even mentioned the existence of those unidentified numbers, I had to get a Secret clearance, the kind where the feds call up your friends and previous employers etc. and ask a bunch of nosy questions about your finances and personal habits.
And even after 35 years I remember the “whooaaaaaa oookaaay” feeling I had on being briefed that misuse of classified material could in some circumstances constitute an offense punishable by execution. As in, I, a peaceful middle-class white woman who had not shot a cop or even murdered anybody at all, could conceivably be legally put to actual death if I did not behave responsibly about my potential access to stuff the gummint didn’t want people to know.
Suffice it to say that I am absolutely flabbergasted that even in the Donald Trump administration there could have been so many people feckless enough to treat really sensitive classified material so cavalierly. SMFH.
Ah, so that’s why Schlabotnik was such a lousy baseball player; it was all a front!
As an aside, movies and such will sometimes treat “need to know basis” as being an extra super level of classification, but really, all classified information is on a need-to-know basis. In @Kimstu’s line of work, she had (or might plausibly have had) a need to know those secret frequencies, and so she could plausibly have been legitimately told them. But if you had some other, unrelated, Secret-level piece of classified information, that had nothing to do with @Kimstu’s job, you couldn’t legally share that information with her, even though she had the clearance level for it, because she didn’t have the need to know.
Occasionally top secret documents get leaked and posted all over the Internet; they are still Top Secret even as they are being published in The New York Times or whatever.
ETA this took place a long time ago, but a friend (this is what he said…) apparently had the problem that he did not have clearance (or need to know?) to access his own report, which made it a problem to refer to the first part when he was writing the second half. He ended up looking at a draft copy he had, which officially should not have existed if following protocol.
Leading, over here, to GCHQ insisting on overseeing the physical destruction of any and all computer drives containing information that had already been leaked to the media around the world.
In fact, I had a friend whose government agency sent a warning to all of its employees warning against them reading press coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations because it might contain classified information that they were not allowed to mishandle. It was a bit silly and I’m sure there were no personnel actions that ever came of people who read the newspaper or who discarded it without properly destroying it but…
I’ve always been irked by those scenes in movies/tv shows where someone announces "I have Top Secret Clearance so you can show/tell me about [whatever random subject has come up.]
Really? I am, say, a engineer who designs some super-secret targeting gizmo for a weapon, and thus I can be told the name of important spies and our blackmail holds on various foreign officials and, oh, the current nuclear launch codes?
Yeah.
More humorously, back in the 80s I volunteered at the local town library. It was located on a very short street: one side of the street had a single complex of buildings that was a primary school. The other side had a similar complex that made up the local High School, then a standalone building that was the ‘new’ town library (only 40 years old, that’s new, right?) and then a single, ordinary one family house.
One day a government guy came to the circulation desk, trying to investigate the guy who owned the house for something related to getting a security clearance. Part of this required interviewing ALL his immediate neighbors. Yeah. He talked to the librarians on duty, who couldn’t help him at all beyond confirming that the guy and his wife both had library cards. He even insisted on asking me, because I was the volunteer randomly working on the circ. desk at the moment, an entire page of questions of questions about this X guy, none of which I could answer.
I mean, the only reason I could put face and name together was because I’d once had to take payment from him for a book one of his kids had lost. I knew nothing about his spending habits, did he throw frequent parties, how did the couple and their children interact with the non-existent neighbors… The agent actually made a note about his having paid for the book. I wonder if that affected his security rating in any way?
Not to continue (my) hijack further, sorry, but IM limited E (I’ve been called as a security clearance reference for friends a couple of times), the feds are WAY more interested in your possible financial embarrassments than in anything else.
Basic evidence of good character is fine, but it’s disillusioning how little importance security-clearance investigators seem to attach to it compared to the questions about how much debt you have, whether you have expensive tastes or tend to spend recklessly, and so forth.
They have a point, though. When you read news stories about people who commit espionage, it can be mind-boggling to see how little money is sometimes involved. Some people who are irresponsible about money are willing to take crazy risks and be crazy disloyal just for the sake of a few tens of thousands of dollars in a crisis.
