“Republican bullshit can fly halfway around the world before a Democrat can pull on his boots.”
-Attributed falsely to Mark Twain. Or Paul the Apostle. I forget who.
As I said in the other thread, suppose a politician is handed a secret document, folds it up and puts it in a pocket and walks out of the room with it. What now? Who stops them? Who dares to try? It’s a system that runs on courtesy and deliberate ignorance.
It reminds me of a self-checkout at a grocery store. It only works because most people follow the rules most of the time. Some people legitimately think they have scanned an item but missed. Some people take a thing or two because they think the store owes them something. And some, like Trump, load a grocery cart to overflowing and go crashing out the fire exit, threatening to sue the security guards that are chasing him. I guess we should thank him for being so obnoxious about it that he blew open just how fragile of a system it really is.
Exactly this. I think I just heard a balloon go “pop”. I wish AOC would sarcastically and breathlessly start asking about visitor logs at the Pence house.
…there is a management theory, that I support, where systems should be all about getting the best outcomes, and that often punishment disincentives best practice.
The outcome that we want when classified documents are accidentally not returned is to get those documents returned.
So imagine we had mandatory fines for this. Maybe even jail time.
If you are a staffer that discovers the document, what would be the best thing to do? Maybe they were the ones that mishandled it. Or maybe it was the boss. They are now facing massive fines, or even potentially getting thrown in jail.
But nobody knows about this. They’ve been sitting in this box for over 10 years. And the incinerator is right over there. What should they do? If they turn them in: someone is getting punished. Burn them? And nobody will ever know.
The outcome we want here is to get the documents back. If it later comes up that the documents were taken in malice, or that there was wilful disregard of procedure, then action should be taken appropriately. But it needs to be taken case-by-case.
I was in the USAF for 8 years in the 80s and I never heard of fined for that sort of thing.
If I leave a health care record anywhere that doesn’t have two layers of locks, I can be fined or lose my license.
More likely Twain. St. Paul was probably too obsessed with keeping the ladies in their proper place to worry about the aerodynamic properties of bull excrement.
A commentator who’d actually worked in a White House, speaking on one of the cable shows today, gave an interesting example of what type of documents some of these guys might have.
She noted that a President or Vice President will have daily schedules printed out for every day of the week, and inevitably they are classified–after all, the fewer people who know in advance where they will be and at what times, the better.
But though Tuesday’s schedule is a classified document on Monday, by Wednesday it doesn’t really need to remain classified. But inevitably, it does remain classified.
It’s very possible that Presidents and Vice Presidents, nearly all of whom intend to write memoirs, collect these pages. And, very likely, the pages get boxed up and moved when they leave office.
There could well be much more sensitive items at Pence’s home and at Biden’s home and office–documents that would identify agents in the field or give away the methods the US uses to determine foreign capacity to wage war, etc.
But there could also be a high proportion of ‘yesterday’s Daily Schedule’-type documents, too.
(Obviously investigation must sort all this out–as well as the crucial questions of how the documents came to be boxed up/transported, and who could have had access at various points in time.)
Yes, but if our enemies have a sophisticated intelligence gathering operation of their own, they could potentially reverse engineer where our sources are. So a leak like that could expose intelligence assets.
But if you wanted to take one with you to someplace it wasn’t supposed to be, what kind of safeguard would actually prevent you from doing it? Are you searched when leaving? Is someone standing over your shoulder while you are handling the records? If you had to pack your office up in a hurry is there a chance that a paper could follow you home even if it wasn’t supposed to?
Goes both ways though. It’s somewhat safe to assume that where there is a ream of classified paperwork there is also any number of people who are careless with it whether you are talking about the US, China, Russia, etc.
The way this is going I’m beginning to think staffers are running up and down the halls of the white house with wheelbarrows full of classified documents.
Do need a coaster for your coffee sir?
I guess the Canadian Armed Forces takes security more seriously. Not sure, being lazy with classified material was definitely a way to get fined in the CAF.
I would say that in that kind of circumstance in the Canadian Armed Forces, a member would not be fined for precisely that reason. I’m referring to blatant carelessness that is caught by somebody else. When we had something out of the vault, and we wanted to go to the bathroom, we would leave it with somebody else. We did not just leave it laying around. It had to be secured, either by personnel or in the vault. Sounds like the USAF operated differently (based on another poster below), and perhaps that difference in viewpoint is part of why it seems like the USA has an issue with classified documents being where they ought not to be.
If I want to take it with me, it needs to be on my person until I’m wherever I can safeguard it sufficiently. Some facilities don’t permit any record removal, others do for specified personnel and purposes. If I’m at home with documents, I have to follow the same requirements. What reinforces them is the law, my.professional ethics, and the risk of a breach. In a facility that doesn’t allow record removal, there might be visual monitoring and the threat of fairly severe economic, legal, and licensure consequences.
ETA: In the circumstances in which I’d have to pack my office in a hurry, normally I’d be escorted out of the building and my office would be sorted and boxed by someone else. I’d still have an ethical and legal responsibility to repatriate any stray documents.
It could.
I would hope the intelligence services spend a good deal of time going over what they give in writing, to policymakers, to make sure sources were not compromised. It would have been particularly bad, of course, to give what I would term real secrets to Donald Trump. But we are seeing he’s not the only problem.
I suspect that if the number of secret documents was reduced, it would be easier to police the security of what remains. There are tradeoffs.
P.S. to my last post. It’s not just a question of how many secret documents there are, but also of how many people can bring up that document on their work computer, and how long the secret is to last. If you let two thousand Americans read the document, and if it contains an important secret the Russisn government would still like to know two weeks from now, I’m thinking one of those 2,000 will be a turncoat who delivers it to Russia during the two weeks. So why not just put it up on the State Department web site where I can read it?
The politicians, their aides, and government executives at places like the CIA, should be mature enough to see that they collectively are a security risk and that documents given them, concerning our potential or real adversaries, will have little more information than what is publicly available. If Biden wants to know what Putin is up to, he can look here.
I realize Pence won’t give a speech admitting to limited clerical ability and promising not to accept secret documents if ever again in office. But if by some miracle he does that, or Biden does the equivalent, they would be worthy of praise.
What I’m taking away from this is that it’s probably not at all uncommon for this to happen. I mean, if Biden and Pence both ended up there, we can virtually guarantee that other Presidents, Vice Presidents, Senators, Congresspeople, etc… have done the same.
The difference comes in how it’s handled.
The term, “classified documents”, sets off all kinds of alarms, but we need to realize that most “classified documents” aren’t plans for a Doomsday Weapon. They could be something as simple as, say, documents containing bids for a defense contract, or documents containing details of background checks for sensitive government positions, etc.
To me, the fact that they could keep them at home and actually forget about them indicates that they’re not documents about Jason Bourne and Treadstone. LOL
Side note: My understanding (not first or even second, third or fourth-hand) is that most classified documents lose that status after 25 years?
In that case, Treadstone goes public in four years! LOL
Agree. I say Biden and Pence should embrace the investigations as it will likely show little to no risk to national security and prove to be a simple error or oversight, with no nefarious intent. Going thru the investigation willingly and supportively will also bring into stark relief the case against TFG and his reluctance to cooperate, as well as the risks from each case. Biden can turn this issue into a strength.