Please don’t do this. Your local police would have as much jurisdiction as your local dog catcher. It would be a waste of your time and theirs. Eventually they would do what you should have done, look up the number for the local FBI office. There is no chain of command that goes from local police to federal agencies. They work under separate jurisdiction and separate laws.
Of course, now that we have photos of what top secret file folders/cover pages look like, I imagine they will become a novelty item for anyone with a warped sense of humor. (Open to reveal photoshopped picture of your not-favourite politician in compromising position, or the plans to invade Canada.)
As far as I know, no-one who bought the copy of the NYT with extracts from the Pentagon Papers was prosecuted.
That no one was prosecuted for reading an article in the NYT that was sourced from secret documents doesn’t preclude the existence of a law that makes it illegal to read a top secret document.
I haven’t found such a law yet. I’m open to the possibility that such a law exists, but I think it’s more likely that the laws only address the responsibility of those who have legal access to confidential documents and their liability for letting those secrets fall into the wrong hands. If the NSA guy shows me the plans to attack Canada, that’s on him, not on me.
They aren’t qualified to make that determination. Didn’t they help reveal Valerie Plame?
She was stationed in the U.S. and is still alive.
It obiously isn’t a factual matter what you, the person with the secret documents, are going to think you should disclose due to it being in the public interst. However, the example you gave does not indicate that leaking secrets to the WaPo, however ill-advised the leak you mentioned may have been, endangered Ms. Plame’s life. What it endangered was her career.
More broadly, I don’t see that you should always do, with a top secret document, whatever would be personally safest. But as said before, the safest thing is to go to a lawyer.
How do such lawyers advertise themselves? National law? Federal crimes?
There seems to be a lot of ignorance in this thread, liberally salted with some factual information.
If I came across a document with Top Secret markings, I would glance through it to determine that someone wasn’t playing a prank, then call my division’s Security Officer (doesn’t every company have one of those?), notify him and follow his instructions (which are probably to secure the document for transport usually something like in an envelope marked “Classified” inside an envelope with just an address to send to if found).
Absent working for a Defense Contractor, the advice to contact a federal agency is a good one. The FBI is fine, but so would contacting a military base, or even a local recruiting office for one of the services They aren’t going to arrest you, or threaten you, or investigate you. They’ll want you to bring the document in to them and ask you some questions, mostly around finding out the possibility of other documents that may still be out there. They would probably remind you that the information in the document is critical to National Security and that you shouldn’t share the information with anyone. Of course, now that they have officially told you the information is important for National Security, the “willful” clauses in laws like the Espionage Act come into play, but only if you start doing stuff like starting a thread here on what you’ve found out.
If you have or have had a clearance, you’ve signed agreements acknowledging your responsibilities, the penalties for ignoring them, including the requirement that you have those responsibilities for years after you give up your clearance. You go through periodic training sessions that hammer this home. All of these responsibilities are regulatory items, and don’t have anything to do with constraining the activities of uncleared individuals. If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of US citizens with a TS clearance, you should know what to do with your uncle’s document without being told. And you’ll know that there are penalties on you for doing nothing.
What covers ordinary citizens (as well as cleared personnel) are laws like the Espionage Act, where, if you realize, or should realize, that the information you’ve got is critical to National Security, you can be prosecuted for actions covered by the law. Even then, the courts allow a lot of leeway for people “outside the veil”. The willful or negligent part has to be pretty egregious (cleared individuals don’t get this level of leeway).
Finally, I would guess that there are multiple instances of cleared individuals (inadvertently) taking TS documents out of the SCIF every month (just because there are so many cleared personnel and human beings make mistakes). Once they are discovered (and remediation is taken care of), the person responsible is, for first offenses, reminded of their responsibilities, made to go through training again, and a note made in their security package. And that’s it. Too many mistakes will probably lead to reprimands, then loss of clearance, but no one gets prosecuted for being a forgetful doofus.
While this has happened as far as I know it is quite rare. One major caveat is whether you have or have ever had a security clearance. When you are assigned a clearance you promise to treat all classified information, whether part of your job, an accident or the nightly news, correctly. Even after you leave government service. It is a rare situation that came up most significantly with he Snowden files. Cleared people were taking a risk if they ever even read a news report on those leaks. If NBC posted a leaked document and it ended up on your hard drive, you might get in a lot of trouble if your computer was seized for an unrelated reason. AFAIF that never happened but the Government warned people with clearances not to take chances. If you come across a classified document, don’t do anything except contact your lawyer and the FBI.
What others said better than I. 
Accidents happen, so it isn’t entirely hypothetical. For instance, as I remember the story, several decades ago residents along the shores of Holy Loch in Scotland reported a lot of litter along the shore. When people went to pick it up, they found some if it was classified documents from the US nuclear submarine tender based in the Loch. Apparently a burn bag wasn’t…oops.
I never said Ms. Plame’s life was risked. However, she had been a clandestine operative and senior official in nuclear non-proliferation. Revealing her status compromised all her contacts and operations for her entire career. Foreign agencies would be backtracking her career for anything they could turn up.
Specifically, she was working at the time to get Iraqi nuclear scientists and their families extracted to the US. With her reveal, those contacts were burned and they were turned over to Mossad to eliminate.
People died as a consequence of her status being revealed.
But as long as she wasn’t at risk, that’s all that matters.
As I recall an interesting article related to her posted resume. She listed among her “employers” a certain company; the reporters tracked down someone else whose resume listed that company and asked him if it was legit or a CIA front? No answer. That resume was taken down soon after. So information can be bad in the right hands.
Also, I recall that some TS federal employees were told to not read Wikileaks because it was hosting classified documents that they were not authorized to see. Reminds me of the story during the arms treaty negotiations, where the US negotiator was sitting across from some Soviet brass. The guy got frustrated, hauled out a map, and said “we know you have missle bases with the following amounts of warheads, here, here, here…” The Soviet general looked shocked, and pointed to a Soviet admiral 'You can’t tell him that! It classified!".
She herself never has named any. She only says it is possible:
I don’t know the fate of all my assets
The question for me then is — did leaking secrets ever save lives?
I don’t have any names for my example either, but it is highly plausible that the Pentagon Papers being published in the New York Times saved many lives by shortening the Vietnam War.
So you should read the secret papers and make the best careful well-informed decision you can as to who they should go to.
As noted: not just federal employees, and not just people with security clearances. I met neither of those criteria. My company sent out a broadcast email saying “thou shalt not”.
To me, it would depend on how old it was. If it was current, say the last 2-3 years, I’d probably call the FBI. If it was older than that, I’d shred it or burn it.
My reasoning for the above, is that, even if the government knows it’s missing (and they very well may have no idea that it is, depending) and it’s old, then there is no reason to get the government curning on this. It’s not an issue now, and with you destroying, it won’t become one.
If it is new, there is a chance that there mught be an investigation on this, and by turning it is, that effort could be turned off. I’d serioulsy doubt that would be the case though.
Over all, I’d destroying it and move on.
I agree. If I report them, someone might get into trouble - either me, or someone else. It almost certainly will mean a lot of work for somebody who probably has enough on their plate as it is. Why take that risk? I didn’t sign off for them, which means they’re not my responsibility. If I destroy them, it’ll be like they never existed, and nobody will be the wiser.
I’d hide them in a hollowed out pumpkin.
I used to work at some companies that maintained document storage facilities for Secret, Top Secret, etc. -rated documents. If I still worked there, I’d probably take them there. I’d probably still take them to the ones that still exist.
Boo! Hiss!
After reading this thread, I have even more respect for Daniel Ellsberg.
In the Air Force, we would occasionally find Secret or Top Secret classified documents lying around in random places, but that was actually a test. They were intentionally planted to see how we would handle the situation if it actually happened.
We were supposed to not read the document (it was probably blank anyway) and to take it directly to our squadron’s security officer.