‘When Everything is Classified, Nothing is Classified’

Happy Friday! On this day in 1970, John Lennon came up with, wrote, and recorded “Instant Karma” in a matter of hours, essentially launching his solo career.

Impressive. But as impressive as putting together a 2,700-word newsletter on over-classification in an evening? We’ll leave that for you to decide.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services issued a 64-page report Thursday, finding the National Institutes of Health—and more specifically, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—failed to properly monitor a grantee that collaborated on research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), the Chinese city where the COVID-19 pandemic began. The report does not include any evidence the WIV or the grantee—EcoHealth—were responsible for the virus that’s killed millions in recent years, but it does say the NIH did not follow its own progress reporting protocols, nor did they refer the research to their review committee meant to evaluate the risks of pathogen experimentation. “Based on these findings,” the inspector general report reads, “we conclude that NIH missed opportunities to more effectively monitor research. With improved oversight, NIH may have been able to take more timely corrective actions to mitigate the inherent risks associated with this type of research.”
• The Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine and Related Biological Products committee voted unanimously on Thursday in favor of retiring Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech’s original COVID-19 vaccines and replacing them with a version of the pharmaceutical companies’ bivalent booster shots, which were specifically designed to protect against the Omicron variant. A Centers for Disease Control study published this week found people who received the updated booster were about half as likely to develop symptomatic COVID-19 from the now-dominant XBB/XBB.1.5 subvariant as people who received two to four doses of the original, monovalent vaccine. The FDA and CDC must officially adopt the change before it can go into effect, but the agencies are expected to do so.
• The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday the United States’ real gross domestic product (GDP) grew at a 2.9 percent annualized pace in the fourth quarter of 2022, down from 3.2 percent annualized growth in Q3. The numbers bested economists’ predictions of 2.6 percent growth, despite the Federal Reserve hiking interest rates to cool growth in a bid to slow inflation.
• Days before it was set to expire, the Biden administration on Thursday extended the Deferred Enforced Departure for Certain Hong Kong Citizens program, which allows Hong Kongers to overstay their visas without fear of deportation. The program was first adopted in August 2021 in response to growing political repression in Hong Kong; Hong Kongers may now remain in the U.S. until January 2025. 
• The Justice Department announced Thursday it has “dismantled” Hive, a Russia-linked ransomware gang accused of hacking hospital, school, and private firm computer systems. U.S. agencies collaborated with European authorities to hack the Hive servers over seven months, before disabling them and seizing control of the group’s website. Attorney General Merrick Garland said officials have not made any arrests or seized any assets, and the investigation is ongoing. 
• Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed yesterday U.S. forces killed Bilal al-Sudani—a high-ranking ISIS leader and “key facilitator for ISIS’s global network”—in Somalia earlier in the day. According to Austin, no civilians or U.S. troops were hurt in the helicopter raid that also killed other ISIS members.
• Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California announced Thursday he is running for U.S. Senate, hoping to succeed incumbent Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who at 89 has not yet announced whether she plans to run for reelection. Democratic Rep. Katie Porter entered the race earlier this month, and Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee is expected to join the field as well. Republican Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, meanwhile, announced he will run for reelection in 2024, rather than pursuing a rumored presidential bid.
• Shelby County, Tennessee District Attorney Steve Mulroy charged five former Memphis police officers with second-degree murder for the death of Tyre Nichols, a black man who died days after the five officers, who are also black, left him in critical condition after a traffic stop on January 7. The five men were also charged with aggravated assault, aggravated kidnapping, official misconduct, and official oppression. Mulroy said officials will release video footage of the altercation this evening, and U.S. Capitol Police are beefing up security in preparation for any protests or riots that erupt over the weekend. 
• The Labor Department reported Thursday that initial jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—decreased by 6,000 week-over-week to a seasonally adjusted 186,000 last week, reflective of a still-tight labor market despite layoffs at a number of high-profile companies.

Three Can Keep a Secret

Pittsburgh, 1984. Thirteen-year-old Kristin Preble’s social studies class was having show-and-tell, so she brought in something her dad had found in a hotel room a few years before: a 4-inch stack of federal government documents labeled “Classified, Confidential, Executive.” Preble’s teacher confiscated the documents and turned them over to the FBI after perusing the briefings on Iran, Libya, and other countries. 

The 8th grader got a “B” on the assignment.

Procedures for handling classified material have gotten stricter over the past 40 years, but recent document security breaches by Donald Trump, President Joe Biden, and now former Vice President Mike Pence aren’t the first such incidents. We feel comfortable asserting they won’t be the last, either: The National Archives asked other former presidents and vice presidents on Thursday to take a look at their personal records and see if they turn up anything that shouldn’t be there.

The breaches could have major implications for national security—we don’t know the files’ exact contents, but reporting suggests at least some included highly sensitive information. As Klon has explained, the United States has plenty of secrets that need keeping, from technical details of nuclear weapons to the human sources risking their lives to deliver vital intelligence from around the world.

But we’re not here to talk about those secrets. As Barack Obama put it in 2016, “There’s classified, and then there’s classified.” He was making a partisan argument to defend Hillary Clinton at the time, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong. More than 1 million Americans have top secret security clearances, and every year the U.S. creates approximately 50 million classified documents. We say approximately because we don’t know the exact number—the government gave up counting.

There’s a lot of legitimately sensitive information in those files, obviously, but there’s a lot of other stuff, too. “Everything’s secret,” Michael Hayden, former CIA and NSA director, once said. “I mean, I got an email saying, ‘Merry Christmas.’ It carried a Top Secret NSA classification marking.”

Information gets unnecessarily classified for a whole host of reasons. Concealing officials’ embarrassing behavior? Too lazy to log out of the classified system when you switch to an unclassified topic in your emails? Trying to make something look more important so your boss will actually read it? Unsure if it should be classified, but leery of the consequences for wrongfully releasing something? Stamp that sucker and call it a day.

“There’s no malice, there’s no intent to hide anything for a lot of it,” said Sina Beaghley, a senior defense policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. “A lot of it is truly just convenience.” 

And fear. “There are very high penalties for under-classifying or mishandling classified information,” Beaghley said. “You can see where the default would be, ‘Let’s hold this at whatever level I know I’m not going to get into trouble.’”

Beaghley noted classification training has improved in recent years, but low-level officials doing their level best to both guard secrets and ensure transparency still face a daunting task. The Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) at the National Archives recorded 2,116 “security classification guides” governing document classification in 2021, more than 70 percent of them under the Department of Defense. While America’s various agencies and military branches do have unique needs, the Archives argued this number could be winnowed down. In the meantime, your average Government Joe and Jane can lose their security clearances, their jobs, or their freedom for getting this stuff wrong—while erring on the side of caution won’t get them in trouble. In 2016, the House Oversight and Reform Committee concluded the federal government had mislabeled 50 to 90 percent of classified material.

But over-classification is a problem, and not just for holding government officials accountable (which, for the record, we’re inclined to find important). “The best way to ensure that secrecy is respected, and that the most important secrets remain secret, is for secrecy to be returned to its limited but necessary role,” a 1997 bipartisan congressional report concluded. “Secrets can be protected more effectively if secrecy is reduced overall.” The report’s recommendations were ignored, and in 2004 another report—this one from the 9/11 Commission—said over-classification had siloed intelligence that could have helped stop the attack. Yet the problem persists; Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines wrote to senators last year, “It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner.”

And with all this unnecessarily classified information sloshing around, it’s easy to see how high-level officials handling a high volume of information of all sorts could get complacent. “When everything is classified, nothing is classified,” said Loch Johnson, who worked for congressional national security committees and the Church Committee investigating government abuses. “This notion of documents floating around in the Oval Office and into a box and down to Pennsylvania Avenue or Mar-a-Lago or wherever it might be is really just an indication of sloppiness that’s overtaking the system.” This complacency, Johnson added, may be a symptom of high-level officials rarely facing the consequences lower-level workers fear.

As unwieldy as the situation is, the government does systematically review material for declassification. In 2016, ISOO estimated 102 million pages of government documents had been reviewed for declassification that year, and 44 million declassified. But these efforts can’t keep up with the deluge of new classifications. Sen. Elizabeth Warren estimated last year the federal government spends about $18 billion a year protecting classification and about $102 million on declassification. And there are plenty of examples of classification lingering long after its justification expires—in 1991, a Baltimore Sun reporter discovered a still-classified file on World War I troop movements.

Just about every president for the last few decades has issued an executive order tweaking the classification system—though they’re arguably motivated to continue keeping potentially embarrassing material under wraps—and Congress has followed its multiple committee investigations with legislation such as the 2010 Reducing Over-Classification Act, aimed at improving classification practices in the executive branch. But, whoops, Congress didn’t define the term “over-classification,” leaving the law’s significance a bit muzzy.

The current bipartisan kerfuffle could be an opening for real change, experts argue. “Politically, we have to begin realizing that this isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue,” said Matthew Connelly, a history professor at Columbia University and author of The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets. “This is a story of public officials treating public records like it’s their personal property.”

Analysts suggest steps to both cut down on over-classification and increase efficiency of declassification. Johnson, for example, argued Congress should get serious about clarifying what merits each classification category. “Really precise legislative language about what should be in these categories,” he suggested. “So that those who are wielding these rubber stamps can really tell without much ambiguity whether or not it warrants top secret or some other level of classification.”

Connelly says Congress should appropriate money to develop a machine-learning system to speed up declassification—a suggestion Beaghley also backed. She argued technology could recognize phrases that suggest a need for classification or likely innocuous information. “Otherwise you’re talking about people manually curating millions of documents,” she said. “Technology is getting better and better at handling information like that. Doesn’t mean you won’t have a human in the loop, but to help us at least manage and thin things over time.”

Worth Your Time

• Did you know the Air Force almost nuked North Carolina in 1961? More than 60 years ago, a B-52 crash landed carrying nuclear bombs “250 times more powerful than the ones that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” Jeremy Marcovitch recounts in his North Carolina Rabbit Hole newsletter. Dr. Jack ReVelle, then-25 years old, found and defused the bombs, and three years ago yesterday, he passed away “after fighting a disease that was brought on by a military career of responding to radioactive accidents,” Marcovitch writes. “That volleyball-sized orb that he’d carried out of that muddy pit in 1961 was the primary core of a hydrogen bomb, with enough uranium and plutonium inside to create a huge crater, kill tens of thousands of people instantly, and leave parts of Eastern North Carolina permanently uninhabitable. The only protection the Air Force gave Jack ReVelle was his military fatigues and a pair of gloves. He held the most radioactive part of the most powerful weapon the world had ever seen up against his chest for fifteen minutes.”
• A tragedy on a movie set may have something to teach us about our constitutional rights. After a prop gun fired on the set of Rust killing the film’s cinematographer, movie star Alec Baldwin talked to the police—and he shouldn’t have, argues Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times. “To people unfamiliar with the American criminal justice system, Baldwin’s decision sounds reasonable: Something terrible happened, and he wanted to help,” Manjoo writes. “But defense lawyers I talked to said Baldwin’s case should serve as a reminder that if you are involved in a serious incident, it’s best not to talk to the police unless you have an attorney present.” The Fifth Amendment, Manjoo continues, “is no mere formality. It is among the best defenses against government overreach that Americans enjoy. We should guard it vigorously. Anytime you’re asked to talk to the police about an incident you are involved in, there are just four words you need to say: ‘I want a lawyer.’”
• Politicians in D.C. seem to be on an anti-monopoly kick lately, but there’s one trust no one is trying to bust: Columbus Washboard Co., the last washboard-maker in America. The company sold more than a million boards a year back in the 1940s, but washing machines soon made the wood-and-corrugated-steel boards a relic of a bygone era. People still buy them—in much smaller quantities—but for very different purposes. “Today, about 40% of company sales go to bluegrass and folk musicians who use the boards as percussion instruments,” Kris Maher writes for the Wall Street Journal. “Most of Columbus’s sales come via Amazon.com, including by customers who want to hang the washboards on a wall in the laundry room. Carlene Blair, of International Falls, Minn., said she has six washboards by her washer and dryer, including a Columbus model. Ms. Blair said she paid $9.99 for it at a Twin Cities-area Goodwill last spring. ‘I’ve never used one to wash clothes,’ she said. ‘I like that antique feeling.’ Ms. Blair scoops up used washboards at garage sales and antique stores, She usually adds a coat of paint and a stenciled design to sell on Facebook or a local consignment shop to buyers who also like to see them hanging.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• In his latest Boiling Frogs (🔒), Nick weighs in on Donald Trump’s return to Facebook. “To this day, the only sanction Trump has suffered for attempting a coup against the incoming U.S. government was losing his social media accounts. That may change soon depending on what happens in Fulton County, but until recently those of us who wanted to see him face some sort of accountability had to content ourselves with the fact that he was no longer free to fart out his dumb memes on Twitter and Facebook. Thanks to Elon Musk and Nick Clegg, even that trivial penalty has now been rescinded. Trump is, for the moment, off scot-free.”
• Jonah steps in to host this week’s episode of The Dispatch Podcast, talking to Declan and Kevin about the debt ceiling mess, the over-classification of documents, and whether Ron DeSantis’ all-in-on-the-culture-war approach is simply what Republican politics will be from now on. Plus: profound thoughts on the many twists and turns in the M&Ms saga.
• On the site today, Price reports on the future of the pro-life movement, Hussain Abdul-Hussain makes the case for continuing Arab-Israeli normalization, and Yuki Tatsumi delves into Japan’s military buildup. 

Let Us Know

Do you think sloppiness—rather than malice—is the most likely explanation for the recent classified document scandals? If so, how much should intent matter?