Mishandling of classified documents continues to make headlines, first with the FBI August 2022 raid of former President Trump Mar-a-Lago home and, more recently, with the disclosure that the documents are classified was found at President Biden’s private office and at his own home. Historian Matthew Connelly says one reason we see problems like this is that so many government records are being classified as “top secret”.
On average, records are marked as confidential three times per second, Connelly said, creating so many secret documents that it’s nearly impossible to preserve them all.
“More and more things are being classified as things like PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, text messages, and video conferencing,” he said. “Absolute volume is something we can’t even measure anymore on paper. … We don’t know what’s stored in the cloud — or, in some cases, erased and completely destroyed. so that no one can know.”
Connelly says that over the past 20 years, he’s found that the documents he expected to find in the archives simply weren’t there. “If you want to try doing history of the 1980s or even the 1970s, you will find that there are just big holes in the record,” he said. “And I can’t help but wonder: How much is missing out there? What else don’t we know?”
Previously, confidential records were stored, preserved, and eventually declassified — allowing researchers and casual history buffs alike to rummage through them for new details about events in the past. past, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis or the civil rights movement. But in his new book, Declassification Tools: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secrets, Connelly made the point that a large amount of documents would never have been considered for declassification had the process not been reformed.
“No one will be allowed to see any [the documents now being labeled classified] unless some other official decides that the information is safe to release to the public,” he said. Connelly says it’s a requirement that officials review “page by page, page by page.”
If technology is part of the problem, it can also be part of the solution. Connelly and a number of data scientists have used artificial intelligence and machine learning to develop a system that analyzes a huge pool of records to determine which records are actually classified and which can be published. declare.
“With computers, we are always generating more information, including more and more classified information,” he said. “We had to create technology that would allow us to prioritize what really needs to be protected and then accelerate the release of everything else.”
Declassification Tools: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secretsby Michael Connelly
Penguin Random House
hide captions
switch captions
Penguin Random House
Declassification Tools: What History Reveals About America’s Top Secretsby Michael Connelly
Penguin Random House
Featured interview
About how many documents have been classified
The material is not considered national security information unless it poses a threat to US national security. And over the years, practically every president has issued an executive order in which they try to define what something is “top secret” or “secret” or “secret.” or what you have.
The problem, of course, is that there are 2,000-3,000 [appointed] officials have the right to categorize something new, a new program, a new technology. They have the right to decide that everything related to that program will be classified to a certain extent. Let’s say it’s “top secret”. But once they did, every official involved – and literally millions of people with security checks – each of them… was required to stamp anything related to it. that as classified at the same level. And what happens is, maybe some of this content is sensitive at first, but over time, so much information starts to get classified that it can get ridiculous. And some good examples of that include when, if you recall the so-called scandal about Hillary Clinton’s Emails, a lot of things end up being classified as, for example, press coverage of drone attacks. So even the information was widely disseminated, even things that in some cases were headline news at the time. Once they are exchanged among senior officials, even that information will be classified.
About Obama sorting through more documents than any previous president
The extent to which we can actually measure, such as the number of times government officials create new secrets, has reached an all-time high under the Obama administration. And there are many other ways you can look at this as well. Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department prosecuted more people under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information than all previous administrations combined. And in fact, the amount of money spent on government secrets has even reached new heights, to the point where by the end of his term, the US government had spent about $18 billion on protecting information. national security information.
On President Trump’s Categorical Approach
Here is a president who said that when he becomes president, for example, he will reveal all the secrets that have been kept up to that point about the Kennedy assassination. But somehow, in the end, he decided not to. And in fact, at the end of his tenure, he said that everything he touches, everything, is classified at the highest level.
Although Donald Trump seems to represent a significant departure from the tradition of the American presidency, in a way he is completely consistent with every president that has come before. And that’s because he decided he didn’t even need to write a new executive order to keep it a secret. Every president who returns to FDR has written an executive order that is supposed to identify and control national security information. But Donald Trump decided that he was happy with the executive order drafted by Barack Obama – and so he just left things as is.
About Trump’s claim he declassified personal documents found at Mar-a-Lago
Presidents have supreme secrecy. But there is no evidence that he actually did. I mean, he suggested he could do it in his mind. But actually the system is extremely complicated. Above all, it’s about paper. So every decision like this about whether something should be declassified, or how it is classified, all of this has to be recorded on paper. And so there is no evidence that Trump has declassified any of these records.
On classified emails found on Hillary Clinton’s personal server
Some of these records have been classified at the highest level. Some of them involve so-called “sensitive partitioned information”. It could be information related to signals intelligence [information gained by intercepting communications]. It may be a long time before we know what’s really in there. And there’s certainly good reason to believe that some of that stuff is actually pretty innocuous, and it’s withheld largely for political reasons, for diplomatic reasons, in the sense that these are things that the government The United States does not want to make official disclosures, even if they are already known or largely known. What bothers me more, as a historian, even as a citizen, is how many of those emails were destroyed, because before Clinton delivered about 30,000 emails she decided is a public record, already available [were] tens of thousands of other records that she and her attorneys decided were private. They deleted them so no one would know it was something she decided not to let anyone else see.
On a confidential file left at the office and home of then Vice President Biden
I think you can look at it in two ways: One view is that this is just further evidence of how out of control state secrets are. They cannot keep track of all the secrets they are creating, because there are too many secrets. And so even if you recognize Joseph Biden and the people around him and you think they’re responsible [stewards of these documents]then you still have to ask yourself: How did they lose track of the records that seem, at least in some cases, to be classified as top secret?
But the other way to look at this is how it is… you see that people, whether it’s the president or in this case the vice president, are the most invested in state secrets. are the most determined to cling to these secrets.
On developing an algorithm that can predict which documents should be classified and declassified
We found hundreds of examples of things that were completely innocuous, such as hotel bookings that were classified at the time as “Secret”. On the other hand, we found things that the prediction algorithm should have classified as “Secret” but didn’t. … We have found things that almost certainly have to be classified.
I am really lucky to have colleagues who have security licenses or at least have worked in the past and have a lot of experience in this field. And I gave them a blind test. I asked them to see the classified documents and the unclassified documents. And I asked them to tell us which of those records should be classified and at what level. And time and time again they are amazed. They were more likely to agree with the algorithm than with the officials who initially classified or unclassified this information.
So the conclusion I draw from this is that there is a lot of human error in keeping official secrets. There are many examples. We found hundreds of examples of officials over-classifying or over-classifying things they under-classified, which could actually be harmful to national security.
Sam Briger and Joel Wolfram produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
