From a former Justice Dept official: “Our ridiculous classification rules” are the real problem:

good article--worth time to consider.


The Real Clinton Email Scandal: Our Ridiculous Classification Rules

By MATTHEW MILLER

August 18, 2015

Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email account for official State Department business was a mistake, but the revelation that Clinton’s emails contain upwards of 305 messages with potentially “classified” information is far less scandalous than the headlines make it appear. The most troubling part of this story involves the rules governing official secrets, not Clinton’s conduct as Secretary of State.

As a former Department of Justice official who regularly dealt with classified information, I am glad a team of officials from the FBI, the intelligence community and other agencies is not currently reviewing every email I sent and received while I worked in government. If they did, they would likely find arguably classified information that was transmitted over unclassified networks—and the same thing is undoubtedly true for other senior officials at the White House, the State Department and other top national security agencies.

The sheer volume of information now considered classified, as well as the extreme, and often absurd, interpretations by intelligence officials about what is and is not classified, make it nearly impossible for officials charged with operating in both the classified and unclassified worlds to do so without ever mixing the two.

From the intelligence community’s perspective, the border between these two worlds looks like a brick wall. Many intelligence officials spend their entire day working inside so-called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, designed to be impenetrable to eavesdropping, and using only separate, classified email systems to communicate with others in government. In these hermetically sealed environments, there is no need to ever sort through the differences between classified and unclassified information.

But for officials charged with dealing with the public, the media and other governments, the lines become much harder to draw.

The Associated Press reported last week that one of the Clinton emails that intelligence officials claim is classified—something the State Department disputes—involved a discussion of drones operating in Pakistan, a fact that is still considered top secret even though it has been openly discussed by government officials on numerous occasions...........

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/the-real-clinton-email-scandal-our-ridiculous-classification-rules-121507.html#ixzz3jSJ1ZaI9