In the not-so-distant past there were two countries, spying on one another. Both nations had elaborate espionage bureaucracies, and they were hopelessly entangled in an endless game of cat-and-mouse with one another.
One of these governments, which happened to be orange, had a policy where all secret information had to remain labeled “SECRET” for it to continue to be treated as such.
The other government, which happened to be blue, had a system where all secret information retained its secretive status, even in situations where it might not be labeled as such.
If you check the history books, you’ll find that the orange nation lost to the blue nation, and historians agree that many significant intelligence failures contributed significantly to this result. There was the case where the orange spy’s coordinates were noticed among a raft of other documents because of their obvious SECRET heading. There was, of course, the incident where an orange federal employee stole a raft of secret documents and tore the SECRET label off the top of them, rendering anyone who shared them from that point on entirely immune to prosecution. And don’t forget the foreign orange sympathizers whose communications were intercepted due to the requirement that they sign on and off with “This communication will be/was secret.”
Hillary Clinton will tell you that the United States follows the example of one of these governments, but not the other. I believe she knows this to be a lie (any other interpretation is much more insulting), and I am tired of seeing it repeated here. Please, if you are here for some other reason than to spread disinformation, realize that “derivative classification,” which describes the method by which materials containing or referencing other classified materials are classified, is not “retroactive” classification. Materials are “derivatively classified” the moment they are created, not after the fact, whether or not they are labeled as such. Above, I hope I have somewhat illustrated the absurdity of requiring all classified information to be perpetually labeled as such. We now know that Clinton’s emails contained a lot of this kind of information, and again, to suggest that she was unaware of this fact is to accuse her of mortally dangerous incompetence.
People like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning have lost their freedom while being much more careful with secret information. If Clinton isn’t prosecuted, it will be more proof of our dual-track justice system — one track for those with power, and another for those without. The investigation into Clinton’s emails will continue to be in the news for a while, and if we shut down discussion of it here (as has been hinted at, I take it), this community will become only more insular and less capable of aiding Democrats and progressive legislation.
Thank you.
