I see that the Clinton emails are back in the news. Let me tell this group something that most of you don't know.
After graduating from college in 1965 I went on active duty as an officer in Military Intelligence. In those days that branch of service supplied officers for a secretive "Military Command Unit" called THE ARMY SECURITY AGENCY. Nobody in the ROTC department at school could tell me anything about it except that if you chose to go into Military Intelligence you could volunteer for ASA.
Since I was already signed up to go on active duty, I figured I would try to get involved in something interesting, selective, and hush-hush.
I got in. Then I learned that ASA was a military part of the now famous NSA, which back in the early 60's no one had ever heard of. It was said to be a descendant of the legendary OSS, originally commanded by Wild Bill Donovan. This being the era of the "real" James Bond played by Sean Connery, who wouldn't want to join.
So I spent a good portion of my obligated 2 years dealing with highly classified stuff in a large windowless building filled with state of the art equipment (for that time--today your iPhone has more computing power than the mainframe machine we ran in the "ops" building.)
Long story short, and the part that's relevant here:
The fact that a document is stamped Top Secret tells you nothing about its actual importance or the degree to which its content is not known by everyone with half a brain.
I discovered this at the very outset of my work with such materials. It was at the special ASA school I attended, Fort Devens, where I learned about all the intelligence agencies and the secret world of codes and ciphers.
One afternoon as a faculty member was illustrating his talk on cryptography he showed us a set of slides. I noticed that each slide was labeled "Secret". One of the slides contained two alphabets. One alphabet was in standard order while the other was mixed up. This is the basis for "simple substitution" ciphers, the kind of "codes" (which are properly called ciphers)found in everyday newspaper "cryptograms" and other childish levels of encryption.
(As an aside, I'll tell you that "codes" are secret languages, once illustrated very humorously by Mike Nichols and Elaine May who did a routine in which they spoke to one another in whispers about putting "starch in the collar, but no starch in the cuffs...shhhh!!! --" this was dealt with very seriously as if a message of great importance was being conveyed.)
At any rate, The Codes and Ciphers instructor expected no question at this point. But I had one. "Is that slide really SECRET?" I asked.
His answer was complicated. While such a slide all by itself would not be classified at any level, as part of an instructional set that comprised part of a block of instruction at the ASA school all slides in the set would be marked with the level of classification deemed appropriate for the set as a whole. One wouldn't want the enemy to know exactly how we taught our new officers about Cryptography and Cryptanalysis.
The implications of this little tidbit of knowledge are truly staggering. What it tells us is that there are by now billions of documents that unless they are combined with countless other documents are not really classified even though they may be marked as such. That is, no matter what a piece of paper has stamped on it, one actually knows nothing about the level of secrecy that ought to be applied to a bit of email or an attachment that comes with it. It may be a technical violation of security practice, but one cannot infer from a document's stamp that allowing the wrong people to read it will expose sensitive material to prying eyes.
Just to be accurate, there are types of classification beyond the three familiar levels that represent generic hush-hushness. There are special activities that are given additional imprints to indicate that only those cleared specifically to handle such documents may gain access to them. I carried a top secret clearance and access to one of the specialized activities, which I will not name for the sake of discretion. The same problem exists, however, even in the world of "compartmentalization".
Finally, there's the somewhat more technically involved set of questions that arise when one is talking about the electronic transmission of information. That's what we're dealing with when we talk about "email". When a document is to be treated in a truly "secure" manner the entire flow of electrons must be treated in a secure manner. Not only must the "server" be of a certain kind and be hooked to the power grid and the data transmission lines in a very particular manner, but all other electronic transmission of the subject documents must match the security level of the email system. If for instance one reads the properly received email over a telephone (wired or unwired) that email is now no more secure than the telephone system used in the conversation.
I shall stop the discussion of the electronic issues because it becomes exceedingly technical, and since I know nothing about the nature of the emails that Mrs. Clinton was putting through her private server, I would have to go into all manner of things that may or may not be relevant to the actual situation.
The point is that when I heard that Mrs. Clinton had "mishandled" classified documents by putting them through her email service I felt that I had been told precisely NOTHING. And all the loud mouths who carried on about how terrible her actions were either didn't know a damned thing about such matters or maybe did know exactly what she had done and were willing to spin political straw into oppositional gold. I am sympathetic to Mrs. Clinton in that it is probably nigh on to impossible to explain this business to a mass audience or to people who don't really want to hear it.