The Real Clinton Email Scandal: Our Ridiculous Classification Rules

[Recoverin_Republican]

The Real Clinton Email Scandal: Our Ridiculous Classification Rules
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/the-real-clinton-email-scandal-our-ridiculous-classification-rules-121507

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.
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Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/the-real-clinton-email-scandal-our-ridiculous-classification-rules-121507#ixzz41hAZIjd0

[scscholar]

1. Exactly. Other people like Colin Powell...

did it too.

[nichomachus]

2. And we should always do our best

to emulate Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and all those other GOP visionaries.

[catnhatnh]

3. Jeffrey Dahmer

is a victim of our absurd culinary regulations.....