The real scandal is overclassification

I’d explain it, but I’d have to kill you.

The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn’t (merely) evidence of political impunity — it’s also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/30/i-come-to-a-land-downunder/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have “Top Secret clearance” and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we’re scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless…