We’ve all been following the headlines regarding certain events happening in Florida last week, and all the fallout, and the usual bloviating and bad takes inherent in American politics, though one thing you might notice is that while lots of folks in TFG’s camp are rushing (sometimes ridiculously) to defend him, others, usually the smarter ones, remain a bit more circumspect.
Why? Because what’s going on here is pretty serious.
It’s serious, because one doesn’t mess around with classified information. There are plenty of primers on the topic out there these days (Jim Wright’s got a good one here), so I don’t need to go too deeply into it and embarass myself for getting some of it wrong.
But, as someone with two and a half decades in the federal public sector, someone who’s had a clearance to access classified data, and who has to annually sit for information security training (and pass the test proving I understand it), I have it on pretty good authority that mishandling classified information is something that the government takes very seriously, and even the most die-hard MAGA types in government are likely to at least have second thoughts about letting him get away with this, even if they let all the other stuff go.
These days, I mostly only deal with Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI), which, although not classfied, is still marked and has its dissemination controlled, as its release could induce risk; in my case, it’s mostly business information and PII encountered in an IT context, and there are still plenty of rules and procedures for handling it that everyone takes seriously.
In past positions, I had a need for an actual security clearance, and had to go through the background checks and investigations to get such things issued, because I, again, worked with business systems that included information that itself wasn’t necessarily sensitive, but, if enough pieces of it were put together, could do serious damage to things like national defense – the example given to us was that if someone had access to things like the shipping locations for big food service contracts in certain parts of the world, they might be able to put together a reasonably good picture of US troop movements there, etc. For that reason, that sort of contract information isn’t publicly released even when most other stuff is.
When I spent a few years early in my career buying the so-called $500 hammers they joke about, if a requirement for spare parts for one of the numerous naval vessels that use nuclear propulsion came in, we had to jump through a bunch of extra hoops to make sure that information was properly safeguarded, even if the requirement was for a screw that held down a cover somewhere in the general area of something related to making an aircraft carrier go, because in that sort of situation, you can’t be too careful.
And…before you ask – yes, the President has certain authority to declassify quite a lot of things just by deciding so, there are processes that must be followed, and when the word “nuclear” gets involved, that authority doesn’t apply.
Never mind the couple of times I’ve had to go into controlled spaces, leaving my phone and watch and whatever at the door because it’s possible someone might be tempted to use them to take a picture of something. Heck, when those Wikileaks dumps of improperly released classified information hit the media, word went out to Federal employees that if they even read those news reports that might have included snippets of the data, they’d be in violation of the law because that would give them access to something we weren’t cleared for, and they could be subject to fines or imprisonment.
This is not an area you want to screw up in.
So, it’s no wonder that if, say, somebody no longer in government happened to be holding a bunch of boxes of classified information (containing potential nuclear secrets?), and storing it in a closet on a resort with lax security processes and foreign nationals with the run of the place, that the DOJ would be concerned, and pay special attention, as they are doing right now.
