Recently, and not for the first time, conservative heads were exploding because emails from/to Hillary Clinton were discovered that contained classified information. Some things simply make me chuckle.
First, a disclaimer: I could care less that Hillary Clinton is involved. I'm not convinced she's presidential material (her husband proved he wasn't) and she hasn't really ever accomplished anything that makes me think she could handle the job in a respectful and humanly decent manner. (The last US President who managed that was Jimmy Carter, but we all know how his administration has been spun. End of digression.) So, this isn't about her, it's all about the accusation, and I don't care who's making it.
At the beginning of my working career, I ended up being an intelligence analyst at the edge of the Free World (5 km as the crow flies from the Iron Curtain) at the height of the Cold War. I wore civilian clothes and was primarily charged with gathering intelligence from any and all sources, even exploiting my contacts, whenever and wherever possible. In a sense, I was the "spy who was out in the cold". An important part of my "job" was conducting "liaison" with local national agencies in order to gather, what I was told was highly sensitive information that was vital for the national security of the US of A. Fair enough.
At least once a week, my partner and I would travel out to the railroad crossing point between East and West to get the word on what was slipping over and across the border. The border police were great guys: friendly, helpful, always positive, appreciative of the fact that we could speak the local language, and they were generous. They went through every train that came out of the Eastern Zone and gathered up all the newspapers, for example, that the travellers left behind (litter-leavers know have no national allegiance). We dutifully took these back to our office, where the miraculous happened.
Our "product", so to speak, were "intelligence reports": the more you submitted, the higher you were rated, and we were no slackers, I can assure you. Out came the "form" (everything in the military has a form), the key data was filled in (in triplicate, of course), and the newspapers were simply attached. Everything, however, that left our office was, by policy, classified SECRET. And so, the form was stamped SECRET at the top and bottom of every page, and each and every page of the attachments (i.e., the newspapers) were stamped SECRET as well. This was all bundled together into a double-enveloped package, stamped appropriately, then paper-taped across every edge of tape and on every seam before being taken up to the mailroom for sending to our "customer", the translation detachment at our next-higher echelon of authority. There, once received, droves of translators translated every single headline and word and stamped every page they produced with SECRET on top and bottom of the page. And the translations were reworked as well into "reports" all of which were classified at least SECRET, though those reports in which the analysts believed to see something "important" were classified at higher levels. It would take a total of about 40 years for our newspapers to eventually be unclassified, but in the interim, the national security of the USA would not be compromised.
Yeah, I love it when journalists play the "classified" card. They have no idea what it means. I have some idea and I can tell you that most of what I saw classified were things anybody anywhere with even the slightest amount of interest could have collected for themselves.
But they didn't. Why? Because the "secrets" weren't worth the paper they were written on.
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