Classified Information

It occurred to me a while back that with all the talk now about classified information I really had little idea what that term actually meant, how many classifications there might be, how they were determined or what kind of oversight of the process might exist.

I posed these questions to Cheryl Rofer over at Phronesisaical who had some personal knowledge ( she is a scientist at the margins of policy making) and was kind enough to hunt down some reference materials.

Much of what I wondered about is contained in Executive Order 13526 and there is a good summary here. I found this part of the definition interesting:

EO 13526 limits classification to information that pertains to scientific, technological or ECONOMIC matters relating to national security.

It occurs to me how easy it would be to conflate economic prosperity with economic security, making any action which results in profit classifiable, and anyone who exposes corporate malfeasance guilty of undermining the country. Unpatriotic and criminal. Hopefully the next batch of leaked cables point to this form of complicity between our government and U.S. business against foreign governments and foreign workers.

This is the alliance which makes it so hard for mainstream U.S. unions to declare any kind of international solidarity with workers in other parts of the world. Globalization has made this murkier but there is still a whole " Made in America" , get our economy moving and " re-build the middle class" meme out there. The problem is that if the new global middle class manufactures and consumes like America if the 50's and 60's it will mean the end of our ecosystem.

It is also against the rules to classify something just to "prevent embarrassment" or to"conceal violations of law, inefficiency or administrative error". I think that is who we need to be prosecuting, those who classified memos just to avoid embarrassment.