Reddit reviews Secrecy

Back in the 70s, when democrats had brains and back bone there was a Senator called Pat Moynihan. He was in a Senate Intelligence committee meeting. They were all worrying about Russia and going over the figures when he had a little epiphany. (*&^ he said to himself, this whole thing is headed down fast. And his moment of clarity, he communicated to the committee and was duly ignored. US intelligence needed Russia to be strong and scarey. Pat realized the whole soviet system was on its last legs. It took Reagan to come along and tell us what we should have already known. Presidential Faux-cowboys like Ron and the current blithering idiot tend to do that and then their followers appoint them genius in chief. The current faux-cowboy faux-soldier misses the old days so much he's making Russia into an enemy again. And we used to think Reagan was a bit thick.

You can read all about in a book. Here it is.

http://www.amazon.com/Secrecy-Experience-Daniel-Patrick-Moynihan/dp/0300080794/ref=sr_11_1/103-0879303-5593409?ie=UTF8&qid=1182049777&sr=11-1

He also wrote a very good book on the damaging impact of excessive secrecy in government.

https://www.amazon.com/Secrecy-Experience-Daniel-Patrick-Moynihan/dp/0300080794

What seems like a very long time ago I read this book by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Secrecy: The American Experience

Nothing Snowden and/or Greenwald say about the US surprises me nor am I surprised with Canadian media censorship.

Does this make me cynical? Not really. Just realistic.

Hijacking too comment: Book worth reading, Secrecy: The American Experience from Dan Patrick Moynahan, 30-year Senator and former ambassador to India and UN, about the development of the classification system and how overclassification has grown wildly out of control.

> 1) she's an originating authority, so she is supposed to be an expert

That does not follow at all. She is permitted to delegate that authority and likely does. Even if she were an "expert" in classified information, that does not mean that she can automatically intuit what kinds of things are sensitive and which are not. There are a lot of perfectly innocuous things that are classified, even improperly classified. Different agencies might not have the perspective that allows them to understand why some other agency might view the information as classified.

In fact, Obama's executive order establishing it stipulates that if there is significant disagreement as to whether something should be classified, it will default to not being classified. A concession to the fact that, prior to this scandal, many people were of the opinion that the government overclassifies things, since they are not subject to any real external oversight on the matter. It's kind of a Catch-22. A number of classified diplomatic cables from the Manning leak of the State Dept. included shit like news stories and other nonsense that was inexplicably classified 'secret'. The late Senator Moynihan wrote a book about the problem in the '90s.

> she's the fucking Secretary of State, of course she's going to be handling classified e-mails, but she handled all her e-mail on her bathroom server,

Yes, she handled all her email on her private server, but the mistake you are making is assuming that she handled all her communications through email. If you were right about that, you'd have a point. I think you'd agree that she probably discussed top secret or SAP material more than ~10 times in the course of her 4-year tenure.

> 3) TS/SAP dealing with intelligence collected by human and signal intercept sources is VERY EVIDENTLY CLASSIFIED.

Do you have broad experience with TS/SAP material? How do you know whether it's always obviously sensitive? Wikipedia lists as an example that presidential support programs (i.e. for travel) are usually SAPs. Who knows whether one of her emails involved chatting about some innocuous detail of a trip Obama recently made that was technically classified. Or if, as the WSJ reported, the emails in question dealt with authorization for drone strikes, which is info that has a very limited potential impact and shelf life, since everyone knows that we have them and use them, and individual strikes are widely reported after they occur (and info that leaks about it is unlikely to reach militants in time or at all, and unlikely to cause any harm except allow them to escape just one more strike). We're left to assume the worst based on nothing but our trust that intelligence agencies only ever classify things that obviously deserve to be classified, and never go overboard. Hillary is left with no way to defend herself, as she can't exactly release the emails herself and say "see, this is no big deal". I happen to think that if she were able to, it would deflate the scandal completely. The same way that people have been crying that her hacked campaign emails and DNC emails show her to be corrupt, but when you actually read them, you see a whole lot of nothing.

> It would be great if you could just admit she is lying out of her gills on this issue, and it is not close to the same thing that Powell did.

It is almost exactly what Powell did, with the exception that he was never subject to a "witch hunt" (as Powell and Rice themselves called it in private emails) looking to turn up scandals. Imagine if it were Kerry being investigated for this sort of activity, and Hillary had wiped her server of all its emails without possibility of recovery the way Powell did, completing eliminating any avenue for investigation and ensuring it never came up as an issue with the public. We might be left with a situation where we might be able to say that Hillary had a "handful" of emails (as was initially reported) that were not classified when they were sent, just like Powell. No investigation would occur and turn up otherwise, because she had covered her tracks. Is it fair for me to say that Hillary's situation was nowhere near the same thing as Kerry's just because they never conducted a balls-to-the-wall investigation that would've uncovered similar mistakes? To be sure, I couldn't say it was identical, but I could certainly say that there's a strong chance that her mistakes didn't end there, and that Kerry only looks worse because they dug deep into his tenure as StateSec looking for issues.