Obama: The Word 'Classified' Means Whatever We Need It To Mean
from the defining-'classified'-like-a-group-of-blind-men-describing-an-elephant dept
How do we know whether information is classified? Well, because the government tells us it is. But what does that mean? It turns out it means whatever the government wants it to mean, subject to time, place, personnel involved, etc.
Classified material handed over to movie producers by Leon Panetta? Probably not a big deal. Classified material handed over to journalists by whistleblowers? That's a prosecutin'.
No one explains this slippery approach to classification better than President Obama, who was gamely trying to answer questions about an ongoing investigation (Hillary Clinton and her famous emails) during an interview with Fox News.
“There’s classified, and then there’s classified,” the president said.That clears everything up. Clinton sent, received and stored classified info on a private email server. This cannot be disputed. But some classified info is more equal than others. It all depends on who has it and how the current administration feels about that person.
It's also about how the current administration feels about whistleblowers. It doesn't like them. So, Clinton playing fast and loose with classified info is subject to an entirely different standard than the large number of whistleblowers the Obama administration has prosecuted over the years.
Obama, again, digs deep into his feels to provide a technical explanation of this dichotomy.
President Obama said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that while Hillary Clinton had been careless in managing her emails as secretary of state, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the country.I believe this is true. Hillary Clinton does love this country -- or at least the part of its she's intimately familiar with: the highly-insulated Beltway interior. She certainly would never do anything intentionally to harm her position of power or her chances of a November promotion. We can tell how much she wants to keep the country safe by how much effort she's put into keeping her communications out of the hands of the public. This is the Administration Way. There's nothing more dangerous to the US government than transparency and accountability. Clinton knows this. Obama definitely knows this.
The problem is, as Trevor Timm points out, violating the Espionage Act doesn't require an intent to harm. Handling classified material carelessly can open one up to charges… provided you're not part of the government's inner circle.
Obama's interview also explained why government agencies redact or withhold information already in the public domain. It all traces back to "classified" being an almost-entirely subjective term when deployed by the government.
“There’s stuff that is really top-secret top-secret, and there’s stuff that is being presented to the president or the secretary of state that you might not want on the transom, or going out over the wire, but is basically stuff that you could get in open-source.”Classification: all things to all people, as long as it allows officials and agencies to control narratives and disrupt public accountability. No matter what the FBI concludes from its investigation into Hillary Clinton, Obama has already granted her a pardon.
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Filed Under: classification, classified, double standard, emails, hillary clinton, president obama, secrecy, transparency
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In Soviet America material classifies you
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Strange
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Re: Strange
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"No really, trust us, /this/ classified information is harmless, /that/ classified information is a huge threat to the country..."
When the government just brushes aside one leak of classified information, while going completely nuts over another, the idea that 'classified' means 'dangerous' in any way other than 'this could be dangerous to my career if it got out, better classify it' is a little hard to buy, and it becomes clear that classification has more to do with CYoA than actual danger in general.
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Well there's your problem...
They should have worked their way up the ranks to, oh I dunno, general or something first, then they could have printed the whole site off and mailed it to every member of their family without personal repercussions.
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Re:
Because we can.
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Clarification
1) classified = we'll use it to jail you, if you release it, and we don't like you;
2) classified = if it's released, we would be revealed to be criminally malfeasant.
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Is there a bottom to this pit?
Love all these phrases from the past few administrations ranging from the "outing a CIA agent" - wasn't that "technically" treason?
To our recent "Least Untruthful Answer"?? Didn't that used to be called a Lie?
Seems to boil down to the very simple - "Make us look good, we don't care what you did" to "Make us look bad - it doesn't matter what you did, max prosecution required."
Wish we had the "Vote of No Confidence" like other countries... now *that* is a vote that would see a MAJOR turnout of voters...
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Are those blind men from the Democrats? If so I'd guess their description of an elephant would resemble Trump. Which, in retrospect, is a delicate description of how he has conducted his campaign.
Pardon me if I mixed the animals (were republicans elephants, donkeys, platypuses?).
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I've heard this before
Clinton: The word 'Sex' Means Whatever We Need it to Mean.
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Actually, Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning haven't done anything to endanger the country.
In fact, they have exposed the people who endanger their country, and particularly, the values of the free country it should be.
IMO, if there are people who truly love their country and the people living in it, are these two. Or at least, they deserve the benefit of the doubt more than Mrs. Clinton.
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Re: I've heard this before
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Theres
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All animals are equal
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Theres's espionage, and then there's economic espionage...
and then there's nuclear blackmail.
Here is something that is super-duper classified,
just because I say so:
checyr pngf jvyy abg rng engf
Classification - it's magic!
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Speeding
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Re: "No really, trust us, /this/ classified information is harmless, /that/ classified information is a huge threat to the country..."
To be fair, the Snowden leak kind of did end "civilization as we know it". Conspiracy theorists formerly known as tinfoil hat wearing crazy people are now seen as normal people with valid arguments.
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Re:
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Re: In Soviet America material classifies you
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Re:
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Don't worry
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Re:
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Re: Re:
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Make us look bad, your dead.
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Re: Re: I've heard this before
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Bigger Government gets, the more Corrupt it becomes. Really, what did you expect from someone with zero experience running anything, and just a Community Organizer. A joke of a job.
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Re: I've heard this before
https://twitter.com/loydte3/status/719679984303022080
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Not surprised.
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Re:
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That's right up there with "secret interpretations" of laws
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Clinton's emails"
Being a lawyer, and a lover of our Constitution, we have only to look at the ex post facto provisions of that Constitution to see that sending and receiving AFTER classified emails is NOT a criminal matter!
I agree about whistleblowers, who are wrongfully pursued by the "wannabe" dictators in the Obama administration, but please - stop quoting Rupert Murdoch in his "hate Hillary" campaign - if Hillary can be shown to have sent/received classified documents AFTER they were classified, we have a whole new discussion (which doesn't exist at this time).
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Re: I've heard this before
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bull
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obama
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Re: Theres's espionage, and then there's economic espionage...
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Re: Re: Re: I've heard this before
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Re: Strange
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Re: Clinton's emails"
Not to mention that her staff (and/or herself) chose which of her emails to turn over to the government after the fact, which is a huge violation of several laws (and, unless all the staff members involved were cleared for knowledge of the stuff in question, more direct violations of the law).
And, just for bonus points, emails all have dates on them, and classification documents are dated as well, so we already know that she sent stuff was already classified when she sent it.
You can stop with the pretensions now. Either you were mistaken and can be outraged with the rest of the honest people, or you were just a dishonest partisan hack to begin with. Considering that everything I just told was public domain, widely disseminated, and easily available...
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JOHN M. DEUTCH and his CIA computer
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/deutch2.htm
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It was never "Obama's Dichotomy"
I understand the difference. It is as if someone were to ask you for twenty bucks for lunch. til Friday because they forgot their wallet or clutch. You're significant other might know you've fifty thousands saved in the bank, but the one asking doesn't need to know that. You've got a few bucks and can wait til Friday to get it back...
If a member of my family were to ask me for a small loan - say a few grand, I might be inclined to help them, but they're not getting the privileged info my wife or husband has about my balance.
I said to my friend in 1989 that, "... information will become the most sought after commodity in the world." It is.
Information has different values attached to it. It is as simple as that. Visiting Wikileaks and getting the door prize is a little extreme; maybe it was the children doing a paper, but there is a tangible difference between Classified and CLASSIFIED.
It is understandably simple. Am I defending President Obama? I don't need to. He is just another meme in a continual line of memes. A citizen really needs to spend a week at an Ayahuasca retreat to get past all this shite... just saying.
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Irregular verbs
Leak, verb, irregular
1st person "I gave a confidential press briefings"
2nd person "You leaked"
3rd person "He is being charged under the Official Secrets Act"
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Re: Re: Re: Re: I've heard this before
This is highly misleading. The US claimed that Iraq had WMD, and most everyone else pretty much just took that as proof and parroted the line. An awful lot of them even expressed doubts, but thought that maybe the US knew something they didn't.
But outside of governments (who had a bit of a conflict of interest on the matter), pretty much nobody thought it was actually true. Ans especially not the agencies who were in the best position to know.
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Classified
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Evil or Stupid?
2. "President Obama said ... while Hillary Clinton had been careless in managing her emails as secretary of state, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the country." - So she's not malicious, just incompetent? That totally makes me comfortable with her being President.
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Re: Clinton's emails"
1. Removing classification markings off a document does not declassify it. Some of these "unmarked" emails and verbatim cut-and-paste of classified information passed over proper secure networks.
2. There are some categories of information that one assumes is classified, for example anything related to intelligence collection, methods and/or sources, foreign government information, policy development, etc. It was her job to recognize sensitive national security information (not just recognize a marking) and handle the information with proper care and security.
3. Anyone knowing or suspecting classified information to be transmitted outside approved channels is required to report it for investigation. Despite hundreds of people knowing the shenanigans going on here, NO ONE said anything, and that is the reason State has been dragging its heels, because it's not just HRC with culpability here.
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Re: Clinton's emails"
Way back when I was dealing with classified material, two of the most important secrets I learned came from oral discussions. I never saw a classification marking on those discussions, because they weren't written down and were not briefed as classified. But, these were important secrets, and I would certainly, and properly been prosecuted (or courts martialled in one case) had I told them to an enemy, or wrote them down and left them lying around.
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Those employees WERE NOT authorized to see any of those classified emails. That Lawyer was not authorized by the government to handle classified emails.
Denying that there were emails on the server that contained classified information is a losing game. You can argue that there were no "markings" but that does not mean the informations was not classified.
If she had used a government server, then all of the people who managed that server would have been authorised to do so.
She gave access to the employees of Platte River Networks in Denver, Colorado. They had access to classified data.
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This is nothing new at all, "classified" and "top secret" have always been used in discretionary fashion. You know the whole "power corrupts and absolute power...".
"Classified" can literally encompass the whole range from military grade ("CIA's has a new freeze ray") to BS grade ("CIA's boss's is out having an affair").
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Information sensitivity exists whether the information is formally classified or not. Indeed, one of the purposes of classifications to ensure that the information itself gets the right degree of protection. But talking about "classified" information doesn't really help - as with everything there are degrees, and most governments have three or four levels of classification of documents, together with various access controls at the higher levels. I think Obama was trying to argue that the material in Clinton's emails was mundane, and attracted one of the lower levels of classification, so the offense was not that serious. It doesn't mean that no offense was committed, just that the information was not (he's saying) on the same level with nuclear war plans, for example.
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hillary
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Re: Re: Clinton's emails"
When dealing with classified information one does NOT assume anything!
There is a document called a PCG or Program Classification Guide. This guide provides guidance on classifications, markings, protection, etc. This document is also normally classified for obvious reasons.
There is also a good reason why many people do not know of this document because very few people or organizations generate classified information. Those that do generate this material are VERY WELL aware of the classifications guidelines.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I've heard this before
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It does my heart good...
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Otherwise for security matters. So, Classification means whatever we intend it to mean.
VERY logical to me.
If you are saying this shows the evil of "W" and Cheney, there you get my complete agreement. Those people ignored what classification meant, and messed with documents that had nothing to do with the State, and involved our safety!
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