The Background to Secrecy Discussions
According to the Washington Post, 1.4 million Americans have Top Secret clearance. Another 3.5 million have lower clearances. With a total of 4.9 million, and a population of 320 million, this is 1.5% of Americans.
According to 60 minutes, Edward Snowden took 1.7 million top secret classified documents. He leaked 200,000 to journalists while he was in Hong Kong, which is a part of China. He is now in Moscow.
Material is not originally classified, but users judge what falls into the guidelines, and then it becomes classified. There are over 2 million secrets, which I take it to mean subjects that are secret. There is a massive over classification from people being overly cautious. It is estimated that 50% to 90% could be released from their classification.
A source claimed that some documents are labeled top secret just to get people to look at them.
President Obama has stated that there are top secret, and then really top secret.
Clinton’s cell phone was a Blackberry, which is the most secure cell phone used by businesses and government. President Obama uses a Blackberry. Members of Congress use Blackberrys, but they are about to give them up.
Critics have said that her servers could be hacked, but the FBI, which could have detected such hacking, did not claim that they were hacked. In my naïve knowledge, hackers end up as lines in the log file, and leave a record. Standard security software can find virus software, and that was not found either, as far as disclosed.
The upcoming questioning of the head of the FBI, James Comey, by Congress looks very political when you contrast the 8 top secret threads of Secretary Clinton, versus the 1.7 million that Snowden walked away with, of which he has decrypted and made public a vast amount.
When you think of the huge amount that Snowden had access to versus Clinton’s 110, most just at the classified level, why would a hacker waste time with the piddling amount Clinton had, compared to the computers that Snowden had access to.
As far as the public knows, Snowden was only supposed to be working on the computer systems. Why did he have decryption software? He wasn’t supposed to be accessing the information in the files. Or, was a large amount not encrypted?
The really amazing number, is that the Secretary of State ONLY had 8 top secret threads, with few messages. Does this mean that almost all of the top secret messages were correctly accessed on her office computer with the State Department system? Or, were they printed out by aides and just presented to her? More likely, they were previewed and digested by aides, with only summaries presented to her, as any well organized executive would have done.
Let us not forget that there might be some tension between the FBI and the State Department from the case of Robert Hanssen. He daily carried secret documents between the FBI and the State Department, from 1995 to 2001. He was a spy for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service. Hanssen also attended monthly meetings of the FBI’s National Security Division, where counterintelligence and counterterrorist cases were discussed. He started spying for the KGB in 1985.
