US government has way too many top secrets, opines an expert

Washington: The US government's habit of classifying documents with labels of "secrets" and "top secrets" has been openly criticised for a while now. But, the discovery of these classified documents at the homes of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Mike Pence has drawn focus to the fact that the number of these documents is in the millions.

Several experts think around 50 million decisions are marked "confidential," "secret" or "top secret" every year. Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer currently at the Brookings Institution think tank, said an awful lot of classified documents are not that sensitive, reported AFP.

Information regarding nuclear secrets, names of spies, diplomatic cables, names of agents, or relations with other nations are commonly kept secret by every government. However, the US government keeps details known to the public or reported in the media also secret.

Riedel noted that classifying military plans for Ukraine is legitimate but details of a State Department cable reporting the secretary of state's arrival in Israel on Monday is also classified even though it has already been reported by the media. He blamed "bureaucratic inertia" for the tendency to overclassify. "If somebody asks why information got into the public domain, you can say it was leaked," reported AFP.

Elizabeth Goitein, a national security expert at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the real problem that underlies almost all the dysfunctions of the classification system is overclassification. "Some might conclude that the procedures in place for handling classified information are too lax. But that's not the case." She was talking about the classified documents recovered from the houses of former president Donald Trump, his VP Mike Pence, and current President Biden from his time as VP under Barack Obama.