Jack Teixeira of the Massachusetts Air National Guard

A friend of mine landed himself in serious trouble after reading a Pentagon report on a plane: the passenger alongside him, another US Defense Department bureaucrat, reported him for reading a “classified” document in public. Yet like a great many such documents, it only had one page that contained classified information. In fact, it only included a single classified sentence, itself of trivial importance.
But, as a result, every page was stamped CLASSIFIED in capital letters, both above and below the text. In the end, my friend, despite the support of his colleagues and office chief, had no choice but to resign.
To this day, vast reams of pseudo-secret documents are manufactured whenever a Diplomatic, Consular or State Department official adds a comment to the lengthy daily media summaries produced by every US diplomatic post across the world. And if the comment is from a member of the local CIA station (perhaps to the effect that so-and-so is at it again with some anti-American comment), this trivial addition becomes “super-secret”, even though its contents are still 99.99% publicly available as an “open-source” material that all in the organisation can see.
Yet this daily output is only a mere rivulet when compared to the Amazonian flow of documents produced by the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force, who are equally liberal in elevating trivia to “secret” or even “top-secret” status. But they are all outclassed by the Navy’s nuclear submariners, for whom even a toothpaste order is issued “for official use only”, and the US Special Operations Command — which used to be the Joint Special Operations Command, of which I was once the sole consultant — whose toothpaste purchase order are not just “official use” but “secret”, if not more.
Even with genuine secrets, such as the scope and limits of “overhead” (satellite) photography, there is habitual and extreme exaggeration. Long ago, an exceptionally competent National Security Council official and that rare thing, a genuine “country expert”, asked me to visit his office to discuss some phrases I had included in a report for the Defense Department. It contained not a jot of secret data, but was nevertheless stamped “for official use only”, the equivalent of “Airman 1st class” in the hierarchy of secrecy.
In deference to the rules, I kept no copy of my own at home, so he arranged for the document’s delivery from the Pentagon via official mail, and we sat down to discuss the phrases in question. It turned out they contained information that he believed was very, very important — he planned to take it to the President — and, to make his point, he impulsively whipped out another report that included a small black-and-white satellite photograph of very small rectangles (Russian tanks) on his country’s border.
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