When a government official says something is classified, they mean that the disclosure of it to “an unauthorized person” would result in some damage to the United States. The degree of damage measures the importance of what was said. Really important stuff causes “grave damage” and is classified Top Secret. Lesser damage is caused for Secret or Confidential information. Usually, the “unauthorized person” is anyone in the public who does not need to see the stuff that was written or spoken, and we assume they are not authorized because they don’t have a security clearance.
When someone says something is not classified, they are supposed to mean that a person who originated it did not have to mark it with a classification marking, like Top Secret. Now, if the person who originates knows or should know the information is classified but “forgets” to mark it, it is still classified because of the damage it would do. It does not become unclassified, or not classified, by any measure. It is still classified and should be marked that way. When Hillary says she did not have anything classified on her server, she means it did not have classification markings on it. If she originated it, it would be her responsibility to mark it. If someone else did, it was their responsibility. Still, everyone in governments all over the world know about this problem of not marking things when they should. Another process compensates for that.
To be sure people don’t make mistakes and release classified to the public, the government has a public release process, which I have to use to publish things. It is annoying, but not a big problem, because the DNI pre - pub people know what they are doing. The State Department should have a few that do too. It is a review by a government person designated to do this kind of thing, to make sure what I publish is not unmarked material that has slipped by in my writing. It has only happened once that anything was “redacted” a term which means taken out of something that was going to be publicly released. They don’t tell me it is classified, since I no longer have a security clearance and that would be a problem for them to tell me something was classified and I shouldn’t have it. It came out of my brain and was not marked because I don’t think about marking stuff anymore. In that particular case, I had no idea such a thing could be classified until I thought about it a little.
So, when Hillary says what she had on the server was not classified and our Intelligence services say some of it was, they are both relying on the public not having a good understanding of the system that creates classified information. When her husband’s former political advisor goes on CNN and says it was “classified after the fact” he is inferring it wasn’t classified at all until someone decided, retroactively, to mark it that way. It is only the marking that was applied retroactively, and not the classification. It was classified before and will be properly marked now, even though it is too late to stop the release of it. She decided it was to be released and not the State Department pre-pub people.
There is another aspect to this that gets little attention in government. There is always the possibility that it was not marked as classified because everyone knew that the server was an unclassified, non-government computer. I have seen Top Secret things marked as Secret and Secret things marked as unclassified because the network they were processing on wasn’t approved for that level of material. Each computer system is approved for the highest level it contains, so nobody can put a higher level on it. I once did an inspection company where a woman was removing the Secret markings from documents before she ran them on her little computer network. I noticed her doing it and asked her why. “I am not allowed to process classified information on that computer, so I have to remove those markings.” She was a nice person who didn’t know any better, but got fired from her job anyway. This was someone who did not understand why we were getting those computers approved and marking documents that others would read. Perhaps Hillary is the same kind of person, but I doubt it.
The FBI will be looking for mitigation, i.e. did the company that put those servers in and helped her with the processing of email do things to protect that data from others reading it? Did they encrypt the data sitting on the server and her backups? Did they know it was classified? Did they protect it like it was if they didn’t? These are all factors bearing on how much damage was done by having those four emails that have already been identified as being classified, sitting on a server anywhere. They might have done a good job and the possibility of damage will be remote. They might have treated it like any other commercial job and the possibility will be greater that someone else got it, including their own employees, who certainly could have. What is interesting about this is the who of this inquiry. If it was a damage assessment, the FBI would seldom be involved. That is the kind of thing the State Department would do themselves, unless they suspected it was more than an accident. I will go into that one day, but not today.
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