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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   32406 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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At risk of being viewed as trying to claim that it's (R)ifferent, my understanding is that information is scoped underneath the individuals with OCA. That is, suppose there are two agencies, each with a head who has OCA. Agency Head 1 determines that Information X is classified at the Y level. This is not a complete prohibition on sharing; it just needs to be approved by the appropriate channels. That is, in order to share it with Agency 2, there is a process which concludes that Agency 1 is cool with sharing Information X with (at least some parts of) Agency 2. However, the OCA "follows" Information X. When it's written down, it contains markings which say that it was Originally Classified By Agency 1, saying that if Agency 2 wants to share it any further, they must get approval from Agency 1. This is my understanding mostly from seeing Snowden leak documents with these kinds of markings and declassified stuff with these markings crossed out.

I believe that one of the problems with what Hillary did was that they were routing information through her private server that had been Originally Classified By some other agency. Now, if every item was, in fact, Originally Classified By her at State, then there's a slightly better argument that she has the authority to do what she wants with it. It would still be a colossal fuck-up in many ways, but it would make it slightly harder to prosecute her. (FWIW, I was on record as being on Team No Indict long long long ago when all this went down, in significant part because it seemed like there would be difficulties with securing a conviction.) Similarly here, if we suppose that what SECDEF shared was completely generated by and would have been Originally Classified By DoD, then his authority is at its strongest, and it makes prosecution harder. Most of the rules are for the "little people", so unless a principal is bandying about with information that was Originally Classified By someone else (or like straight selling secrets to foreigners or whatever), they're probably not getting prosecuted. Of course, it's still a colossal fuck-up in many ways here too.

Do you have a source for this claim that the documents at issue in her case were classified outside of state?

Some IGs claimed it:

In their joint statement, the inspectors general said the classified information had originated with the nation’s intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.

Also, reading the inside baseball a bit on Comey's statement:

110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received [emphasis added]

I read that to imply that it wasn't just State. Also:

we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail

Traditionally, State isn't part of the IC.

That's fair. Thanks!

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