Pluralistic: The real scandal is overclassification; The Australian Chokepoint Capitalism Tour (30 Jan 2023)

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Originally published at: Pluralistic: The real scandal is overclassification; The Australian Chokepoint Capitalism Tour (30 Jan 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow


Today's links


A photograph of the Military Records Center in Alexandria, Virginia. Displayed are some captured German records waiting to be boxed.

The real scandal is overclassification (permalink)

The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn't (merely) evidence of political impunity – it's also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.

Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have "Top Secret clearance" and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we're scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless chambers of official secrecy:

https://prospect.org/politics/2023-01-30-president-classified-document-scandal/

Overclassification is a well-documented (ahem) problem, used by bureaucrats to cover up corruption, crimes and incompetence, as well as out of the lazy reflex to declare everything to be secret. This is abetted by members of the vast "Intelligence Community" who have rotated into the private sector and have a lucrative side-hustle as TV talking heads who spin spy-thriller fantasies about the risks of these paper broken arrows.

Dayen points to Senator Moynihan's 1997 report on "Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," and its conclusion that if you declare everything secret, then nothing ends up being truly secret. It's a brilliant, readable, devastating critique of official secrecy. Nothing has been done about its recommendations:

https://sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/

In 2016, the House Oversight Committee concluded that 90% of classified documents should not be classified, the same figure that the DoD came up with in its own report, 60 years earlier:

https://oversight.house.gov/hearing/examining-costs-overclassification-transparency-security/

Meanwhile, the Information Security Oversight Office – which oversees classification – keeps ringing alarm bells about overclassification, with 50m+ documents being classified in a typical year. Rather than listen to the ISOO, Congress has cut its staff in half over the past decade. 620 ISOO employees oversee the three million Americans empowered to classify documents:

https://fas.org/irp/congress/2016_hr/overclass.pdf

In 2010, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin took stock of the post-9/11 explosion in state secrets in their "Top Secret America" report: "No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/top-secret-america/2010/07/19/hidden-world-growing-beyond-control-2/

Attempts to liberate classified docs using FOIA requests fail repeatedly, with US agencies returning heavily redacted documents, even blacking out a report on the plans of the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge [to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of] Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/magazine/the-strange-politics-of-classified-information.html

As Dayen says, the talking point from ex-spooks on TV that "overclassification is no excuse for bad document handling," is the equivalent of the old saw that "mass shootings are not the time to talk about gun control." And yet, the press keeps buying it.

Take the Politico op-ed by an ex-FBI spook, who turned the fact that "a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario," proving that there is no overclassification excuse too absurd to get an airing:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/01/26/the-wrong-question-about-the-classified-documents-scandal-00079540


The Australian flag. The Union Flag motif in the top left corner has been replaced with the word 'CHOKEPOINT' and hourglass motif from the cover of 'Chokepoint Capitalism.'

The Australian Chokepoint Capitalism Tour (permalink)

Last October, Scribe Books published the commonwealth edition of Chokepoint Capitalism, the book Rebecca Giblin and I wrote about how monopolistic labour markets are rigged, and how we need to think beyond copyright to get artists paid:

https://scribepublications.co.uk/books-authors/books/chokepoint-capitalism-9781915590015

Now, I'm headed to Australia to tour the book there with Rebecca, with dates in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra (no Perth or NZ this time, alas). It's my first time back to Oz since the Walkaway tour in 2017 – the tour where Rebecca and I conceived of this book, as it happens!

First up is Brisbane, with a talk and signing at Avid Books on Feb 8 at 6PM, hosted by The Griffith Review's Carody Culver:

https://avidreader.com.au/pages/6834-ChokepointCapitalism-RebeccaGiblinandCoryDoctorow

Next is Melbourne, where we'll be back at ACMI on Feb 14 at 630PM, in an event hosted by Esther Anatolitis:

https://www.acmi.net.au/whats-on/in-conversation-cory-doctorow-rebecca-giblin-esther-anatolitis/

Then we're in Sydney for a Feb 15 event at the State Library of NSW, starting at 6PM, hosted by Maddison Connaughton:

https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/chokepoint-capitalism-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow

We close out the trip with two nights in Canberra. First, we're at the ANU Cultural Centre with Dr Andrew Leigh, Australia's assistant Competition minister, on Feb 16 at 6PM (co-sponsored by the Canberra Times):

https://www.anu.edu.au/events/in-conversation-with-rebecca-giblin-and-cory-doctorow

And finally, we're giving a keynote address for Australian Digital Alliance's Copyright Forum 2023 on Feb 17:

https://digital.org.au/2022/11/08/doctorow-giblin-first-speaker-announcement-ada-forum-2023/

I hope you can make it! Australia is one of my favourite places in the world and I've never had a bad event there.

Hey look at this (permalink)


A Wayback Machine banner.

This day in history (permalink)

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#5yrsago Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Chase announce new health insurer ‘free from profit-making incentives and constraints’ https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/30/news/companies/amazon-berkshire-jpmorgan-health-insurance/index.html

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#5yrsago Meet Hereditary Congressman Dan Lipinski, an anti-choice, anti-LGBTQ Illinois “Machine Democrat” who opposes the $15 minimum wage https://theintercept.com/2018/01/29/dan-lipinski-illinois-3rd-district-marie-newman/

#5yrsago Convicted criminal Silvio Berlusconi returns to Italian politics as a kingmaker https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/world/europe/berlusconi-italy-election.html?smid=tw-share

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#5yrsago What youthquake? Jeremy Corbyn’s election surge was drawn from all age groups, not a mob of first-time young voters https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-myth-of-the-2017-youthquake-election/

#5yrsago Inside big tech’s last-minute scramble to comply with Europe’s new privacy rules https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/28/technology/europe-data-privacy-rules.html

#5yrsago Starlings: razor-sharp stories and poems from Jo Walton https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/30/starlings-razor-sharp-stories-and-poems-from-jo-walton/

#5yrsago The in-depth tale of Bylock, the Turkish messenger app whose 1×1 tracking GIF was the basis for tens of thousands of treason accusations https://arrestedlawyers.org/2018/01/21/ever-changing-evidence-bylock/

#1yrago The battle for Ring Zero: The esoteric argument I have been having with myself since 2002 https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

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Colophon (permalink)

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  • Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION

  • Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. ON SUBMISSION

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