OK. We are talking to our guest. Matthew Connelly, he’s a professor
of international and global history, which feels redundant to me. But this is Columbia University and they know what they're doing, for God sakes. He is the author of, it's called “The Declassification Engine: What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets.” And it may be the most presciently timed book ever written. Matthew Connelly, welcome. - Welcome to The Problem.
- Good to be here, Jon. How long were you working on this book
about America's classification system? I've been working on that book for about seven years,
but the research goes back a decade. I started out all the way back in 2013,
but even before then, for decades, I've been working on declassified documents and kind of driving myself crazy with them. Now, when the Donald Trump case
about classified documents came up and the and then obviously the Biden case
about classified documents came up, how often did you walk around
your apartment shouting, “Ka-ching,” and just doing this and just - Yeah,
- just making it-- and just making it rain around Columbia University and generally Morningside Heights specifically? Yeah, well, I don't normally thank former President Trump,
but he really did me a solid in this case. Now, having said that, we've had scandals
maybe not of this magnitude, but for sure if you think about, you know, whether it was the Republican National Committee email or, you know, the IRS
not being able to find their email. I mean, those are cases where, you know,
either they were producing lots of information
they didn't want anybody else to look at. Right. Or, you know,
when somebody wanted to look at it, they somehow found that
it couldn't be found. And so, you know, the most famous, maybe
even before the whole Trump
affair was Hillary Clinton and her email. So we've seen a lot of these scandals. And it's just, if anything, it's
just accelerating. Now in terms of scandal, and I'll take everybody's word for it
that these are scandals rather than just interesting narratives for the media to focus on, or hyperfocus on,
and watching them draw distinctions between Trump and Biden
and watching them explain why this is the most important thing
that's happened to the country. The thing I can't figure out is the Barack Obama administration, they prosecuted more people
under the Espionage Act than anybody in history,
maybe even cumulatively. You know,
Edward Snowden had to flee to Russia. What is the difference? I don't understand what keeping
a classified document in your Corvette or in your, let's say, walled fortress of a country club. Why are we even wringing our hands
about this? Well, I mean, for sure,
I think there's special treatment, right? - And there has been for a long time.
- Right. If you look, for instance,
let's take the example of when people write their memoirs, right?
And when they're really important people, maybe they are senior officials, they had access to lots of secrets.
So what do they do? They go out and they talk to their agent. They talk to their publishers,
and they drum up big advances because they're telling us, you know,
that they're going to tell all, right? - They're going to tell us things we didn't know before —
- Secrets. Because these were secrets, right? You know, because otherwise, like, is it
their writing talent? - Usually not.
- Oh, I don't know — I don't know if you've read Mike Pompeo's book. - It is —
- I've not yet had the pleasure. I don't want to say Tolstoy-esque. Yeah, but just think of it. There are lots of people. There's 1.3 million people in America
now have a top secret security clearance. Wait, how many? 1.3 million.
A top secret security clearance. Top s— Can see anything? Well, anything that's classified top secret, where they are
determined to have a need to know. Let's walk back. - Yeah.
- What are America's classification categories? OK, so I'll give you the rundown. So there's top secret. OK. Is that — that is the top? - It's the top of the top secret.
- It's got the word top in it. There are people will say that, “Oh, this was you know, sensitive, compartmentalized information.” That means it was even more top
secret than top secret. And this is just an example
of this whole culture of secrecy. These people really get into this stuff,
you know, telling you about all the gradations and, you know,
the special access programs. Yes. But, you know, the way to think of it,
to be simple to the extent that's possible with something as complicated as this is
that it's a little bit like a matrix, right? So there are levels of secrecy, right? There's top secret.
There’s secret. There’s confidential. There's controlled,
unclassified information. - So there's these different levels.
- OK. But then there are also
these silos, right? So there are all these different programs,
many of them special access programs where you have to be read in. You have to have what they call,
“a need to know,” to have access to the secrets that are in that silo. And apparently just telling people
that we have those programs can get you sent to Russia or can make you
live in an embassy somewhere - in, you know, it’s wild.
- If you're one of those people, you know, who's been read in and you had access to that information,
and then you go out, you tell somebody, “We have this program,”
and you tell them what it is, then for sure, you can be prosecuted
under the Espionage Act. So what's been happening, like you
said, is in recent years, more and more people are getting prosecuted
under the Espionage Act. And you're absolutely right,
under Barack Obama, there were more prosecutions under the Espionage Act than
in all previous administrations combined. - Combined?
- Yes. Oh, see, I thought I made that up. - But I —
- No, it’s true. Now I feel now, I mean, you have Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 30-some years. Mm-hmm. Under the Espionage Act for passing things to WikiLeaks. Mm-hmm. And now Assange -- Assange himself
is under threat of prosecution. And if you believe that he's a journalist,
and many people do. - Right.
- He’s the first journalist now to be threatened with prosecution under the Espionage Act. So not just the sources. But didn’t — I thought that the Obama administration
also threatened journalists - with prosecution?
- You're right. - There were threats, but it’s the following through —
- But they didn't go through with it? Yes. And most of the things that we learn from
from all this are things we already know. They're generally they are not
particularly exposing of state secrets. So is it
merely the act of showing it to somebody or having it in your possession? Well, when you read in the law, you know,
there is language like, you know, to, you know, further
the interest of a foreign power. Right? And that can be important. So, you know, like let's say if somebody
accidentally disclosed something or they in the case, you know, many people think with President Biden,
they think he mishandled classified information. So that's a different matter. And typically it's
a much less serious offense. So mishandling is — would be considered
a misdemeanor in the world of classification passing that so that the public finds out
this information, whether a whistleblower or otherwise,
that's considered the felony? Well, this is the time
I say that I am not a lawyer. - So you don't want to get your legal advice from me.
- Nice. I have an honorary doctorate, so I'm just
going to say that I'm that I'm correct. Yeah, but,
you know, working in this space, I have, you know, had the experience,
you know, of reading legal briefs, you know, about what it is
you can get prosecuted for. You know, so for an example, when I first started out,
I mentioned how is about ten years ago, I got together with some colleagues in the statistics department
in computer science, and we had this idea, hey,
you know, there's all this secrecy and there are millions now
millions of declassified documents and who knows how many still classified.
Billions, probably. And we thought, you know,
why don't we begin using like these data science tools
to get to the bottom of this? Like, let's start figuring out, like,
what is this, like an actual top secret and what is really something
that's already in the public domain. People, you know, things
that people should already know. And what we found is that there are lawyers out there,
you know, former government lawyers. You know, one of them
was the general counsel at the NSA. Another one was the head of major crimes
at the Southern District. These lawyers told us
that we could get prosecuted under the Espionage Act
just for analyzing declassified documents. - You know, so it's not just — yes!
- Wait, what? - I kid you not.
- How in God's name? You can be prosecuted for espionage
by analyzing declassified information? - That's the theory.
- That doesn't make any sense. - If you go to a very fancy law school —
- It's got to be a fancy one. It has to be fancy. And you get paid $1,000 an hour. You can come up
with all kinds of theories, right? And these are the same institutions
that are hoovering up every piece of information
that you have in your life. In other words, after the Patriot Act,
Americans have no privacy. There is nothing classified
in terms of information for Americans. The government is welcome
to suck it up into giant tubes and wherever it is that they store it in
windowless buildings in the Nevada desert. But if you even read the things
that they've declassified, they will fuck you up? Yeah. I mean, in this case, the argument was that we were using
new technology, which is true. And we had access to, you know,
vastly more data than anyone did before. And that's true, too. But their argument was
that this really the quantitative change, as great as is it, brings
a qualitative difference. But at the end of the day,
they even agreed, you know, that really it would be an overzealous, maybe overambitious prosecutor
who would try to bring such a case. Because luckily in America
we have this thing called - the First Amendment and luckily —
- No, I'm not — I haven't read up on this. - So you're going to have —
- It's the first one, Jon. Come on. You don't have to get - just read. Yeah.
Alright. - So anyway —
- I'm working — I'm actually getting through the preamble right now so that's this year. - Yeah, it goes on, right?
- Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, so there's also legal precedent that academics and luckily, I am one.
Journalist too. We're allowed to seek out the truth
and we're even allowed to take certain chances, take risks, and try and discover
things, create new knowledge. And so luckily, the Supreme Court
a long time ago agrees that you have to let academics do this
because, you know, if you're not even going to let
professors, you know, - look around and try to find stuff —
- Then why did Reality Winner go to jail? All she did was she told us
about a program that the Russians had. It wasn't even an American program. It was that the Russians were interfering
with our elections. Right. Well, in her case, the, you know, sad thing is that when she, you know, signed up,
you know, to work in that position and have access
to government documents, secret documents, she had to pledge to protect
that information. And it's part of the whole culture, right? Is when you're inducted into this world,
you know, the secret world — - Yes, this secret —
- Yeah. cloistered world of 1.4 million Americans
this vast — It's like not to get to “The Last of Us,”
but it's like the mycelium, the the threads of the espionage
and declassification and classification world that are — If this is a vast network, - Yeah.
- a vascularity. Right. And, you know, when you think of it,
it sounds implausible. Right. And there are millions more, by the way,
millions more who have other levels of security clearance,
whether it's for secret or confidential. There are more
people have security clearances even at the top secret level
than live in the District of Columbia. Who decides? Who decides that something is top secret? How much clearance is that? The Grand Poobah of clearances
that then can look — who decides? Alright, you ready to go into this strange world
with me? - OK.
- Oh, Matthew Connelly, you bring it, baby. Alright, so, Jon, let's say that you would like a job,
you know, in the Biden administration. Right? And you might even want to work,
you know, in the Pentagon say, why not? Right? So what you have to find out
is if you're going to be able to get your security clearance. So first, you know,
they have to want you for the job and then you have to go through this
long ordeal. You have to fill out a form. Last I checked,
I think it's 138 pages long. - You have to fill out —
- A security clearance form is — - a security clearance form —
- a 138 pages long. - Yeah.
- Alright. And your friends and family
are going to get interviewed by the FBI. Typically, you're going to have to
do a long face to face interview
talking about all of your gambling, Jon, all of your substance abuse issues
and everything that could — - potentially —
- Good thing I don't want to work there. - I know, right? Me neither.
- Whoops. Oh, boy. Jesus. But yes, they're trying to find all these ways in which you could potentially,
you know, be vulnerable to blackmail. But it has the effect, at the same time,
I don't know if you've ever belonged, you know, to any kind of.
You wouldn't tell me, right. - But in any kind of secret society or fraternity.
- Oh sure. - Yeah. They also have rituals.
- No, I’m in a ton of those. - Right. Many. Too many. But —
- Sure. Yeah. they have their rituals, right? And one of the first things they want
is for you to give up your secrets. Right? So it has this effect of, like,
making people feel like — I think that's — Isn't that how Scientology works? That's -- I think that's kind of the whole game. - I think — Yeah?
- So they want to know everything about you? I mean, in the old days, you know, look, people that were gay
weren't allowed to have security clearance, you know, obviously
was a ridiculous bar of entry for that. But what makes them think that you having
using drugs ever makes you vulnerable to blackmail
or you're a security risk? Well, this is an example of how it reflects a certain kind of culture
when you think of it. This whole system was created in the
1940s and '50s. Right? And so the people in charge of the system, they had a certain sense
of what does a loyal American look like? You know, what do they talk like? And surprise, surprise. But it turns out that,
you know, people who are alcoholics, you know, back in the day, people used to call them womanizers,
like people would have serial affairs and so on You know,
these people didn't seem to have problems. - It was all fine.
- Yeah. Was this based on communism? Was this whole idea based on sort of anarchists and communists and trying to weed out - the reds in our government or the undesirables?
- The way it worked. It was especially difficult for people who
are, say, second generation immigrants. Right? Now, that's not to say that
plenty of second generation immigrants didn't get security clearances like J. Robert Oppenheimer is a famous example. Well, sure. Well, sure. He, you know — - He went to the right schools, you know.
- Yes and he was — he was making the right thing. Right. He was making the atomic —
you needed guys like that, right? That's right. - But when —
- So they would have meetings and be like, “You know, this this guy's Irish.” “I don't know how we I don't know
if we can trust this Irish fella.” They put all the Irishmen in the FBI. Interesting. Who designed this classification
and clearance regime? Is it designed by Hoover? Was it designed by who? Who made it? Yeah, so there were a lot of,
you know, cooks in the kitchen. OK. But in terms of, like, the whole system
and how it first, you know, got worked out,
you know, in terms of levels of clearance and also like the silos of information
and the way you had to get these FBI interviews and clearance
checks and the rest of it all. That started with the Manhattan Project. - Oh wow.
- And so the Manhattan Project was like the prototype. And then that system propagated itself
until eventually it took over. You know, much of our government. Let me just tell you one other thing
about Oppenheimer, though. So just recently,
the Department of Energy, a little late, but they decided that they're going
to void the revocation of J. Robert Oppenheimer security clearance,
because many years ago, I think it was 1954,
Oppenheimer fell out of step with the rest
of the national security establishment. He didn't want to build hydrogen
bombs, right. He thought the U.S. had to share nuclear technology in order to prevent nuclear war. And so they found ways to drive him out. And the way they did it was by stripping him of his security clearance. - Now, the interesting thing
- Wow is that, you know, they pointed out how he had relatives, you know, who are communists in some cases. In other cases, they just for civil libertarians. But, you know, one of the people they put on the three man — and they're all men of course — one of the men they put on this three panel jury — Well, you know why the ladies gab. I don't know if you knew that.. Back in the '40s and '50s, the ladies would gab. Oh, don't get me started Jon.
- Oh, yeah. But one of the three, he said, “You know, in my experience, security risk tend to be Jews. Before I know anything about them, I know they're likely to be Jewish.” - Wow.
- Yes. And that's why they picked him. They put that guy on the jury so that he could judge Oppenheimer. A three person jury, who decided, “Well, that guy is Jewish.” And they were like, “You know, he's Jewish enough that he can design the bomb, but he's a little too Jewish - to keep going.”
- Right. So this is how we end up with this national security establishment where you know, don't believe what you see on TV, okay? Like, if you watch TV, you think, “Oh, my God,
all the leaders of the CIA are African-American,” right? They have all these interesting like, you don't — no, sadly, I'm sorry to tell you, but — What? Yes, systematically for decades, it's been particularly difficult for people who are not white, straight men to get security clearances. And here's the crazy part weren’t there are people in the Trump administration who failed their security clearance test and then ultimately the administration was like, “Fuck it." - Yeah.
- "It's fine. He can go to the meeting.” Well, it's an example of how, you know, this is one true thing that Trump said is that “The President is sovereign over secrecy.” The president ultimately controls
how this information is defined, who gets access to it. And so if he decides, like, “Well, my no good son-in-law, I don't care what you say about him, I'm still going to let him have access to top secrets.” - Right.
- At the end of the day, you know, he's the one. You know, if he doesn't like the way the regulations are written, he can rewrite them. All of these executive orders are executive orders by the President. So we have this enormous regime. We have a regime of secrecy. We have a regime of classification. It is millions of people deep. There are juries that decide what gets classified and what doesn't. And then there's the top secret. And then, of course, there's the SCIF. This stuff is so hot, to the — It's so juicy that you can only — if you take it with you,
it is like the monkey's paw. It will curse you. You must only look at it in the SCIF. But the truth is, this is an arbitrary administrative bureaucracy based on trying to keep the bomb out of Russia's hands. And, you know, Jon, it's like the best-kept secret in Washington. There's this aura, right, around the whole national secrecy complex. Like we all know it's “Oh, it's so complicated and they have to be so careful and like,
they're they have to get clearances and everything has to be
stamped, has to be inside envelopes and other envelopes.” And it's true, there are all these rules and regulations. But the fact is, that's not the way it actually works on the inside. What you find inside is a system out of control, right? They just can't agree among themselves
what secrets they actually have to protect. - Wow
- And as a result, you know, huge you know, amounts of information are protected at the highest level. It's got to be the highest level. - It’s gotta be at the highest level.
- It’s gotta be at the SCIF - They probably decided in a SCIF.
- Yeah. And one of the reasons for that, you know, it's basic human nature. And psychologists have studied this. If you take random pieces of paper and you stamp some of them “secret,” those are the pieces of paper
that people think are important and valuable. So it's a very human need as well. Let me give you a different human need. That I have found in generally
in administrative states and bureaucracies and that is the need to cover your hiney That so — how much of this is ass-covering so that future administrations, when they come in, don't reveal what a bonehead you were when you made certain decisions about drones and wars and all kinds of other things
that would embarrass you for your incompetence. Yeah. So a lot of this stuff, it's just what you said. There's no incentive to declassify stuff. You know, all the incentives are to mark things as secret or top secret, because otherwise people won't think that information is important. So your boss might not pay attention to it. Or like you said, maybe you have disclosed something that you weren't meant to. And the people who live in this world, you know, they are lifers most of them, like they spent decades working inside this national secrecy complex. And so sometimes they don't even know what's publicly known,
because pretty much everything they read is classified. So after a while,
they don't actually know what the rest of the world knows. So even like senior CIA officials have commented on this kind of problem and they call them innocence, they say they're all too many of these people in government, these people who don't actually know
the public already knows much of what they think is secret. The thing that I don't understand is and then you have those, you know, they'll talk about, for instance, the Kennedy assassination. “After 25 years, we will declassify all the materials
from the Warren Report and the Kennedy assassination. And we will finally" – and 25 years passes. And they're like "40 years. After 50 years, we will —” And then they declassify it,
but they actually don't declassify everything. And then they redact the shit out of all these other things. And it's an incomprehensible jumble. And some of the things that they have classified
are like newspaper reports. Yes. So newspaper reports, that is a good example, because that's one way that Hillary Clinton got in trouble
is that, you know, she and her aides would pass between them,
you know, things that they read about in the newspaper. Right and you know Hillary, I guess, had trouble with their printers. It was like “Print this. Print this.” But in other cases, you know, clearly she's sharing media reports with her aides. And the issue, though, is that in some cases, this reports about programs that were still classified. Right? So to take, like a common example, the drone program
where there are killing, you know, people in Pakistan. So the U.S. government, even though they were running these missions for years and killing like hundreds of Pakistani citizens, the public position is, you know, “We can neither confirm nor deny.” And so one reason for that is absurd as it may seem,
is that if they did acknowledge that program and believe it or not, even the declassification of a communication between a Secretary of State and her aides about could be seen in this weird world, could be seen as an acknowledgment that could create a diplomatic incident, then the Pakistani government has to explain and answer for itself. “So why is it that you're letting the U.S., you know, kill our citizens? Why is it they're flying their aircraft overhead?” As long as everybody pretends it's not happening, nobody has to take a position on it. But everybody knows it's happening. And there have been news reports that it's been happening. And so much of this, the only thing that's ever revealed, like the one thing I thought WikiLeaks was really amazing at revealing is A) how banal and how much of a fear-based industry it is. Oh, yeah. That it is people covering their asses and not wanting to take responsibility for decisions. Well, you know, journalists have a role in this as well. You know, I have to say, and even some academics. That is, you know, when we work on this subject,
we want everyone to know how exciting it is, right? And it is. Like, there are really appalling secrets. Like, there are things that I discovered in doing my research, writing my book that I was amazed by. Don't tell me, because I don't want to go to jail. No, no. Can't tell you. I can neither confirm nor deny. But, like you said, when you look at the,
you know, even a fraction of a quarter of a million cables that came out because of WikiLeaks, right? That Chelsea Manning gave to Julian Assange that were then published for the world. It led to a whole series of stories in the media, right? Dozens of them where they talk about the revelations of WikiLeaks. When you track those stories down, in most cases, you find that these are things that are already well known in public. - It just so happened they found a document that was secret
- Right. - that said the same thing and the vast majority —
- That were stamped. - That was it.
- Yeah. It had the stamp. So now that journalists are interested in it, if it didn't have the stamp, they probably would have ignored it. We know this country has pulled a multitude of coups. We know this country has used all kinds of manner of propaganda and manipulation, especially when it comes to getting us into wars
or keeping us into wars. We know all of these things, so why are we pretending? Well, for a few reasons. I mean, one, like, it's how you get paid. I mean, this government spends over $18 billion a year on classifying and protecting information. Wait, what? Over $18 billion a year. This is bigger than the budget of, like, the U.S. Treasury, right? So this would be one of those larger departments in our government if all the spending on secrecy was was in one place. Well, then. how does this stuff end up in boxes in people's — You would think for $18 billion, somebody would have would have gone and said,
“Hey, man, I think we're missing —” It's the volume. It's the volume. That's the other thing. It's the system can no longer cope
with the sheer volume of so-called secret information. So back when they were trying to track this,
the government used to put out an annual report. They still do, but they've basically given up on
on what they used to do, which is they tried to count how many times every year
some government official classified something as secret. So in 2012, they said it was over 90 million times. So that's three times every second. Three times every second somebody is saying this is classified. Right. And just the other day I was looking at a document from the Carter administration back in 1977. They were trying to do something about this,
you know, impossible problem. And the NSA, the National Security Agency,
that people like to spy on everyone and surveil us, they tried to get exempted entirely, you know, from the whole system for trying to reveal and release information. And one argument they made is that — Was that request classified? Was that a top secret request? It was in the Carter Library for decades before we found this document with a bunch of other documents. So the figure they gave is they said,
“How are we supposed to declassify stuff? We produce 10,000 secret reports a day.” So this is back in 1977. Can you imagine what the volume is now? It's estimated the State Department even
I think it was like eight or ten years ago, the State Department is producing 2 billion emails a day, right? So how are you going to control and protect all those secrets? And the crazy part is it doesn't feel as though journalists have any sense of how to put any of this into context. They only — right now they are chasing something that they believe is ‘Spy Versus Spy.’ Trump v Biden.
When they're not looking at the broader absurdity of the entire national security state. Right. It's like every year or so, we're still playing the same games. - Right.
- But the sides switch uniforms, right? So if you remember, like during the Hillary Clinton email affair, we had a lot of Democrats saying like,
“Oh, you know, a lot of this stuff isn't even secret. You know, who cares? This is like, you know, a bunch of bureaucrats coming after Hillary for their own self-interest reasons.” What had happened with Trump in Mar-a-Lago. It's as if they all switch sides. And now it was the Republicans saying basically the same thing. The Democrats are saying that he's endangering national security. Now, I'm not saying that they're wrong. Right? I think it's entirely possible,
you know, that some of the things that Trump took, he took because these really were explosive secrets
like these could be deeply incriminating. And that's probably why we're going to talk about it endlessly, right? And with Biden, too. But the problem is
we don't have a sense of what's actually deeply incriminating or what's actually deeply secret or what it is they're protecting. And by the by, these guys can just call up somebody. I mean, we just had this case now of the FBI agent. I think his name is McGonigal, who is was looking into the the information that Reality Winner had put out, that
the Russians were interfering with the election system. Well, it turns out now he is being accused of colluding with Deripaska, who is the Russian interloper who was there trying to interfere. Like, this whole thing is so deeply fucked. Yes. And it's even more fucked than we realized because the vast majority of us like, whether we're playing on one side or the other,
we think what we're fighting about is secrecy. But actually, what bothers me is that whether we're talking about Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump or the Republican National Committee or what have you, what's at stake here is our history, because what in every case they have done, even leaving aside the question of whether they endangered national security, they were stealing property. Right? Those documents don't belong to them. They belong to you and me. This is our heritage. Yeah, but you're — you're appealing, though, to our higher aspirations as a country. You're not thinking about this in the Sun Tzu sense, which is, everything is information to be weaponized. What has happened now to the information state is it is viewed in the same way that DARPA would view a new advance in technology is how do I — and by the way, I don't think that's new. I think weaponization of whatever weapons you have at your disposal to you know, attack your enemies has always been done, even domestically with politics. But it's really sophisticated now. Well, to quote another sage, Dr. Phil, - I would ask the question,
- Nice. How's that working out for you? Well I would say to that, to quote another Dr. Phil guest, “Catch me outside. How about that?” So that's how— Well, it's a little bit like, OK, so you took up this cudgel and you're beating the crap out of the other guy, - Right.
- because he was found to have these secret documents. Right and obviously because he's Trump, - Yeah.
- he won't cooperate. He's above the law
because he's a man of no accountability and all entitlement. - We know that.
- Right. And don't get me wrong, I would join you. I would pick up another cudgel and I would continue beating him. Yes. Yes. But I might be beating him for other reasons, right? Because my grievance with Donald Trump is not only
is he like the crappy, you know, roommate who moved out and took a bunch of your stuff. - Right.
- He's claiming it was his all along. - Right. Because he's the president.
- Right. So obviously, that's different than Joe Biden,
the kind of at least so far anyway. We think he's probably more of the absent minded roommate. And he was throwing everything in trash bags and he ended up taking a few things that are yours. - And then he apologized and said,
- Oh— - “Hey, can I buy you coffee?”
- dear God. Right. But doesn't it show that in this country, when you're on the inside, you don't in any way abide by these norms and regulations that we all talk about? See, that's what when we talked about
“That belongs to the people.” Right. You know, it's that same stuff
I have with the Hatch Act where, you know, they “You can't from the podium of the White House try and, you know, utilize the bully pulpit for personal gain.” And you're like, “Do you have any idea what branding is?” Like that's — of course you're using it for personal gain. - But it's, I think it's the condescension and the —
- Oh, yeah. and the high mindedness of what they say they're doing. Right.
Versus the fact that, like, if you went there, they're probably using classified shit as coasters. Like, there isn't this treating of it with the solemnity that they say there is. Right. Yeah. I think that's part of Hillary Clinton's problem with the email affair is that many people thought, oh, this is just another example how the rest of us have to follow these rules
and we're going to get in a lot of trouble. We might even get prosecuted if we don't. Whereas, you know, Hillary Clinton decided that it would be more convenient for her. I mean, she actually used the word convenient. It would be convenient for her to disregard these rules
and these laws, actually, which. Which they all do, because it is a city that runs on entitlement. And where did she get this idea from? Colin Powell. Colin Powell told her, don't use that State Department email system. Don't worry about. It's a pain. Yeah, you could use your own email. And by the way, we don't know everything that was said between them, but I have yet to hear a good explanation for why this was not about trying to avoid having any of these records released to the public. Because if you're creating public records, as even Hillary eventually found out, then they are subject to the Freedom of Information Act. So journalists and historians will come after you and ask for those records and you might even have to produce them. - Yeah, but how long – if you're classifying three things every second, what good is FOIA? What good is the Freedom of Information Act? Because the bureaucratic delay to even get a hold of the information. And if there's that much information, it's the oldest trick in any law docudrama that you would see just, “Oh, you want you want that disclosure evidence?” And then they send over 18 semi trucks filled with boxes, like they'll just flood the zone with bullshit. Oh yeah. I mean, I filed the equivalent of FOIAs at several presidential libraries
when I first started out like seven years ago. I have not gotten anything from any of them. Now, one reason for this, the one reason why this whole FOIA system has become dysfunctional is because the vast majority of people who submit FOIAs are not historians,
they're not journalists. They're not even the people who want to know about the UFOs at Roswell. The people who submit FOIAs by and large,
these are commercial entities. They're private firms, information brokers that are seeking commercial intelligence
that they can store in databases and sell to customers. - Oh dear God.
- And they are using like more than 90% of the FOIAs filed are ones that are filed by these information brokers like Thomson Reuters. They're data mining. - They're basically data mining.
- Absolutely. Yeah. And then they're reselling this public information to private parties that are able to pay their subscription fees. See, I don't understand why you're not on every one of these 24 hour news networks explaining just how broken this whole security apparatus and classification system is rather than everybody going “Who is more culpable in American secrets, Trump or Biden?” Like nobody, is looking at the macro of a system that's utterly broken. I'd like to think, you know, that people are beginning to realize they I notice like I'm one of these people,
not just like reading The New York Times. But I like to read what their readers say. And the most popular comments. And when the Biden story first broke, you know, the first,
you know, dozen or so were people saying, "this is nothing." “This is a nothing burger” And then, you know, the next one, the one after that. And finally, by the time you got to like, oh, and then there were the ones next to his Corvette, then people are like, “Wait a minute here, there's something wrong with this whole system.” - That's right.
- Right. So that's me. I'm the guy. But unfortunately, apparently I have a face for radio. - So you may not be seeing me on local televison station.
- Not true, my friend. Not true. Handsome as the day is long, I say that, I know you're probably listening to this in your car but he's dead on wrong. Very tall too. Very tall, very handsome. In terms of what's really going on with the security state and all the redactions. And, you know, and we saw that in the Mueller report
and they made such a big deal of everybody had to go to the SCIF and then the Republicans tried to storm the SCIF and get into the SCIF. And then the redactions and, you know, there was a breathless coverage of it on the day they released the report, and then everybody forgot about it
because nobody goes through and tries to discern what these redactions really mean. So isn't that just another layer of obfuscation that the government can control to keep whatever embarrassment
they don't want out into the public sphere? Yeah, I remember years ago
when I first started, you know, working with data scientists, like, one thing I found is like, their students are much more forthright than the ones you find in, say, our history department here. They will — if they think you're an idiot, they will tell you. And so, you know,
they had all kinds of reactions when we first started working with these declassified documents
and all their margins, all their redactions and such. And one of them, God bless her,
she said she talked about this as censorship. And I said, “No, no, no, no, no, this isn't censorship.” You know, “This is you know, these were meant to be public documents, at least not originally.” “You know, they're meant to be redacting things
that might jeopardize national security.” But as the years have gone by
and I see like working with data scientists, when we can, you know, train algorithms to start finding
like what exactly they typically redact, I began to realize, it is censorship. It's absolutely censorship. - They're trying to redact the historical record to provide a certain version,
- Wow. of what happened, which is the one they think is safe to to share with the rest of us. Everybody learned from Nixon like you really shouldn't recor — if you don't have a recording. I'm just going to put this this black ink mark over it and no one's going to be able to discern
what it is that we were talking about. Jon, did you know that the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
they destroyed all the records, or almost all the records of all their meetings
back in the early '70s. As soon as they thought somebody might file a Freedom of Information Act request or some other way of make it out, they destroyed all of their records
and then they stopped taking records. It's like a numbers racket. - They decided, you know, they should just not keeping anything to paper.
- Right. And that's what that was the whole thing with the Trump Administration. And then anything that was on paper,
he would chew up and throw in the toilet. You know, the whole thing is mishegoss. How do you rein it in and how do you gain any kind of control of it? Now, you talk about AI, but I think, boy, if there's anything that's going to lend itself to conspiracy theory, it's allowing ChatGPT to be in charge of our national security state and decide what we need to know and what we don't. Yeah, so we are going to have to use technology
because to a large extent, especially in more recent years, a lot of what's happening,
it's just the exponential growth of information generally. And also it's not just documents
of course, like more and more of it, it's video, it's audio, you know, it's Zoom calls and spreadsheets and all the rest of it. So you just can't continue this system
where they have about 2,000 people in the government and the entire government, there are 2,000 people doing this, going through documents, deciding what can be released to the public. You know, not when the State Department is producing 2 billion email a year. Let alone everything the NSA and everyone else is doing. So we are, I'm sorry to break it to you, but we are going to have to use like, machine learning algorithms to begin sorting through all this and prioritizing the information. It really does have to be protected most closely. Now, it's not just me. There is this thing. I hope more people start hearing about it. It's called the Public Interest Declassification Board,
and this is created by Congress and the White House in order to make sure the public is represented
in these kinds of discussions. Now, unfortunately, the PIDB is largely powerless. They have almost no staff. So there's an $18 billion security and classification system, - and then there's a board of public interest civilians —
- Yeah. Unpaid. It doesn't have any money, unpaid and nobody really uses it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. They’re unpaid, they’re volunteers, They have no staff, virtually no staff. They're tucked away in the National Archives. Right. - Right?
- Right. But, you know, this is supposed to be the voice of the people, right? - Yes. Okay.
- Who are supposed to be speaking out. And for ten years, what they've been saying is
we have to begin working with data scientists, developing tools
that's going to allow us to get on top of this whole mess. So they're right. They're absolutely right. And the work I've been doing with colleagues,
even with declassified data, even with a small budget, we have grants here and there. We've been able to learn a lot, right? And it's entirely feasible. You can build systems. Yes, with classified information within protected systems that could begin to rank order those records, that really has to be studied
closely and accelerate the release of everything else. And maybe begin to narrow this regime to actually things that would be in a national security interest. - Absolutely, because this system, it would detect outliers, right?
- Right. So you would be able to see which officials tend to classify
everything top secret or on the other hand, which official, you know, maybe it is not classifying something that probably ought to be classified. Think of your spam filter. - Spam filters have gotten really good. Right?
- Right. I don't know if you go through with what they collect, but,
you know, 99% of the cases, it's spam. I mean, I mostly – I take that off because sometimes I feel lonely. So it, it helps me feel more popular. But — so I'm going to ask you, and maybe this is it's something that's unknowable. In your research, as you look through it. How much of it is malevolence? How much of it is bureaucracy and incompetence? And how much of it is malevolence taking advantage of administration and incompetence? Well, if this is the first anyone heard about these kinds of problems, you know, then maybe I'd say, “Yeah, you know, they've screwed up, right, and we should try to fix it.” But if you go back through the history, as I have,
if you like, dig into the archives and you read, you know, the records, you know, going all the way back to FDR. What you find is from the very outset, they knew that they were building a system where is all about secrecy and they did not create any systems
to guarantee transparency and accountability. And by the early 1950s, they already realized that overclassification was an enormous and growing problem. And year after year after year, you had committees and commissions in the Pentagon, you know, in the White House. I mean, these are all themselves like national security experts
saying like something has to be done. And every single administration, but one, every administration issued a new executive order that was supposed to fix the system. But what happened in every single instance
is that what were supposed to be reforms. The reality is they were trying to concentrate power over the system in the White House and among the president's appointees. - Wow.
- So that's why I say this isn't just incompetence. There is plenty of incompetence. This is an intentionally designed labyrinth that no one can negotiate. Not necessarily just to protect American security, but to protect the administration. Yeah, because whoever occupies
the White House has sovereign control over what’s secret. - They can send people to prison for revealing secrets
that they define as national security.
- Right. - Which they've done.
- And they'll keep doing it, right? So that's why I think ultimately this is about power. You know, this is about the only kind of sovereign power
that exists in our political system. The way the presidents get to decide
what the rest of us are allowed to know. Last question, and this would be most shocking revelation in your mind as you as you went through this,
was there anything that shocked your conscience? You know, some of what I studied were things that I think a lot of us have heard about, like the experimentation, radiological experimentation on American servicemen. Some of us might have even heard about,
you know, the way they experimented on children like children who they said were terminally ill
but turned out not to be. They experimented on the elderly, homeless people. But in a way, what was most shocking was when I found the document where they said, “You know, if this gets out, some of us might be liable for prosecution. So we have to make sure that we classify all of this so that nobody ever sees it” To me, even I was a little taken aback. They knew what they were doing. One other reason we know they were doing this
and how they knew they were doing it. Was because it was at the same time
the Nuremberg Tribunal was in session. - Wow.
- Yeah. And the very day, the very day that doctors, American doctors, came up with standards
for how you should conduct experiments. Right. And make sure that people knew what they were signing up for. That was the day they decided that, in fact,
all of this had to be kept secret. So that's – that intentionality that they knew they're engaged in criminal behavior,
knowing that they were going to be likened to Nazi doctors, - but then they decided they could use secrecy to shield themselves, even I was a little taken aback by that.
- Holy shit. And, you know, I think after all these years,
the only thing they probably learned is don't commit that intention in writing, that it's all, that, now that you know, that whatever you put in writing is the historical record, make that up. And I mean, it almost sounds like the mafia where they just go, you know, let's just use phone booths or let's never use,
you know, anything that can be tracked or traced, - Right.
- to express our intention. It's so crazy. And who is it in there, and this is just obviously the final question, that killed John F. Kennedy? And what's his name? We all did Jon. We all did. Dude, well done. Perfect. Matthew Connelly, professor of international and global history at Columbia University, author of “The Declassification Engine:
What History Reveals About America's Top Secrets.” It’s coming out on Valentine's Day. You know what? There's no more romantic gift you can give. - There’s a love story about FDR in there so —
- That’s right. It's safe to give for Valentine's Day. I guarantee it. And I'm a married man. It's the love story between America and its secrets. Please check it out. It's wonderful. Matthew, thank you so much for for joining us. Thank you, Jon.
