Top Secret and Personal Data First thing I would like to do is apologize to my readers. This site went down for a couple of days because the host provider forgot to update the site security which I had already paid for. Because of this people either got a security warning or just couldn’t connect, but we are again good and security has been reinstated. I don’t know what we would do if we had no secrets. I bet this would put a couple of million people out of work who are the guardians of the secrets. What really should be done, is revamp the way we keep secrets and also what we should make secret. You can’t have a government without secrets, but you can overdo it much as we have done. If we did cut down on the millions of secret files, some of which are nothing more than newspaper clippings we would probably save tons of money and gain a more educated population when it comes to government affairs and elections. I have thought about this and have come to the conclusion if a politician knows he or she can take an action in their best interest and not the peoples, and classify the documents connected with that action, many times he or she will take that action. If he or she knows the action they are about to take goes against the will of the people and the voters are going to find out, they just might not do it, making it better for all of us. I know about what gets classified in some cases because as I have said it the past, when I was in the army, I was given a secret clearance and for a couple of months my job was to burn classified documents. I can tell you this, I burned many a page from Popular Mechanics and other magazines and can’t imagine why someone would give them secret status. Think about it, I would burn one page, but thousands of these pages were out in the public and probably still are. To me this just illustrates grave incompetence. No one really knows when the first document became secret. Could it have been a rock tablet from 5,000 B.C. that had a record of troop movements on it? Maybe some Roman senators decided to make some of their deals secret to hide from the public. Whenever it started and by whom doesn’t matter, what matters is we are over using the concept for various reasons. I have to say this, if a country wants to have so many secret documents, it has to have an airtight system for protecting them. The bigger the number of documents, the more people are needed to protect them and the bigger the system. Recently we discovered we had a secret document leak. We discovered more than 100 secret U.S. defense documents got out into circulation and even worse it was suspected far more could be out there. We are talking about very dangerous documents, not magazine pages. It is said the documents proved we were spying on our allies for one thing. This is not as unusual as it sounds. We spy on our allies and they spy on us, but you are not supposed to embarrass anyone by admitting to this. Some documents had to do with things like an assessment of Ukraine’s defenses, which I am sure they didn’t want to get out. It is said the documents also spoke about our satellite systems. There were other things in the documents which could prove embarrassing to our close allies. In the end it was found a young soldier was given access to secret documents and thought it would be great to take them and brag to his friends on the internet about what he had and what was going on. If we didn’t have so many people with secret clearances, the estimate I heard was three million but don’t know for sure, we might not have had this leak. The criteria for a secret clearance should be changed and these clearances should be made harder to obtain. How do we know this hasn’t happened before? This happened to make the news, but how many times did leaks of secret documents get covered up which we have no knowledge of? Sometimes carelessness is the cause for leaked secret documents. Some have been said to have been left in places by accident. Others were left on computers. In a way veteran’s records are secret because they require the permission of the veteran or next-of-kin. There is an infamous case where a laptop computer containing millions of names of vets and their info was left on a subway train. As far as I know, no one was ever punished for this. Another part of the security problem for secret documents is sometimes they are not protected very well when they are on government websites. This was proved when Gary McKinnon was able to get into U.S. government websites and see secret documents. Later he said he couldn’t believe how easy it was. How can anyone excuse something like this. I have often said we can’t as the public really protect ourselves from our data getting out because it is in the hands of so many others and in some cases not well protected. In some cases, like the credit sites, many of us have not given them permission to have this data and yet when they get hacked and the data is lost, it becomes our problem. The bottom line here is we have too much data classified as secret, too much personal data online, too many people have access and the data sometimes is not protected very well.
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