Classified email
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Classified email is where John Kiriakou locates the moment the volume problem became unmanageable. He was on temporary duty overseas on the day it was implemented, and remembers the station chief he was working for saying "we thought things were out of hand already, there's no way to control classified email."

Classifying lunch

The practice that followed, at the CIA and at NSA, the Defense Department and the National Security Council, was that "literally everything that is produced gets a classification on it, even when it is legitimately unclassified."

His example is his own marriage. He would email Heather Kiriakou, also a senior CIA officer, to say "do you want to meet for lunch", and classify it Secret HUM 4-82, the human-intelligence authority every agency employee holds. She would reply "sure, let's meet in front of the deli at 12" and classify her answer the same way.

"Well, it's not secret that I want to meet my wife for lunch. It's not secret that we're going to meet at noon in front of the deli. But that's just how you're taught, how you're trained to do it."

The reason given

The justification offered to officers was the aggregation risk, that if material is left unclassified, "some malignant force out there, the Russians, the Chinese, whomever they might be, might be able to put it together and come up with some classified information as a result."

The consequence, on Kiriakou's account, is arithmetic: "billions and billions of classified documents being created every single year, with no mechanism to police them or to eventually declassify them."

See also

- Over Classification
- Heather Kiriakou
- Classification compartments
- National Archives declassification
