{"id":1857856,"date":"2023-02-23T11:51:27","date_gmt":"2023-02-23T16:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1857856"},"modified":"2023-02-23T11:53:14","modified_gmt":"2023-02-23T16:53:14","slug":"john-stossel-governments-dirty-secret","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/john-stossel-governments-dirty-secret\/","title":{"rendered":"John Stossel: Government&#8217;s Dirty Secret"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">10<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fjohn-stossel-governments-dirty-secret%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1857856&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47-->\n<div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/430998d8-cd57-49e9-add5-55d38f59c14c@news.ap_.org_.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\"   style=\"display:none\"><\/div>\n<p><span>Donald Trump&#8217;s house contains classified documents!<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Democrats were horrified! Trump is guilty &#8220;mishandling of some of our nation&#8217;s most sensitive secrets&#8221; Create &#8220;a national security crisis!&#8221; Nicole Wallace and Chris Hayes of MSNBC.<\/p>\n<p>Next, President Joe Biden was caught.<\/p>\n<p>The conservatives were suddenly upset.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Thanks to Joe Biden,&#8221; Sean Hannity &#8220;America&#8217;s most sensitive secrets were floating around.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Both sides were wrong.<\/p>\n<p>The truth is that the word &#8220;truth&#8221; means: &#8220;classified&#8221; means little. Three things are now classified every second by our bloated government.<\/p>\n<p>The stacks of classified paper in Washington would be higher than 26 Washington Monuments if they were stacked together.<\/p>\n<p>Matthew Connelly is the author of &#8220;The Declassification Engine,&#8221; This is how it works. &#8220;as much as bureaucrats know they&#8217;re only supposed to classify information that&#8217;s really important, they end up classifying all kinds of nonsense. &#8230; Even like telling a friend, &#8216;Let&#8217;s go have coffee.&#8217; They&#8217;ll end up classifying that email as top-secret.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Mike Hayden, former director of the CIA received a classified message saying that &#8220;Merry Christmas.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Government kept track for many years of the amount of peanut butter that the Army purchased. They also classified the description of Dagestan&#8217;s wedding rituals. They also classify newspaper article.<\/p>\n<p>They are particularly eager to categorize dumb things they do, such as the Army&#8217;s reported experiments testing whether &#8220;psychics&#8221; Could kill people with their eyes.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A lot of what the government keeps secret, they keep secret simply because it&#8217;s embarrassing,&#8221; Connelly.<\/p>\n<div class=\"row mb-3\">\n<div class=\"col\">\n<h4 class=\"pc\">Recommended<\/h4>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>Sometimes, the government will try to reduce overclassification.<\/p>\n<p>The excess was pledged by Presidents Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Bill Clinton.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Not in one case did they actually reduce the rate at which our government was creating secrets,&#8221; Connelly. &#8220;In fact, the amount of secrecy only increased.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>This is not surprising to me. Government is more about status and butt-covering than efficiency.<\/p>\n<p>Connelly, &#8220;I would imagine bureaucrats think, &#8216;Ooh, if I label this classified, I&#8217;m more important.'&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In Washington,&#8221; He answers. &#8220;many officials won&#8217;t even look at something unless it&#8217;s classified.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There is no disadvantage to wasting your time classifying things.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;In all my years of research,&#8221; Connelly says, &#8220;I&#8217;ve never found a single instance of anybody being fired for overclassifying something.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>There is so much that is not important but &#8220;classified&#8221; It&#8217;s not surprising that paper ends up in the homes of officials.<\/p>\n<p>After Trump was caught along with Biden, classified documents were found at Mike Pence&#8217;s home. Hillary Clinton was convicted of sending classified information to her email address in 2014. David Petraeus, an ex-CIA Director, sent classified papers to his mistress as part of a book she was working on.<\/p>\n<p>Connelly is offended that these people treat government documents like their private property. Biden&#8217;s documents could be found in a folder labelled &#8220;Biden&#8221;. &#8220;personal.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I&#8217;d like to know who thought that this was his personal property?&#8221; Connelly: &#8220;These are <em>our<\/em> property. These records are\u00a0<em>our\u00a0<\/em>history.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>People who take records home to their homes go to prison. A Navy veteran who kept top-secret documents at home was sentenced to three years imprisonment. A former contractor of the CIA was sentenced for keeping classified documents in his house.<\/p>\n<p>That won&#8217;t happen to Trump or Biden, I bet.<\/p>\n<p>America&#8217;s first &#8220;top-secret&#8221; D-Day was the landing. Because Hitler did not know exactly where the troops would land, D-Day was successful.<\/p>\n<p>The second was an atomic bomb.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We have to keep secrets,&#8221; Connelly. &#8220;But when we create tens of millions of new secrets every year, it&#8217;s impossible to identify and protect the things that really do have to be protected.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Donald Trump&#8217;s house contains classified documents! Democrats were horrified! Trump is guilty &#8220;mishandling of some of our nation&#8217;s most sensitive secrets&#8221; Create &#8220;a national security crisis!&#8221; Nicole Wallace and Chris Hayes of MSNBC. Next, President Joe Biden was caught. The conservatives were suddenly upset. &#8220;Thanks to Joe Biden,&#8221; Sean Hannity &#8220;America&#8217;s most sensitive secrets were &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1857859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[547],"tags":[7986,5525,4475,6323,9302],"class_list":["post-1857856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-bongino-report","tag-dirty","tag-governments","tag-john","tag-secret","tag-stossel"],"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/IMG_2758-scaled-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1857856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1857856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1857859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1857856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1857856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1857856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}