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Executive Order 12958, issued by Bill Clinton in 1995, gave just 20 officials, including the President, authority to classify documents as top secret. Sounds good, huh? Yeah, but it allowed those 20 to delegate their authority to 1,336 others. As it turned out, that derivative authority was eventually handed to some 2 million government officials and a million industrial contractors (per a 1997 bipartisan congressional report).
Yeah, um, do the math. To paraphrase The Incredibles ... when everything is secret, nothing is.
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