Nick, have you ever heard of something called an Acoustic Kitty?

No. What is it?

In 1967, the CIA spent millions of dollars trying to train domestic cats to spy on the Soviet Union.

The outcome, quote,

our final examination of trained cats for redacted use in the redacted,

convinced us that the program would not lend itself in a practical sense to our highly specialized needs.

So in other words, cats make pretty bad spies.

Yeah, it turns out cats aren't great at following directions or taking care of surveillance equipment.

And by the way, this project was a secret until 2001.

Well, because it was so embarrassing?

No, I mean, you might think so, but it was actually because the project was classified.

In the top scientific and engineering facilities across the country, security regulations are keeping the most important of projects under the tightest of rats.

But whether we're talking about cats failing spy school or nuclear codes or the plans for D-Day,

these covert programs share something in common with most things in our bureaucracy, paperwork.

Except in this case, we are talking millions of pages of classified information that the government creates and manages every year.

America's national security state is a behemoth grown out of control.

By one estimate, the government classifies three documents every second.

Also, no, there are no unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know.

This is Civics 101. I'm Hannah McCarthy.

I'm Nick Epidichet.

And today, we're talking about our government's classified information system.

...