Hello friends and welcome. So excited to chat with you today and I think you are going

to find this conversation very interesting. Today my guest is History Professor Matthew

Connolly who has written a book about government classification and I guarantee you are going

to learn something today that you did not know before. So let's dive into the declassification

engine what history reveals about America's top secrets. I'm Sharon McBam and here's where

it gets interesting. Thank you for being here today. I'm chatting with Professor Matthew

Connolly. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Sean. Oh my gosh, you study so many topics

that I find personally very fascinating and you have a new book coming out about the topic

of classification. And first of all, let's start with the very basics. Most people have

heard of the concept of like, oh, it's classified. Classified documents, it's a secret. Like

most people know what that means, right? But can you give us like a more official definition

of what it means for something to be classified? Yeah, happy to do that. So you're right.

I mean, everyone's heard of this, like how things can be top secret and how, you know,

all of their things that even more secret than top secret. And I think a lot of us also

heard about people when they get their security clearances and their background checks and

all the rest of it. And so like we hear about these things, it's, you know, in movies and

television and lately there's a lot of it in the news. But the system itself is super complex.

And you probably seen already how it is that lots of experts have rushed out to try to explain

things to people. The way I explain things is that there's really two things here that we're

talking about. One is of how it is that, you know, when the people who are allowed by the

government to decide something is secret when they stamp something in that way, like literally

in some cases, what they're basically saying is that the only people who are allowed to see

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