This is John Bachelor, a conversation in these last hours with my colleague Henry Sikolsky,

the executive director of the Non-Proliferation Education Center, looked at the origins of

the overclassification endless classifications system practiced by the U.S. government.

Where did it come from?

Henry points to nuclear war as a starting point and the powers of the presidency.

The longer case is available on the podcast.

Here's Henry with the origins.

In the second, and I think the nuclear energy, that's sort of the connection between my operation and this issue,

substantively, put a rather large amount of icing, if you will, on top of this bureaucratic cake.

Because it seemed now that wars would go very quickly and be extremely disruptive,

and therefore the powers of the presidency had to be amped up even further

and is ability to control information, particularly with regard to things related to nuclear war,

became very, very pronounced. We are still in the shadow of that set of concerns

in the way we operate our government and the way we protect information.

And so the war on terror added another layer, you could argue, and I think it in many respects,

it didn't help. But where we are now is with a rather elaborate and I think less than agile

system that doesn't just classify what needs to be classified. This is not an argument against

keeping secrets. But it goes overboard. And then going overboard, it used to be, I guess,

initially somewhat tolerable. I mean, I worked with the panagotten to be honest, part of the reasons

for this project were some of the personal encounters I had with some of the less than brilliant

application of the system. I'm John Bachelor.