This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 5th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown. The hijinks of former high-level

federal office holders aside, there is a problem with over classification in the federal government and the

incentives built into the federal system of classifying information promises to make the

problem worse without action. Cato's Patrick Edington details a path forward for getting a handle on what government is hiding

and why it matters that they aren't hiding too much.

Classified documents have been in the news a lot lately. I don't know if you're following this path.

But lots of high-level government officials, the highest level government officials in the United States have mishandled classified documents and have been

I don't know if an actual finger was wagged at them for for engaging in this

activity, but it certainly seems out of proportion

to the way reality winner and others

have treated classified documents.

And so the question has been raised by you and others that there is a problem that is related to this, which is overclassification,

and the degree to which governments are able to have us fly blind in our attempts to hold our own government accountable in terms of accessing information about our own government.

So if you can, if you can, if you can delineate classification

has a purpose, in some cases it has a very legitimate purpose, a critical purpose to our national security, our safety, our

defense mechanisms that we have for the United States,

but there are others that don't make any sense and make that other system

less salient, I think, to a lot of people. Is that about right?

I think that's exactly right, and I would go even further and say that when you look at

whistleblowers like Army Captain Christopher Pyle who in 1971 revealed this

massive Army domestic surveillance program that he was

...