--:-- Shamita Basu: Hey there, it's Shamita here. As you might know, along with hosting Apple News Today, I'm also the host of our weekly interview podcast, Apple News in Conversation. The show touches on all kinds of topics in interviews with journalists, experts and deep thinkers.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Our latest episode is about the government's culture of secrecy and what it costs us. We've been hearing a lot about classified documents lately, turning up in all the wrong places.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Today, the National Archives confirmed that it found classified information among the documents Donald Trump removed from the White House and brought to Mar-a-Lago. A small number of classified documents had been found in the garage of President Biden's Wilmington residence and in a room next door.
--:-- Shamita Basu: So the material was in a locked garage? Yes, as well as my Corvette. Yet more classified documents slipped out of the White House and into the private home of a top official. These documents were uncovered at the Indiana home of former Vice President Mike Pence.
--:-- Shamita Basu: The whole point of classification is to protect national secrets. Things like war plans, intelligence sources, and sensitive communications. And there's a whole system around how classified documents get stored, reviewed, and possibly marked for declassification years later, when they're no longer deemed sensitive.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now recently we learned that some former government officials have been holding onto files they weren't supposed to. But historian Matthew Connolly says America has a bigger problem. Way, way, way too many documents are being classified in the first place.
--:-- Matthew Connolly: Even if you're just writing to a colleague about meeting for coffee, if you think that at some point, maybe in exchanging those messages, you might eventually mention some classified program, it's just safer just to classify even that first message as secret.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In recent years, roughly three documents were being marked as classified every second. And this tendency to err on the side of classifying is creating a massive backlog. It makes it much harder decades from now when people have to go through and review it all.
--:-- Matthew Connolly: And so what that means is we're just not going to have the history of our times, not unless we can figure out some solution to this problem.
--:-- Shamita Basu: For the past decade, Matthew Connolly has been working with big data and machine learning with a team at Columbia University to better understand what information the government has been hiding from its citizens and why.
--:-- Matthew Connolly: In his new book, The Declassification Engine, he argues that having so many classified documents makes it harder for the government to protect truly sensitive information. And to get things under control, the government needs to declassify more.
--:-- Shamita Basu: My full conversation with Matthew is out now. To hear the episode, search for Apple News in conversation in the podcast app.
