ON GOVERNMENT DOCUMENT CLASSIFICATION

There is incessant discussion of a Secretary of State e-mails being sent from a private server.  Here is the State Department's definition of Confidential Security  ( grades are Top Secret, Secret, and Confidential from highest to lowest)  I will concentrate on Confidential that I believe is the problem.:
 "Confidential" shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security that the original classification authority is able to identify or describe.*

Please note the words "unauthorized disclosure."  This is a big difference, for example, between the Department of State discussion and, say, the Gen. Patraeus** problem in which he intentionally gave classified information to his biographer/girlfriend who didn't have security clearance (plus he also lied about it.).  There is no claim that the Secretary of State intentionally disclosed any classification information to unauthorized personnel. The claim is that someone might hack the Secretary's private server and read the e-mails (Actually this has happened to the Dept. of State official computer system.).  In fact the private system was shut down at one point because the company that maintained the server thought it might be being attacked.  Because there was no "unauthorized disclosure" there is no indictable violation, it seems to me it would be accidental disclosure.  Thus I agree with the CIA that there was no indictable offense, but to say it was careless to have the private server seems justified.

Personally, I think the charge should be "what damage was done?"  So in the case of Gen. Patraeus, so far as I know, no damage was done in his release of classified information.  I think the nation has denied itself the contribution of a brilliant person (Gen. Patraeus).  Even in the case of the Secretary of State, there is no claim of  actual damage.

In my own job with the Department of Interior and NASA, I received many classified documents. These would arrive with the cover page red candy striped with a big classification designation on the cover such as CONFIDENTIAL in large letters.  You had to sign for it and sign again when you returned it.  In practice, the Federal bureaucrats are classification happy and do too much classification and also classify things above their importance.  It was not unusual to receive a document with a confidential classification that involved matter in the public domain.  I recall one meeting classified as Secret that I was glad was highly classified because everything said in the meeting was wrong (I was even forced to give a wrong answer by my boss.).

At one time I even had a clearance above Top Secret (Yes there are such classifications and even the name of the classification is classified.).  The only meeting I had with that classification seemed to include all information in the public domain, as nearly as I could tell.  That said, I am sure there are meetings and document deserving of high classification.  For one example, I would say that the attack on Osama bin Laden was one deserving of the highest classification.  Drone attacks might be another.

An additional discussion of security clearance is given in the reference.***

* https://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dos-class.pdf
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Petraeus*** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information