Thread by @EileenChollet

Lots of people are in a tizzy about @DOGE personnel accessing sensitive and classified information. Let’s clear a few things up. 🧵

The ideas of classifying information and granting security clearances derives from Executive Orders, starting back in the 1950’s. The EO currently in force is EO 13526, created by then-President Obama through minor tweaks to previous EOs.

(EO 13526 is horribly outdated and wholly unfit for purpose in a world where most information is not contained in documents. It needs a clean sheet rewrite. Still…)

The fact that the classification system is derived solely from the authority of POTUS means now-President Trump can do whatever he pleases, no matter how dangerous or unwise it may be. Congress could stop him by passing legislation but probably won’t.

(Honestly, it would be awesome if Congress did. A return to legislating would be awesome).

@DOGE is a rename of the US Digital Service, also an Obama creation. It’s in the Executive Office of the President (EOP), which means it has a lot of power and few disclosure requirements. People who don’t like that should speak to former President Obama (or Congress).

The claims that Musk’s people (whoever they may be) don’t have proper clearances to see all of this information are almost certainly incorrect. To start with, SpaceX and Starlink have a giant pile of intelligence and military contracts that require cleared IT folks.

Even if these people didn't have clearances to start with, Trump signed a little-noticed EO on January 20 granting high-level clearances to a list of people in EOP. Exhibit A of why the media needs to stop playing little kid soccer with the latest hotness. whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…

Some people in the secrets biz are going to point out that they also need need-to-know and read-ins. IT types are routinely granted wide need-to-know because someone needs to fix the secret squirrel services when they break and fixing them often means seeing squirrely stuff.

Read-ins are a paperwork drill run by an administrative priesthood whose power depends on being empowered by presidential authority to be gatekeepers. The actual read-in process is often as simple as signing a piece of paper.

But what presidential authority giveth, presidential authority can taketh away. The people who are trying to block DOGE's access and then getting trampled need to bone up on bureaucratic warfare. Going all charge-of-the-light-brigade is not a winning move here (or ever).

Now the even-smarter people are pointing out that access to controlled unclassified information (CUI) is also in play. CUI gets its dissemination controls from Congressional authority rather than presidential. It's things from statutes like the Privacy Act of 1974.

Unfortunately, Congress let then-President Obama steal their thunder with EO 13556. Fighting out that constitutional crisis in the courts will be a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce level nightmare. obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-offi…

"Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world."

Decades worth of Congresses and presidents could have cleared up this radioactively obvious failure mode in the national security information system. They didn't because it would have meant being massively uncool like me. And so it goes, and so will you soon I suppose.