Comment by efitz
3 years ago
A private right of action and waiver of immunity solves most of the “bad actor” problems.
The big issue is how to preserve what actually needs to be secret (in the interest of the USA, not the interests of the bureaucracy) while forcing everything else to be public.
A lot of things are secret that don’t need to be secret; that’s a side effect of mandatory data classification and normal bureaucratic incentives- you won’t get in trouble for over-classifying, and classified information is a source of bureaucratic power. So you have to introduce a really strong personal incentive to offset that or nothing will ever change.
Personally, I don’t think that information should be classified if it came from public sources. Or maybe only allow such information to be classified for a short period of time, eg one year.
The longer and/or higher the classification level, the more effort should be involved, to create disincentives to over-classification.
I'm sorry, but very little of what you're saying makes sense in practice. I suggest submitting some FOIA requests to your local government to get some context and understanding of the difficulties.