If there’s one lesson to learn from Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, it’s that America’s classification system is broken. Both cases raise legitimate questions about the ever-expanding cloak of government secrecy. Roughly 4.2 million people in America have security clearances, but nearly a third of them, like Snowden, are not even on the government’s payroll.
Although these people are privy to some secrets that are needed to maintain the nation’s security, the fact that an Army private and an outside contractor even had access to what is considered some of the country’s most sensitive national security information is a telling indicator that the nation’s secrecy policy has already failed.
