Since when was that info secret?

U.S. government agencies are battling over what information from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails should be considered classified. It's a recurring issue because you can take unclassified bits of information and create a chunk of knowledge that someone else can then consider classified.[Source]

It's an issue I deal with even at my level in the Army with the monthly Unit Status Report. Every month, I report the unit's readiness levels as a sign of how ready we are to deploy. Not that this makes a whole lot of sense, since we're ALREADY in Korea, but it still has to be done (it IS the Army, after all).

The question is: when does information require a higher classification? In our unclassified networks, we might talk about fielding our "new" M4A1 rifles (not really new, but they're new to us). But if you create a report that wraps up the numbers and allocations along with the battalion's personnel readiness status, that's Secret.

What about in between? I've been in units where battalion information is Secret, but the company level information is unclassified. In others, even the company level report is Secret. Was there any conscious decision one way or the other, or was it simply organizational inertia?

Declaring it unclassified at the company level kept things expedient -- companies could do their individual reports before compiling them all on the one classified computer the battalion had. It prevented us lieutenants from wasting endless hours waiting around for someone else to finish their report.

But this is the Army. Anytime you do something different, you leave yourself open to criticism, especially if someone else decides what you're doing -- in the interest of expediency and time efficiency -- creates a security risk.

That's probably what's going on with Clinton's emails. It's one thing for a colonel to make a classification decision for regular reports. It's quite another when you're a Cabinet Secretary dealing with the dynamic issues of global diplomacy on a real-time basis. And nobody likes being second-guessed by a bunch of back room analysts with no leadership responsibilities for anything. (see 1992's "You can't handle the truth!" scene from "A Few Good Men.")

Adam B. Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, put it this way: “While the secretary of state has a duty to protect classified information, as all of us do in a position of trust, here she did not have the benefit of six-plus months of interagency classification reviews....The same information said by people in two different positions may receive two opposite classification determinations.” [Source]