U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump now both face criticism (and possible legal exposure) for mishandling classified documents when they were out of political office. In Biden’s case, classified documents dating back to his tenure as vice president were found by Biden’s lawyers in a think tank office he once used, and at his private residence in Wilmington, Delaware. The FBI discovered several hundred government files marked as classified at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s home in Florida, after Trump resisted repeated efforts by the government to retrieve them. What complicates these stories is that the government tends to overclassify information, marking everything from national security secrets to publicly available data as “classified.”
Oona Hathaway argues that although the protection of sensitive government data is important, Washington devotes excessive resources to protecting mostly useless classified information while doing little to protect the private data of ordinary citizens—leaving information with much greater national security value out for the taking.
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