I worked for 18 years at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. I worked on a contract that New Mexico State University had with the Department of Defense. The contract was mostly computer operations covering business matters, data reports of NASA, Navy and Army launches of rockets and missiles, and military maneuvers. I held a SECRET clearance all that time. After you are investigated by (In my case, DISCO) you receive your clearance and you are briefed and you sign a briefing document which states that if you mishandle any classified material (confidential, secret, top secret) in any way (leaving it visible without a cover card stating the security level, discarding printing of classified material incorrectly (We had classified trash!!!), photographing or showing it to someone uncleared, even by accident, the penalty is $10,000 fine AND10 years in prison for each violation. One page is equal to one violation. If this material they photographed was indeed classified, they broke the law photographing it, mishandling it. On another note, they found HRC to have not committed a crime because she didn't intend to. In the briefing, all security briefings state that the mishandling of classified material, even inadvertently, is punishable by the same penalties. There is a two-tiered legal system, make no mistake.
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Uh-oh, am I in trouble for saying disco? haha Are you familiar with White Sands Missile Range? They tested the first nuclear bomb there.
Oh dear...
I should have added, the fact that they took photographs of those "staged" documents, means that they probably aren't classified anymore, as we know Trump as President could declassify whatever he desired, and had done.
Yes, the classified trash container was marked. Periodically it would be taken for observed burning.
We put EVERYTHING from our desks into the safe every night, to avoid leaving classified out by mistake. The initials and date and time of closing each safe were documented on the outside of the safe.
The safes were double-checked after hours. As a jr officer I went the rounds in the basement of the Pentagon making sure all the safes in our agency were locked and initialed.
Exactly! One person signs the safe log and a second person signs verifying. I was going to type all that procedure but I didn't want to go on too long.
We even had removable system drives and removable data drives. Every night into the safe. Every morning out.
For our classified waste we had pulverizer and we had to have two people with clearance to take it and observe. Also even in the 90s we had magnetic tapes. Spent two days with 3 other colleagues using a contraption that you load the tape on and pull a level down and a blade cuts through the layers of tape on the spool and you keep chopping until the tap falls into the trash bag. We were locked in the room and let out at lunch, locked back in after lunch and let out at quitting time! LOL When I think of how carefully I guarded our classified material and a certain HRC just flagrantly shared classified material on her own server, talk about disillusioned!