Over-classification is a free speech issue. There's a moral difference between information being classified to protect the country, and information being clas

Over-classification is a free speech issue. There's a moral difference between information being classified to protect the country, and information being classified to protect inept politicians and government officials from having to face the accountability of the public. For instance, the CIA spent the equivalent of several billion dollars trying to lift an obsolete Soviet submarine from the ocean floor, against the recommendations of the US Navy which thought they could recover the relevant materials using deep sea remote control 'drones' from a spy submarine, rather than using a surface ship to lift the whole sub, which they said would fail and risked discovery. Well it did fail, and they did get discovered and the US Government was forced to explain itself to the Soviet government. But in the aftermath of this boondoggle, the US government was more candid with the Soviets than with the American public. The rational for sharing information with the Soviets but not with the American public can only be to protect the CIA/etc from public accountability. They continue to use the ambiguity created by their secrecy to lead people to believe they were more successful than they actually were. The Soviets/Russians can get ground truth about this incident by sending their own drones down there to see what was left of the submarine. The CIA's classification of the incident serves to obscure the truth from the American public, not the Russians.