“Sure, there are some secrets that really need to be kept. And we’re relatively careful with that stuff. But when it comes to classified material, following the letter of the law would be a huge pain in the ass. And it would make government even less efficient than it is. Don’t get me wrong, the harsh laws have their uses. They allow us to punish uppity people who try to tell the citizenry the elite’s secrets. We put Chelsea Manning in a place where she gets reamed for having expired toothpaste!

“But they’re not meant for people like me—powerful people who’ve paid their dues to rise in the ruling class. Like everyone else in that cohort, I’ve earned the right to leak when I deem it prudent; to use my discretion to take whatever work I want home with me; to keep classified documents in my personal files; I mean, hell, my Teflon husband had a former crony who smuggled classified papers from a secure room.

“And what harm ever comes of it?
“Hell, I can’t prove that Wikileaks or the Snowden leaks did America more harm than good. What were the concrete harms anyway? And, to the people who say I should’ve done all my emailing through the State Department system, what a joke! As if that’s secure. LOL. We’re better off assuming that the Chinese and the Russians can see most everything we do, save the most closely guarded secrets, and even they aren’t completely safe. Anything else is just a false sense of security.