Nightly news broadcasts have exposed how both Presidents of the United States, Trump…and Biden… and even VP Pence… made significant mistakes about national security. They all failed to follow basic security protocols. Of course, as in most Trump comparisons, the scale of a Trump failure is always dialed up to 11. A massive number of documents, secret documents mixed in with magazines and office junk, missing folders (that track “Top Secret” materials), keeping the documents in an “ultra-secure location”… a public golf club. And, of course, ignoring his lawyer’s instructions to return the documents and then lying to the judge that he had returned everything.

When “Top Secret” was first coined, no one could even imagine that the President of the United States would completely disregard national security, because it was inconvenient. And yet here we are.

Since WWII and the Cold War, the very idea of security has been greatly degraded. In WWI, security was pretty straightforward. We were at war with the Nazis. Giving them certain information could cost soldiers their lives. Top Secret information was rare and infrequently seen by the average American. At the end of WWII, the Cold War arose. Nazis became Communists, and we threw in the possibility of nuclear war. The few who lived in the world of TopSecret, largely the military and a few high-level bureaucrats remained highly motivated to make National Security work.

Today, even small children are exposed to the language of security. Does every 9-year old have a password to login to school? Of course they do! This went into hyperdrive when COVID made grandparents use Zoom to talk to their kid. And we all have passwords for online shopping, banking, and media accounts. We don’t understand why we need security, but we’ve all been frustrated when we forget a password and need to get it reset. All of this exposure to the language of security degrades our understanding of REAL TopSecret data. The kind of information that gets people killed.

Of course, our TopSecret gurus have made our security problems much worse. Government security has three levels. Confidential is the lowest, with Secret and then TopSecret.being more secure. So far, no problem. TopSecret the level the President has, has been granted to 1.4 million people. If we include all 3 security levels, we talking about 4 million people. 4 Million! How exactly is something secure if 4 million people have access? What exactly are these 4 million people doing? Imagine the Billions of documents that have been classified. Imagine how many TRILLIONS of bits of data we’re warehousing… in secure facilities across the world! Imagine that the amount of data is so vast that the government outsources huge amounts of this work (and the security) to private companies around the world.

If you happen to be one of the outsourced workers that help to secure or analyze this data, you may well be asking these same questions. One such person was Edward Snowden. This outsourced data analyst noticed that multiple governments were spying on their own citizens. At that time, Domestic Surveillance in the US was illegal. Snowden stated that his job was classic spying, which (as a private citizen) made his job illegal, and made is firm (and the National Security Agency they contracted with) criminals. The government put in place whistleblower rules that specifically encouraged workers to report illegal activities, and provided legal protection for whistleblowing. The government’s reaction was to immediately demand his arrest as a spy and a criminal.

Was Snowden a hero exposing government overreach, or a criminal seeking personal glory? Or both? Does it even matter? What does matter is that so many people have a security clearance, access to dangerous information, and little personal experience to understand why the material should be secure.

Worse still, the gerontocracy that manages our National Security isn’t technologically competent enough to reset their own passwords. Trump, Biden, Gary Peters (Chairman of Homeland Security), or Alejandro Mayorkas (Secretary of Homeland Security). The “kids” on this list are in their mid-60s, and none have much technological or security expertise. None of them understand the security risks within their highly outsourced security empires.

Meanwhile, organizations like WikiLeaks, ethical hackers, whistleblower sites, tech-savvy gamers on discord servers, the news media, and a ton of other organizations with an interest in government transparency. Our nation’s security leaders don’t understand why thousands of workers within our security systems are increasingly following their own ethical standards rather than their security obligations.

America is collecting too many secrets, with too many senior officials unable to understand how our security systems work, or how we select the right guards for our secrets. If you could speak to our nation’s leaders, what would YOU tell them? Do we need a smaller National Security system? Or a tighter security focus that would get younger, more tech-savvy Americans aligned with the US security Agenda? Let us know!

When workers exposed evidence of corruption and abuse, it was the whistleblower rather than the criminal that was likely to be jailed or fined. Because whistleblowers have the ability to expose abuses of power that we learned about

practices, and that corporations and government offices routinely covered up scandals and