Placing this here, for the afternoon crowd --
<yawn> Oh well.
In the meantime, fascinating piece of scholarly work published by the University of Penn. Law Review that speaks to the (quite unbelievably) over aggressive reclassification that has been going on for quite some time now...
http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9475&context=penn_law_review
"Now you see it. Now you don’t.
This is not a magician’s incantation. It is a description of retroactive classification, a little-known provision of U.S. national security law that allows the government to declassify a document, release it to the public, and then declare it classified later on.
Retroactive classification means the government could hand you a document today and prosecute you tomorrow for not giving it back.
Retroactive classification can even reach documents that are available in public libraries, on the Internet, or elsewhere in the public domain.
The executive branch has used retroactive classification to startling effect. The Department of Justice, for example, declassified and released a report on National Security Agency (NSA) wiretapping only to declare, years later, that the report was once again classified.
The journalist who had received the report was threatened with prosecution if he did not return it. Retroactive classification has also targeted government documents revealing corruption in Iraq, violence in Afghanistan, and mismanagement of the national missile defense program. In each of these cases, the government released a document in an unclassified form through official channels—not through a leak—and then turned around to classify it.
This practice would be troubling enough if it actually removed the document from the public domain. But in the Internet Age, once a document is released to the public, it is often impossible for the government to retrieve it.
While retroactive classification does not remove the document from the public domain, where our enemies can access it, retroactive classification does remove the document from the public discourse, prohibiting members of Congress, government auditors, and law-abiding members of the public from openly discussing it."
Retroactively Classified Documents, the First Amendment, and the Power to Make Secrets Out of the Public Record