The U.S. government has kept secrets from the very beginning. In 1774, members of the Continental Congress passed a resolution “that the doors be kept shut during the time of business” and “to keep the proceedings secret, until the majority shall direct them to be made public.” What makes US government document ‘Top Secret’.
Secrets are even baked into the Constitution. Article 1, Section 5 says that Congress “shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy.”
In the 20th century, secrecy became synonymous with “national security” and was aimed at keeping military information out of the hands of foreign enemies. Right before World War II, informal secrecy protocols were codified and the nation was introduced to the three now-famous “classification” levels: “Confidential,” “Secret” and “Top Secret.”
Today, government officials produce classified documents at a rate of 90 million a year, or three per second. A small portion of those documents and other materials are labeled “Top Secret” because, if leaked, they have the potential to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to national security.
As the United States prepared to enter World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8381, making it a crime to photograph or sketch any U.S. military installations or documents labeled “Secret,” “Confidential” or “Restricted,” which were classifications already being used by the Army and Navy.
But the first attempt to publicly define those classifications came in 1951 with President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 10290, which added a fourth category, “Top Secret,” and laid out a clear system for identifying, labeling and safeguarding highly sensitive information.
According to Truman, the classification “Top Secret” should be restricted to material that “plainly requires the highest degree of protection” and, if disclosed without authorization, “would or could cause exceptionally grave danger to the national security.”
There are currently 1.3 million Americans with “Top Secret” clearances, including outside contractors for the Department of Defense and other agencies. But there are also “Top Secret” documents that are restricted to just hundreds or even dozens of individuals. Those documents are marked with additional labels like “SI” for “Special Intelligence” or “SAP” for “Special Access Programs.”
