Lori Falce: The impossible mission of classified documents

Perhaps I have been misled by a lifetime of movies and television.

I have always been under the impression that top secret documents were kind of hard to access. Maybe I didn’t think you needed to drop down from a harness like Tom Cruise in “Mission Impossible” to access a motion-sensor-secured hard drive, but I did think it was slightly harder than getting a book out of the library without a library card.

But, as Donald Trump’s classified documents have been followed by President Joe Biden’s classified documents and now Mike Pence’s classified documents, I’m becoming more concerned.

Is it possible I have classified documents? It seems like everyone else does. I feel left out.

I don’t throw much away. I have a big stack of boxes in my garage that involve court papers from cases that I covered and were settled in 2014. Who knows when I might need those again? In my mother’s attic, there are boxes that have school board agendas from meetings I attended in 1999. My email has the guest list, complete with addresses, for my wedding in 2005.

A casual glance around my office will yield an absolute blizzard of sticky notes, as well as newspapers, letters, calendars and legal pads. If you can read my handwriting, more power to you.

This is why people don’t give me classified information. My whole life is about what is — or should be — freely available to the public. Bring on the open records. Let the sun shine in.

But regardless of who is found to have classified documents — and I’m still not sure I’m off the hook — I think the bigger question needs to be who is keeping track of them and how.

At this point, I am less concerned about the documents from the current or former elected officials that have been identified than I am about the ones in the possession of people we never elected and might never know about.

I care less about special prosecutors and committees than I do about someone finding a solution to actually keeping these lock-and-key documents under lock and key.

Hey, the movies always showed a briefcase chained to someone’s wrist. Have we thought about that? Maybe we could chain the documents to a desk like the pens at the bank.

The big problem at the moment is that people seem more interested in being defensive or having a gotcha moment about who else might also have something with “super secret!” stamped in red on the cover. We need to keep our eyes on the fact that, when something happens over and over again, it’s a systemic failure.

If this was the library, there is a record of who took what and when. Miss the date to return it, and you are called upon to return it or pay the fine. I can personally vouch for the fact that Citizens Library in Washington, Pa., has gotten back multiple books from me or had me pay for the books in question. There’s a copy of “The Witch of Blackbird Pond” on my bookshelf from sixth grade that proves that.

And if the books were just disappearing out the door, there are solutions for that, too. Is Barnes & Noble really more high tech than the National Security Agency?

I won’t be surprised by finding out almost anyone has classified documents now. Apparently they are as easy to come by as CVS receipts. I have dozens of them but couldn’t tell you the last time I was at CVS.

What I want to know is what we are going to do to stop it.