Victimless espionage

Spy vs. Spy, Gangnam style. Image (with animation!) by Makatako at Deviant Art.

Yeah, that's the problem:

But the investigation takes place in an administration that has taken an especially hard line on the handling of classified information.

Scott Gration, ambassador to Kenya, resigned after a 2012 inspector general’s report accused him of flouting government rules, including the requirement that he use State Department email. “He has willfully disregarded Department regulations on the use of commercial email for official government business,” the report said.

A New York firefighter and decorated combat veteran who served in the Marines in Afghanistan, Jason Brezler, is currently fighting dismissal from the Marine Corps for sending, via his personal account, an email attachment the government says was classified. His lawyer, Kevin Carroll, says he sent the message in response to an emergency request from a base in Afghanistan.

Mrs. Clinton and her aides have noted that the material the inspectors general call classified was not labeled as such in the emails. But in 2010, Thomas Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, was indicted under the Espionage Act for keeping an agency email printout at home that was not marked as classified. (Mr. Drake pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor.)

Not that Clinton should be punished in some way, but that the smaller people accused of the same kinds of things shouldn't be punished either. What for? They haven't done any harm.

Hardly anybody thinks, I hope, that Barack Obama should have been busted for drug use in his youth; rather, we're coming to understand that many or most of the people who were busted shouldn't have been. Drug laws as they are cause much more suffering than the problems they are supposed to alleviate. They fail to distinguish between dangerous and nondangerous drugs, they tend to punish victims instead of profiteers, they bring the law itself into disrepute, like all prohibitions on pleasure; and they don't solve the problem, to the extent there really is a problem at all, and I guess there is, in the use of really addictive opiates and meth. So some states have legalized marijuana, and police forces in many additional places have tried to cool down arrests for low-level marijuana offenses (primarily for black people, as they already were not enforcing them at anywhere near the same level for whites). Good! And all too slowly, some of the victims of bad law are being let out of jail. Good! But hardly good enough as long as anybody is in jail for doing what the president got away with.

The enforcement of federal secrecy law needs to be dealt with the same way, more or less. The law should be changed. Information that doesn't need to be classified shouldn't be classified. Prosecutorial discretion needs to be used, harmless offenses should be dismissed. Ask Major Brezler to write a brief account of why he did what he did and say, "Thanks." Apologize to Thomas Drake. Let Hillary Clinton explain that the rules and the way they are enforced are crazy and will be enforced differently if she's elected president, and let Obama back her up with some action now. Pardon Jeffrey Sterling!