Re: Just because it is made public doesn't mean it's declassified

At 08:22 AM 08/02/2001 -0700, John Gilmore wrote:

Just because it is public DOES mean it's declassified. There are Supreme Court cases on this. If the government can recover all the copies, then it can REclassify it. But if it can't, then the document is not classified.

It's not that straightforward, because Postol has a security clearance, so he's under more restrictions than somebody who doesn't. If he obtained the information entirely from already-public sources, as opposed to obtaining documents with classification markings that don't also have declassification markings on them, he should be safe from prosecution, but that doesn't mean they can't pop his security clearance for it.