What Is a Classified Document?

The first time the issue of ‘classified documents’ became something of public concern was when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested in 1950 for passing secret information about atomic bomb design at Los Alamos to the Russians, behavior for which they were convicted of espionage and electrocuted in 1953.

It turns out that Julius Rosenberg had been passing classified information to the Russians for most of the World War II years, because he was employed at the Fort Monmouth lab where research on various weapons and communication systems were conducted before and during the war.

The material from Los Alamos, however, represented what was considered a much more serious threat to American security because it was allegedly information which allowed the Russians to speed up their development of an atomic arsenal, over which the United States had held a monopoly until 1949.

The classification of documents has grown exponentially since the end of World War II, primarily because of the amount of military research conducted at universities and military contractors, work which covers such areas as “computing, communications, networks, satellites, fighter and bomber aircraft, aircraft carriers, submarines, tanks, tactical and strategic missiles, nuclear weapons, drones, advanced materials, autonomy, and other weapons and technologies.”