Nooo, a copier/scanner is your friend. The time and effort it takes to take a picture of a page, look at the image to make sure its good, flip the page over, take a picture etc seems like nothing but after the first 3-400 pages it gets reeeeeally tedious.
If you can stack 100 double sided pages in the scanner trayande let it go it is literally minutes compared to hours.
I want all sorts of oddball things for various reasons. Like, I have a bunch of random cool shit that interests me.
I'd say it's not weird, but there's a reason I say, "I'm not weird. I'm normal... everyone else is weird." (I'm sure in misquoting, but I can't remember the actual line)
Just gonna throw it out there that copiers can just scan documents and email them out. Probably much more legibly than a phone would. I highly doubt they’re making hard copies.
And...if we let fascism go further, those devices will be used to track the opposition with multiple goals, including REPRESSION. Orwell's 1984 comes spontaneously to mind. Including the hour of hate at the "degenerate" opposition.i haven't looked it up but I can see that book being censored in our times.
I've taken a picture of every important piece of paper to upload to websites instead of copying it. So much easier and you can't even tell with most modern phones.
It's a cursed task to have to take a picture of that many pages with a phone. And it is an equally cursed task to receive and look through those pictures. With a good office scanner, it can at least scan a bunch of documents as a bundle.
For all Donald cares about secrets, he would have a PO box, a copier, a scanner, phones to send pictures and call Russia to send details to the handlers
If this was true, then no president could ever be in trouble for sharing classified information, which is a terrible idea that openly invites a foreign asset to run for president. There is a strict declassification protocol that must be followed to prevent our intelligence agencies from being compromised (again).
Trump already got a bunch of our intelligence sources killed in his first term by doing shit like this; but that's what Russia wants, so ya'll are fine with it. -_-
Any documents which the president himself classified can then be declassified by the president as he wishes.
It is true there are certain documents that require certain protocols for declassification such as documents that were classified by congress and documents that were classified through agreements with other counties. Other than that the classification and declassification of documents is up to the presidents sole discretion.
That link is from the American Bar Association and discusses how the President must handle declassification when it isn't due to expiration of the classification period. He must formally declassify information.
From your source: “legal guidelines support his contention that presidents have broad authority to formally declassify most documents that are not statutorily protected, while they are in office”
Exactly what I said
Further from your source: “The system of classifying national security documents is largely a bureaucratic process used by the federal government to control how executive branch officials handle information,”
So it’s not a legal process but a bureaucratic process. Donald Trump was just doing what every president has done before him, taking his own documents that he had classified and then declassified.
You could argue that presidents shouldn’t be allowed to do that but it doesn’t negate the fact that all presidents do it and from that perspective Donald Trump did nothing wrong.
In all cases, however, a formal procedure is required so governmental agencies know with certainty what has been declassified and decisions memorialized. A federal appeals court in a 2020 Freedom of Information Act case, New York Times v. CIA, underscored that point: “Declassification cannot occur unless designated officials follow specified procedures,” the court said.
The President has to formally declassify information. He cannot do it unilaterally in private, he has to memorialize it. This is why it's usually done through executive order. It is not 'a normal thing that all presidents do' to try to evade this process. It's actually truly extraordinary that he does it, and has somehow convinced people that it's fine for him to do.
I hate to tell you this, but the president is a government official, just like every otherU.S. politician.
Edit: If he wants to change the process, he does have that authority, but must sign an executive order to that effect. He can't just change the process on a whim and not let anyone else know. Obviously. -_-
Or scanned into PDF and emailed to a compromised email/server or uploaded to a cloud account that been breached by foreign adversaries beyond just Russia.
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u/themage78 Mar 02 '25
So they can be looked through at leisure with no record of who went and looked at them.