Another day, another search for classified documents that are apparently not where they are supposed to be. There have been too many of those in the last few years.

The “realer” problem that I see is not that individuals might possess something they shouldn’t have, it’s that it seems to take quite a while to notice that it’s missing from where it should be.

One period of my career I was forced into becoming the document management person for my team. I say forced because nobody (including me) volunteered for the role. I wouldn’t say it under oath, but I think my boss believed that women should take on nuisance work over men. But anyway….

It was a huge amount of work, on top of an already pretty hefty workload that I took care of myself. I survived it in spite of myself. I also came out of it with a tremendous love of a good checklist.

None of the documents we dealt with were classified, and we had one huge advantage that the only official version of any document was the one checked into an online portal. If my team members created documents that met all the requirements, checked them into the portal, and knew where to find them I didn’t care how often they might print one out.

The issue that comes to mind with the searches over the last few years is “why did it take so long for anyone to know something was missing?” That assumes that it took a long time to discover, which may be incorrect. I have a hard time believing that it’s true in zero cases, though.

I also believe – and this came up in a number of discussions I saw – that the label “classified” in any flavor is very easy to attach to something but often unnecessary. Every tag makes it that much harder to keep track of what you have to keep track of.

Not everyone is a fan of checklists, but I hope over time celebrating the people who are along with less reliance on printers and more on online storage makes it necessary to execute search warrants much less often.