This Supreme Court case might be of interest:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Reynolds

Any organization can classify its information. Mundane corporate security policies have classification levels and different security controls required at each level. The government doesn't need explicit Constitutional justification for that any more than it needs Constitutional justification to buy toner cartridges or allocate vacation days.

Congress gives the federal government's classifications legal teeth with criminal statutes, i.e. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/798.

Its a combination of common law and executive privilege.

Upvote for trying, but executive privilege isn't quite it, IMO. All that does is protect the papers and communications of government officials in a way that makes them less accessible to the courts.

State secrets privilege[0] is closer, but not quite it. All that does is allow the executive to say in court "sorry, that's classified, state secrets privilege," and have certain evidence excluded. It doesn't really get to the root of what allowed the government to classify the information in the first place.

My suspicion is that it derives somehow from the president's role as commander-in-chief, but I'm not very familiar with the legal scholarship behind it.

The federal government has the power to classify information because it owns it. The primary purpose of a state is to preserve itself. The ability to control access to secrets is critical to this. It's a bit like asking "What gives the government the right to execute the laws?" Because that's what it's meant to do.

That’s not the primary purpose of government in the United States. And that’s not how government derives the right to execute laws in the United States.

We govern ourselves. The government is given the right to execute laws by the people who vote. The Bill of Rights clarified that any other rights are reserved by the people.

Additionally, most federal information is public domain and owned by the people. That’s why Freedom of Information Act requests are effective.

Freedom isn’t free and things might not always be this way if we don’t protect our freedoms.

> That’s not the primary purpose of government in the United States. And that’s not how government derives the right to execute laws in the United States.

> We govern ourselves. The government is given the right to execute laws by the people who vote. The Bill of Rights clarified that any other rights are reserved by the people.

I agree with you in principle but in practice it seems the US has drifted far from its origins.

The US government has murdered at least one her own citizens without due process. The Constitution has been contorted around trade such that nearly everything can fall under federal purview (currently being tested in the states with marijuana, remember the CA raids?).

The government for all intents and purposes, seems to be putting self-preservation and perpetuation above all else, and has been for quite some time. I suspect _that_ was what the parent poster was getting at.

The United States government classification system is established under Executive Order 13526, the latest in a long series of executive orders on the topic. Issued by President Barack Obama in 2009, Executive Order 13526 replaced earlier executive orders on the topic and modified the regulations codified to 32 C.F.R. 2001. It lays out the system of classification, declassification, and handling of national security information generated by the U.S. government and its employees and contractors, as well as information received from other governments.

Right, but what's the constitutional basis for those laws, regulations, and executive orders?

The preamble of the EO only says: by the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America