> Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.

Not just government employees. I was at a defense contractor at the time, and we were also instructed to not read any of the documents online, even for people who were technically cleared to read them through proper channels.

Edit: misremembering, wasn't the Snowden leaks, it was some earlier set of leaks on WikiLeaks