Tom Devine—the legal director at the Government Accountability Project who helped craft the compromise language in the early 1990s—told me that his group essentially won a definition of classification that wasn’t as broad as Reagan first sought it to be. “The information has to be specifically designated ‘marked as classified’ … or needs to be for national security purposes,” Devine told me. “You’re entitled to notice” that something is classified, he added. Even under Reagan’s since-disregarded and overly broad definition, “classifiable” information ostensibly had to have something to do with national security, Devine said. “In principle there was that limitation to it,” he told me.