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You know it has been mentioned before, but in our combination locked safe/filing cabinets we had a number of loose cover sheets and folders marked, Top Secret, Secret, or Confidential, in the front of the drawers so that documents could be covered with them as needed when we took them back to our desks to read them. That is normal to protect classified material. Come to think of it, most of the time when I took material out of the cabinet, it was to replace and correct errata updates. We had to line out text or replace pages and initial and date the lined out or replaced information. Then file the errata paper in the back of the book or file.

Most of the Top Secret material I used was burned the day after we used them. At one station the material was kept in the walk-in vault and we had a big Floggers coffee can we put the punch cards in and lit them up with a cigarette lighter. Another station I worked in had an industrial incinerator down the hallway we carried our burn bags to. The attendant used a crane to open the incinerator door and we tossed the bags in.

Of course for every piece of paper there was a receipt we had to initial or sign with a witness to confirm that it was properly destroyed. We always worked in pairs so we swapped out doing the action or being the witness.

In these articles it seems that the Federal Agents have no clue how classified material is handled or the journalists are being snookered.