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Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

I adore governments' classification system which can state things are classified as 'unclassified', and by extension to hijack the meaning of 'classified' to mean 'top secret'.

On a topic relevant note, from the original twitter feed [0] which announced/released this (as part of FOIA) a helpful person also mentioned a lightweight download of the ?same document[1] (18MB vs 118MB).

[0] https://twitter.com/chris_swenson/status/1225836060938125313...

[1] https://deeb.io/wrdprs/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/comp3321_r...

Also, I notice in the top left corner there's a handy little Doc ID: 6689691. It'd be interesting if if it were possible to FOIA all those Doc ID's.

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Top Secret is only one of several levels of classification.

You really need to mark things as unclassified in the government because other people need to be able to answer basic questions like:

- what computer am I allowed to view/edit/save/transmit this on?

- can I talk to my coworkers about this, and if so, which ones?

- what do I do with printed copies of this document?

Answering these questions wrong can land you in serious trouble, including jail time. So even as a courtesy to your peers, you want to mark them (U).

That's apparent to the guy you're responding to. He's pointing out that the so-called "unclassified" is actually the class "non-secret". A truly "unclassified" object would not have gone through the process of classification. It would not have a class.

Of course in English this is fairly common. The object of price zero is said to have no price. Yet clearly it has a price, it is just zero.

I have to say that's an amusing observation and sort of reveals the type errors that occur when we model real world things in type systems.

The United Kingdom's previous system for marking school exams (GCSE) had a marking scheme from "A*/A" to "F", and then "U". Where "U" was Ungraded. Clearly it was graded, but as a "U".

What are they using now? I went through the system not that long ago when it was still A* to U.

1-9, https://qualifications.pearson.com/en/qualifications/edexcel...

Did they have E?

True, but there are documents that have information that is at multiple levels of sensitivity and/or classification. When you work with such information, having such granularity of classification is a good thing (no matter how awkward it looks).

Don't forget U//FOUO.

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