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Comment by hoistbypetard | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting that they chose to redact some of the markings on the document. (e.g. you see "SECRET" and below that there's a redacted mark.)

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That generally means that while the document was declassified, parts of it weren't, and the still-classified info obviously gets redacted.

Information generally gets declassified after 25 years, but there are exceptions for when arbitrarily declassifying things could jeopardize capabilities that are still in use, burn intelligence sources who are still alive, etc.

That makes sense. I just found it interesting that the markings were considered something that could fall into that category. I thought those were usually so broad (e.g. NOFORN) that they wouldn't be.

The existence of certain programs, or the tying of certain codewords to their subjects, can sometimes itself be classified. Sometimes just the fact that a program exists under a given codeword is itself classified information.

The material is classified. Its composition is classified. Its use in the weapon is classified, and the process itself is classified. But at least we know it's called FOGBANK.

It's easy to joke about, but one of the other problems is that if Government X knows that the US has found out specific facts A, B, C, and D, they can then determine that the only person who could have provided those pieces of information is Person Z.

And now Z (and maybe their entire family) get literally taken out back and shot in the head. Now you not only lose the source of intelligence, you disincentivize anyone else to provide intelligence to you.

Or they find out that it could have only been gathered by obscure technique Q, they take specific countermeasures to mitigate against Q, and there goes millions or billions of dollars of R&D.

Like the fact that up to 50% of the State Department was actually CIA, as noted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr and only declassified this year, 63 years later, as part of the recent trove of JFK files releases.

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/2025-03-19/cia-cover...

(Even this much was the result of decades of sustained political support for disclosure since Oliver Stone’s landmark 1991 film.)

Key takeaway is that if the unaccountable minders thumping national security don’t want something released - ever - it won’t be releases.

There is an Obama EO that now encourages using ten years for less sensitive material as part of an effort to let in more sunshine. The new procedures also require the declassification date to be determined upon creation so that it isn't left to a non-SME 25 years later.

Portion markings in the IC, at least in the modern era, will include both the classification and a compartment. The compartment is specific to the collection method, i.e. SI indicates signals intelligence, TK indicates satellite data. Since those can reveal the source of the data, that reveals capabilities that the agency may not want to reveal, even if the data itself is no longer sensitive enough to classify.

> Since those can reveal the source of the data, that reveals capabilities that the agency may not want to reveal, even if the data itself is no longer sensitive enough to classify.

Always 'member Trump and his release of a high resolution photograph from a satellite [1]. It took mere hours for people to work out which exact satellite was used to create the photograph and established a lower bound on its imaging capabilities.

[1] https://qz.com/1699833/what-we-can-learn-from-the-spy-satell...

Compartments are just for SCI. IC agencies do like putting all the classification markings on cafeteria menus, but they do non-SCI as well.

Both SAPs and SCI control systems can be unacknowledged/unpublished, and foreign releasability markings can easily be classified because they show that the country in question has an intelligence relationship with the US that covers a specific topic.

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