Senate Staffers Told To Pretend Top Secret Docs Are Not Widely Available On Web | Hacker News Reader

Senate Staffers Told To Pretend Top Secret Docs Are Not Widely Available On Web

forbes.com

114 pointsjalanco21 comments

This is a well-known and important aspect of keeping data classified. Just because classified information is leaked does not mean that people with clearance can treat it as unclassified. There is lots of bogus "classified" information out there, and an excellent way to limit the harm of leaked truly classified info (which is unavoidable) is to make it indistinguishable from bogus info. And the way to do this is to not confirm or deny that it is legitimate.

Yes, this means people with clearance will sometimes have to sound silly when it becomes overwhelmingly clear that the info is legitimate. But the alternative is for individuals with clearance to effectively declassify information unilaterally, which would be disastrous. Instead, information is only declassified by folks at the top.

This is just the basic idea I gathered from working near labs doing classified research. Some of the explanations for seemingly bizarre behavior concerning classified information gets even deeper into the "because he'll think that she'll think that he'll think...." rabbit hole. Someone who actually has clearance can probably speak on this much more usefully than I can.

I agree, but it doesn't make it the whole thing look any better.

I would just like to add that treating a lot of things a classified information is useful as someone seeing top secret stamped on a report has no idea if it's worth blowing cover or even just opening to read.

Basically you don't reference "leaked" material at all. That would be confirming its accuracy and lending provenance. The last thing you want to do is verify it.

Other things you don't want to do is acknowledge that you are also privy to such information. These things are actually tied together bit by bit. While it might be assumed that a senator on the armed forces committee has access, it could be unknown which of his aides does his classified work.

Some of this is the origin of the "can neither confirm nor deny" phrase. While it may be obvious to everyone that the CIA won't tell you who the spies are, they also won't tell you who isn't a spy, even when it is completely obvious.

Some of the classified stuff may be at the very edge of marginal speculation, but it adds up, like a logic puzzle or a giant game of Clue.

I don't follow the logic. Why can't you discuss the documents on the internet as 'alleged classified information'? That reveals absolutely nothing about what you are actually privy to. Not being able to talk about it at all is ridiculous.

I was going to suggest that isn't the fact this information can now be seen by the public mean it is by definition unclassified but I see there are different levels of classification.

I was under the impression "classified" meant secret and the two words were interchangeable. If I can trust Wikipedia it shows there are five classes information can Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, Restricted, Unclassified.

Now I understand that if a document is classed as Secret it's still Secret even though it's leaked to the public, the information doesn't change just because more people can view it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information#Classif...

Exactly. How is this not censorship then? They pulled the same thing with Wikileaks cables. People should be suing them over free speech infringement.

Because it doesn't affect you or any other person or organization that doesn't have legitimate access to classified information.

The key words here are "unclassified government systems". There are rules and procedures to make sure that the classified stuff stays on the classified systems, and one of those, very sensibly, is that classified stuff shouldn't be on the unclassified systems.

Do Federal employees have free speech rights? My father was a mail carrier when I was growing up, and according to the union's material that they mailed to the mail carriers, Federal employees don't have free speech rights and that was how Reagan was able to fire the striking air traffic controllers. Mail carriers are not able to complain about working conditions in the post office (that is what the union mailer was complaining about, I guess since a union staffer was writing it they could complain -- it was like 25 years ago that I read this, so I could have the details wrong).

The Hatch Act[1] restricts the ability of Executive branch employees to engage in partisan politics. The Smith Act[2] prohibited executive employees from advocating the overthrow of the US Government, although I think it's been found unconstitutional.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_Act_of_1939

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Act

Note that I'm 98% sure that it's still illegal to advocate the violent overthrow of the government, so civil servants should take the Smith Act overturning with a grain of salt.

When you get a clearance, you sign certain pieces of paper that contractually waive certain rights with respect to that information you are cleared to receive. You also obligate yourself contractually to a number of other responsibilities (some, depending on clearance, for the rest of your life).

It's not censorship, and they aren't going to be suing, because they have waived the right to consume this information freely.

The purpose is to prevent somebody from combining an (undisclosed) secret with a leaked secret in order to deduce or infer a third secret.

Actually seems quite reasonable, wouldn't want the employees getting a feeling that the security rules don't apply anymore. They would be wise do declassify the leaked documents, what's done is done and trying to pretend otherwise will only server to delegitimatize the rules.

This stance made more sense with the WikiLeaks cables, because declassifying would confirm that they were real, and there was a lot of content discussing foreign affairs. But with this leak, they haven't confirmed that the documents are genuine, but they have confirmed that the subject matter is which is really "good enough."

Here's the deal. Most classified information is segmented. Say I want to build a encrypting radio. I may have one team build the encrypting part, but they don't know it is for a radio. I have a second team build a radio, but they don't know an encrypting part is going in it (there is just a spec for a 'device' to be plugged in). If I am in the radio building team, and the encrypting info is leaked, and I read it, suddenly I know that an encrypting radio is being built, something that the average person reading the leaked info wouldn't know.

You don't access classified material that you are not cleared for. Period.

This is all like the plot of a bad cold war movie.

Kafka would be proud!

That's pretty much what my company told me. They went so far as to block any access to sites that even mentioned NSA or terms associated with whistle blowing.

It's more like an attempt to not let other classified information inadvertently leak because people get careless when they know the information is out in the open.