Classified Information · 6:05pm Jun 30th, 2014
Rather than inventing jokes on my own, I'll just post one of the top results for the phrase "That's classified."
You probably know that the military and government of your country withhold information but you don't know much about the system. That's because in the US at least, the classification system is crazy complicated. However, the information itself is usually pretty clear-cut. When your soldier-in-Equestria meets Celestia and she starts asking questions, he should very well know what he can and can't talk about even if he doesn't know who made the rules.
First, let's cover some terms.
Security clearance: This means you have had a background investigation and you are eligible to handle classified.
Need to know: Exactly how it sounds. You might have a clearance, but before you can actually see classified, you have to have a need to know.
Read in: If you have need to know, then you will be formally granted access by reading in. This is when you sign a non-disclosure agreement. The NDA is a document where you give written consent to be prosecuted if you leak classified. This is the legal basis for prosecuting people like Manning and Snowden – they broke the contract.
Clearance level: Your clearance is for a certain level of information. "Secret" clearances are most common, with maybe four million US persons holding them. There are about one million "Top Secret" clearance holders. As you might imagine, exact numbers are hard to come by. The background investigations are more in-depth for higher clearances.
Special Access Program (SAP): Inside a clearance level, there are special programs. Even if you have the clearance, you have to be individually read into the programs. Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) is the most common for people to hold. SCI includes four programs: Special Intelligence (SI) covers communications, Gamma (G) is a subdivision of SI, Talent Keyhole (TK) covers satellites, and HUMINT Control System (HCS).
Caveat: A caveat restricts the releasability of information. Sometimes we have to share classified with other countries. A caveat tells us who we can release that specific document to.
So with that covered, let’s dive into a little bit more detail. I told you this was going to be complicated.
This part, however, is so simple that you shouldn’t need a book for it: don’t be a suspicious terrorist.
There are four major levels: Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, and Unclassified. For easy labeling, they make stickers with bright colors so you can easily identify them. SCI, being so common, has its own sticker.
How do you know what something should be classified? There are very few solid rules. The release of Top Secret could cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security. Secret would just be "serious damage," whatever that means. Interestingly, a lot of information may be only classified Secret, but the means by which it was obtained are Top Secret.
Once you’ve established the overall clearance level, then you go into caveats. A very common caveat is FVEY. That stands for Five Eyes, a nickname for Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and United States. We’re buddies, so we share a lot of stuff. A document made by the USA and releasable to the other guys would be marked TOP SECRET//REL TO USA, FVEY. We use FVEY because it’s easier than saying TOP SECRET//REL TO USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL.
On the other hand, if we don’t want to release something, it’s marked no foreigners: SECRET//NOFORN
If a document was made with the help of foreign government information from another country, we include that in the classification. For example if Great Britain gave us some stuff to pass to the rest of NATO: CONFIDENTIAL//FGI GBR//REL TO USA, NATO
There are a lot of other, more obscure markings like proprietary information (PROPIN), sometimes used by the companies that build high tech stuff for the military.
Even Unclassified information can have caveats. Just because something is not classified doesn’t mean we’re okay with others seeing it. So we mark it for official use only: UNCLASSIFIED//FOUO
Classified information is kept for 25 years and then automatically declassified or downgraded. Certain programs do get exceptions. HUMINT, for example, is declassified after 50 years. You can obtain declassified stuff through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Here is a link to a formerly classified document. You can see its declassification information on the lower right of the first page. Take a look down through the document. Notice how individual paragraphs are classified. Some say U or perhaps S//NF. This is called portion marking, so you can tell exactly what portion of a document is what classification. The overall document classification will be determined by the highest classification inside it.
Handling:
Of course, lugging around paper documents everywhere is not very convenient. That’s were classified networks come in. The two big ones are the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network (SIPRNet – for Secret) and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS – for Top Secret). The Google of the secure networks is called Intelink. The Twitter is called E-chirp. There’s also Intellipedia and blogging. Yes, the government has classified social media sites.
Like this, but srs bsns.
Destruction:
If you don't want people to get their hands on things, the easiest thing to do is destroy it. For computers, that means degaussing and/or smashing the hard drives. When in doubt, kinetic kill.
The NSA publishes standards for paper shredders. For shredding classified, the resulting pieces have to be smaller than four square milimeters. I looked at getting one of these for my home just so I could be cool, but they cost thousands of dollars.
For holding papers until it's time to destroy, there are burn bags.
Burn bags. Most of them are striped like this, for some reason. Personally, I think a better way than burning is to use a shredder so large that you can just toss the whole bag in.
So the next time the ponies want to know something classified, I reccomend just quoting Weird Al or something because it's not like they're going to know the difference.
Pretty interesting blog post if you ignore the slash picture.
I find it hilarious that one of the links you have is to NSA, the evil overly secret organization that doesn't talk to anyone, that happens to have a website and an museum that is open to the public (I think, still it was a nice museum).
In some of the RPing I've done I tried to work the idea of classified letters into it using my own system, yeah it worked but I can't easily remember it.
Of course, all this becomes irrelevant once Twilight perfects that Divulge Classified Information spell.
just out of curiosity, what do you do, is it a military orientated job, or are you just a fan of military stuff?
and that first image 0_o
I love being a former Navy Nuke on FIMfiction because I get to share complementary info on your blogs.
When I was going through the school, and bootcamp, and all that, the agreement to not share information was in our contracts. But it's the same sort of fine print in all contracts. I didn't sign an NDA until I was separating, and it explicitly points out what you can and cannot talk about.
First thing I should clarify is that NOFORN is by itself. There are documents out there that will only say NOFORN at the top and bottom. If there are other designations, such as CONFIDENTIAL, or SECRET, they tend to be by themselves. As an aside, in the Navy, NOFORN stood for No Foreign Nationals.
In the military, pretty much everything is sensitive information. Telling loved ones when you're gonna be home, or at a foreign port? Might not want to broadcast that on Facebook. It's not classified, but it's on a "need to know" basis.
From what I saw, junior enlisted never saw classified information passed the CONFIDENTIAL level. Officers can handle whatever classification they are permitted, of course. There were other weird things, too. Like, CONFIDENTIAL information had to be handled properly, with the assigned personnel. NOFORN fell under different rules, though. Not entirely sure what you could or could not do, unless the command had explicit guidelines for that.
Those stickers are exactly what we used when I was a librarian for my department. we had tons of UNCLASSIFIED and CONFIDENTIAL, and a few SECRET stickers for when we had to make up blank folders for ORSE officials. If you are handling these stickers, you have to be careful; they are easy to place onto something, but are a huuuuuge pain in the ass to remove. That's by design, of course; don't want people to steal confidential information, after all. Have to make it as hard as possible.
Burn bags! I've had to lug burn bags up a couple flights of stairs, and down stairs, and carry them to the incinerator room. They are HEAVY: paper is packed as tightly into those bags as possible, and if the bags ripped, we taped up with nuclear grade duct tape (yes, that's a thing). When I was out to sea, we'd make burn runs as often as possible, to keep the clutter down to a minimum. When in port, we'd have to take it to a place that was certified to dispose of sensitive information. That was only paper waste, though. We had a lot of electronic waste that was confidential, but we could not do anything with it because we could never get a clear answer as to how to dispose of it.
The reason the burn bags have those markings is because it lets everyone know that the bag contains sensitive information. If you don't dispose of it, it is a HUGE problem, and if heads don't roll, it's a miracle. You're only supposed to dispose of classified forms of varying levels, but usually, all sheets of paper were thrown in the burn bag. I believe the Navy only uses facilities that burn the burn bags. It's just safer to burn it, as you can't piece together ash.
The thing I hated most were the books that had a thick, hard plastic cover. They had the classified markings etched into the plastic itself. So when you wanted to destroy those, you had to completely destroy the covers as far as you could, then take a grinder or equivalent to remove the classified markings. Then you could dispose of them.
Lastly, classified forms never had "blank" pages. If there was a blank page, you would write "PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK."
Useful reference material, thanks for sharing it
2246037
I must agree, that is quite enlightening
Is that a thing that's been happening a lot lately or something?
2246493
This. I had to help retire and dispose of a lot of old computers and other equipment, and part of that was taking the hard drives out if the computers. We wiped them, and then put them in boxes and shoved them in a closet where they're still waiting for someone to find a way to dispose of them that isn't prohibitively expensive.
2246687
I know that feeling! We didn't even have the capability to wipe the hard drives. All the drives were old SCSI drives, too. We took an incredibly powerful magnet to each one about a dozen times, then boxed them all up and placed the boxes in the Commanding Officer's personal ladder well.
Some of us wanted to destroy all of it with thermite, but we weren't allowed, because ordinance or some crap.
2246493
What about sticking, say, an UNCLASSIFIED sticker over top of a TOP SECRET one?
2246722
Probably frowned upon, obviously. Whenever we had to repurpose a binder, we would have to scrape off the sticker. Takes a really long time to get it all off, but it's not a perfect process. But if the binder was full of information? There's no mislabeling it without getting in trouble.
Personally, I have *never* come across anything TOP SECRET. Never seen a piece of paper, never seen a folder, nothing that high was ever made visible to myself. I'll chalk it up to a security reason, too. After all, you wouldn't want anyone to know you have TOP SECRET information to begin with.
2246780
I mean, if I was designing those stickers, I'd want to make them different sizes, or put serrations on the edges, or something, just to be double-extra-safe.
2246785
Nope! Single standard size for everything. You know, everything looking the same and uniform. Otherwise, it'd be suspicious. You could tell if a sticker was on top of another sticker, though.
These stickers weren't just on books and papers, mind you. We would also put the stickers on computers, monitors, printers, etc. That way, we could differentiate between the classified computers and the regular computers. Not that that mattered, since they were separate networks with separate logins, but still.
I remember reading about a document that was recently unclassified. It had been classified as Top Secret information for almost 100 years. It's contents? Allied troop movements in 1914.
2246989 Yes, certain programs get exceptions.
2247116 I'm just wondering how a document about troop movements during a war that has been over for 100 years is that a threat to national security?
Another fascinating post. Hope I get a chance to say hi at Bronycon.
2247127
The military is just extremely sensitive about that stuff. Plus it could have given enemies ideas on how the US would react if they were attacked.
2247606 This.
On a related note, I'm not sure if the US has Protected stuff as well (Protected A/B/C). In Canada these work kind of like classified shit, only you don't need clearance to see them, just a need to know.
Protected A is things like service numbers, names, etc, Protected B is things like medical info, and Protected C is (as far as I know, never actually seen C) the names and med info of special operatives.
2249302 There are certain kinds of restricted data like medical and personally identifiable information (PII) - stuff like home addresses and social security numbers.
2246798
I think the idea is that, while stickers of the same level would be of the same size (different sized stickers is just begging to leak info somehow), stickers for more highly classified things would be larger than stickers for less highly classified things. That way it would be painfully obvious if someone tried to cover up a higher-security sticker with a lower-security one:
i.imgur.com/e0JGy35.png
If that was in universal use, it couldn't possibly leak more information than the current stickers do (all stickers of the same level are identical, and stickers of different levels are different...just in one extra way now). But the transition from stickers of the same size to this sort of system would potentially leak information.
2246989 can you find the link?
2256102 It was in a random magazine I picked up. I don't remember the name, sorry.
2257729 ok, no worries
Just saying....
Those stickers are hard as shit to pick off.
First off, all of your specific information is relative to USA, and I don't know about how you guys do it, but I can't even say the names of the networks I work on...
Also, destruction of computer technology is a lot harder than that. Especially in a combat situation, where the standing orders are generally to 'grab all the hardrives, and evac, because that's easier and faster than destroying them'.
But if you do need a quick fix, degaussing is only the first step. Actual destruction of the disks (with bullets or sledge hammers), followed by burning is the usual route, but depending on security level of the HDD, explosives can be involved. There needs to be nothing the enemy can recover, due to constantly updating technologies in HDD recovery.
That's why Canada uses floppy disks and 8-track. No one will ever be able to decode those.........
3563275 I did say when in doubt, kinetic kill.
3563469 Yah, but like... Sometimes kinetic killing isn't enough.
3564503
If kinetic kill isn't, then you are not applying sufficient velocity.
4045314 ... that's not how that works at all... You can recover data off of a shattered CD/DVD, just like you can recover data from a broken hard drive. It'll be incomplete information, but still information.
4045519
If what you have left is recognizable as material of the object you are trying to destroy, you did not apply Sufficient Velocity.
Here, let me show you how Sufficient Velocity works:
Sufficient Velocity
If it didn't do the job, it wasn't sufficient.
4045550 Those last two don't count, and the rail gun might not do the job, simply because of the physics involved in CDs/DVDs... Also, most people don't have a railgun for disposal of classified information.
4046202
Then you utterly FAIL at Sufficient Velocity.
I cannot help you.
4045519 True.
4045519 Unless you melt the pieces, or grind it up to a powder.
4112131 I think I said that, yah. Basically you need to delete the disk from existence.
4112358 Basically.