[dunmalg]

I used to work in intelligence. "Secrecy creep" has long been a serious problem inside DoD. How information get classified has largely been left up to low level federal bureaucrats, people my father used to angrily refer to as "big haired women from Mississippi". Basically, they are low level federal office drones, with minimal knowledge about the actual content of classified programs, who re left to determine how they are classified. They start with the core information of a project and classify it "Top Secret". Then they take all the peripheral information of that project and classify it TS as well, just to be safe, because it might overlap with the core info, but they have no clue because they're a GS-4 clerk from Boogerville with a high school diploma. Later as more content is generated in a program, stuff peripheral to the previous peripheral data, which realistically should be classified "Confidential" at most, it too gets classified as TS because of its proximity to the previously over-classified peripheral data. Lather-Rinse-Repeat for a few decades and you have huge swathes of widely known, utterly inconsequential information classified Secret or Top Secret.

[MereInterest]

Don't answer this if it isn't legal to answer, but do you have any examples you can share? I can entirely picture the process, and completely believe that it happens, but I don't have a mental image of what the end result looks like.

[spiritplumber]

There has been a brief period in my life when I did not have the clearance to read code I was writing.

[NovemberWhiskey]

Yeah. I once worked on a project implementing the software for a fighter aircraft first-line test set - the kind of thing that a maintainer would connect up to the pylons to check out the wiring and make sure the right voltages were getting where they were meant to.

We had to run the whole project on a completely separate network from the rest of the business due to the classification of the software, which was driven entirely by a handful of frequencies used in testing; details of which were also broadly available from OSINT sources.

[MereInterest]

I feel like there's a joke about Perl hiding somewhere in there.

[Bluestein]

"There's more than one way to do it, and all of them are classified!" (TIMTOWTDI TS) :)

[withinboredom]

From my personal experience: a cat died. A very non-important cat. It was the only thing of note in my report.

[dwarfsandstuff]

A random cat's death got to be top secret? Oh gawd...

[ARandomerDude]

Things are often classified because of how we know the cat died, not because the cat was special. Suppose you've recruited a foreign intelligence officer to work for you and he happens to mention the cat dying during a debriefing. You can't just declassify the unimportant bits because enough of them will tell you who said it.

It's the same problem as FAANG collecting mountains of "anonymous" metrics. Pretty soon, you can determine who the "anonymous" user is.

[withinboredom]

I think everyone knows we are in Afghanistan and the cat was a stray on our base. But you’re right. Maybe the fact that Nothing Happened was what was classified, not the cat? Who knows.

[wbl]

The top secret lunch: someone ate an orange at Los Alamos. That orange was top secret. This actually makes some sense.