[MatthewWilkes]

Someone I went to uni with got a job at an engineering firm. One of his projects was unmounting nuclear reactors for decomissioning, which were sufficiently secret that he was told to treat them as a black box. He was given a procedure, including specific drill and cut locations which would safely detach the reactor, but no detail about what was inside the shell.

One day he was on holiday in France and went to a museum that had displays about nuclear technology. One of the information boards was an exploded view of the same reactor technologies he was working with.

Who knows if there were subtle differences, but it's fascinating how different decisions about redaction are made given knowledge that the information is public.

[NikolaeVarius]

Its possible it was just the fact that a slightly different design was rated at a different secrecy level because of specific improvements.

For example, rockets and turbofans all use the same basic mechanics to function, the but differentiators are still under ITAR

[swiley]

RSA is still under ITAR too which just seems incredibly dumb.

[PeterWhittaker]

Are you sure? Between the 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement and the 1992 transfer of cryptographic regulations from Defence to Commerce, I don't believe this is the case any longer.

[edrxty]

This is common. I've worked at places where interns started rambling about classified stuff because they found articles on wikipedia and unknowingly put two and two together. The classification system is like any other extremely bureaucratic system: fairly arbitrary and frequently divorced from reality. That's not to say it's terrible and doesn't work, just occasionally struggles when dealing with the problem of determining what needs to be secret out of the set of all facts about the observable universe.

[gizmo686]

For those not fammiliar with classified materials, this sounds like a case of classification by compilation, where multiple pieces of information are individually unclassified, but are classified when put together.

For instance, you might have both the time and location of a planned event be unclassified, but have the combination of time and location be classified.

This can get very annoying when you have people working entirely on unclassified documents (possibly without ever having read the classification guidelines, since they never need access to the classified stuff), and they end up "leaking" classified info by compilation.

It also gets extremely silly when you have to say something like "I'm sorry, but I cannot copy table 7 from document A into document B without making it classified as it would leak information X".

In the end, as the article says, I don't think this really matters. We rarely care about classifying specific pieces of information; and when we do, it is usually a relatively clear line. For the most part, for a leak to be useful, it needs to contain a lot of separate pieces of information that come together to make a cohesive whole.

The complete design, construction, and operations manual for a nuclear bomb will probably help an aspiring nuclear power build it. However, a single page of said documents, even if said power could choose which page, just isn't going to be that useful.

[FPGAhacker]

Sometimes the secret is the fact of using a specific technology, not the technology itself.

[failwhaleshark]

Gotchas, tools, jigs, and tricks of design, manufacturing, maintenance, and support, as well as the very rare materials, are the most crucial bits to guard.

IIRC, the manufacturing of a low-yield, simple fission device based on an old design isn't complicated; it's the fissile materials that are the show-stoppers, hence nonproliferation of centrifuges, dual-use components, and yellowcake/ore.

[KMnO4]

Reminds me of a factory tour I went on where a big fancy robot was assembling car parts. I was told not to take photos — not because the robot was secretive (and in fact the same one was used in several factories), but because the computer screen beside it showed details about the specific configuration of that robot. There were hundreds of different settings that could be tweaked and that was the competitive advantage.

[failwhaleshark]

Makes sense. I toured the Dell factory in Round Rock, and it was the same deal. I think all businesses attempt to limit information disclosure as a standard practice, even if there aren't obvious trade secrets, because there maybe unrecognized intelligence in them.

[ceejayoz]

Sometimes the secret is just bullshit, though.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/why-i-have-nothing-say-about-nsa-le...

> Emails from reporters started coming in last night. Could I comment on the leaked National Security Agency (NSA) report on Russian interference in the election?

> The short answer was no. The reason was simple: I couldn’t read it.

> As one of the 5.5 million Americans who hold a security clearance, viewing that document would violate my obligation to protect classified information.

[mulmen]

Sometimes what you don't say reveals as much as what you do. This is the origin of the Glomar Response. By never providing information it is harder for third parties to tell when something is really secret or just public knowledge. This keeps the actual secret things that much more obscure. If I ask you ten questions and you answer four of them I learned something about all ten topics. If you refuse to give me useful information on all of them I learn nothing.

[lumost]

I suspect this solution makes sense in the short run. In the long-run it makes it so any organizational incompetence can be covered up with "it's classified". Over 80+ years the organization starts to struggle with basic reality.

I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA is filled with Byzantine Bureaucracy, fiefdoms, and departments that don't even know what they are supposed to do. In a kafka-esque twist I'd bet there are individuals who aren't even allowed to know their own job description due to some papered over incompetence.

[anitil]

I used to follow a Freedom of Information blog (I think it was this one [0]) and I remember a case where after a long drawn out battle they received a heavily redacted document... that it turned out had been publicly available for years.

[0] http://foi-privacy.blogspot.com/ gah no https!