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by edrxty
1840 days ago
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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. |
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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.