“There’s stuff that is really top-secret Top Secret,"
He used to be better at this…
And somehow, there are tons of people who think such madness is a good idea.
There’s stuff that is really top-secret Top Secret, and then there’s stuff that’s pop secret. We’ll classify anything.
Furthermore, hasn’t it been established that merely linking to secret information is a violation? It follows by logic that simply typing “google.com” is an act of sedition.
The number one danger to the United States is the government running it.
This has been shown endless times. The leaked Top Secret classified stuff is often used to cover corruption, fuckups, and various crimes by those “we the people” supposedly put in charge.
I would have liked to finish my run with a world that doesn’t resemble every fucking cautionary tale from literature, movies, and music.
Just so disappointed.
I guess there are unsecret unsecrets and unsecret secrets, which are freely available. But then there are the secret unsecrets and - dammit - the secret secrets.
Didn’t Moynihan write a book like twenty years ago pointing out that we couldn’t predict the collapse of the USSR because of overclassification? Oh wait, he did:
This looks like a funny use of the phrase “open source”, one which indicates how it’s come to popularly mean “free” or “public domain” or just generally available. In software, which I think is its original context, “open source” means the actual code can be examined, changed and redistributed, right?
So what would “open source” information (or “stuff” as Obama calls it) look like, anyway? You can see the letters that make up the words that convey the facts?
“There’s murder, and then there’s murder.” – Police
“There’s theft, and then there’s theft.” – Wall Street
“There’s fraud, and then there’s fraud.” – corporate CEOs
And the list goes on and on…
The President Explains to Average Americans: (reader shall hear in typified Obama voice/characteristics please)
Now, we classify information about how to fire and control our missiles, and that you understand is secret, right? Then there’s stuff we classify that we just don’t want to talk about, but that you already know, right?
A perfect example of that would be when I poop. It stinks when I poop, just how it stinks depends on what I ate and how I feel. You know it stinks when I poop, you do! But if words about how it stinks when I poop were to be found on a document at the White House, perhaps an internal memo among staff about which bathrooms to avoid at what times of day, we would classify that, even though you know that I, Barack Obama, have stinky stinky poops.
So do you understand now?
Average Americans titter in response and promptly forget why they asked.
There is an actual official designation of “sensitive but unclassified” that covers exactly that–stuff that isn’t officially classified, but they’d rather you didn’t see anyway.
It is more than a little annoying that the fight over Clinton’s emails has rather left unexamined the issue of whether any of it should have been classified in the first place, and that this is a demonstration of the actual problem of overclassification and the difficult of managing so much classified information.
One small credit for the Obama adminstration: over the last couple of years, the number of new classified documents has declined a little, for the first time in like ever.
I believe TLAs have defined “open-source” as “using a search engine effectively”.
I know this post gets at more important matters, but I just want to put a stop to this:
they’re met by intringent resistance from the Obama administration’s Justice Department.
That probably intends to mean “intransigent resistance”, “stringent resistance”, perhaps “entrenched resistance”, or even “trenchant resistance”, but I’m not yet willing to accept that any chosen set of assonant syllables is a suitable substitute for an existing word.
I AM, however, willing to be convinced: sell me a neologism! Just, like, make it better than the word(s) it’s replacing, somehow.
Part of the (over)classification quagmire is something called Sources and Methods of Intelligence (SAMI). Simply put, intelligence assets are more valuable than the actual intelligence. We could be talking about a classified technology or program, or even information about the identity of an agent. Often everything gathered by an asset is automatically classified to the same level as that asset. This is to protect the asset in case the information hints as to how it was obtained.
For example, any individual piece of intelligence might not be sensitive at all, but put them all together along with the timeline in which they were obtained, and you quickly determine they must have come from being able to listen in on person A talking to person B at a given date and time. The only way to do that would have been by tapping a certain phone, or being in a certain room… you just blew the cover of a program or agent.
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