Critical question not mentioned here at least. When were these documents classified?
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Years ago I worked on testing phones intended for US congress folk (IIR), which had to be approved by the FBI. They had mercury switches across the transmitter that shorted it out when on-hook. (Digital phones can be considered always “live”.)
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You’re thinking of General Mills, the former Surgeon General (and father of the twins, Haley Mills and Haley Mills, who starred in Disney’s original “The Parent Trap”!).
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Just my take on the shenanigans described in this article, but I would assume they were declared secret when they were turned over during discovery. Along with every single other piece of paper the CIA had to turn over to the defendant.
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I had just put the following xkcd cartoon in the Count to Ten Thousand thread, but clearly it needs to be here as well:
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Sources and methods. Duh.
Are you implying that Risen is trying to send one of his sources to jail?
And who is this Jeremy anyway? There’s a James Risen who seems connected with United States v. Sterling, but he’s tried to fight off the subpoenas.
Would it even be a thing if an agency were disbarred again (for pulling this garbage on an entity, including a human?) A sort of ‘the Court finds this complaint very nicely formed; go get your Mom and we’ll sort this.’
I imagine the counterclaim includes injunction against making employees belt their pants right under their ribs, smoke clove ciggies, or sequester the science behind handwashing from foreign nationals and parolees.
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Submitted for your review:
“When originally classified were these documents properly classified as secret,” the prosecution asked of the three documents.
“They weren’t,” Lutz responded.
“But they are now properly classified secret?”
“Yes,” Lutz answered.
I’m confused. Were these documents improperly classified as secret when originally classified or were they classified in another category? When were the documents classified?
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Oops, brain freeze, I’ve edited my note to correct the first name. Thanks!
(If you don’t like my grammar, too bad, though…)
Yup. I too have disassembled a rotary phone, and am familiar with its innards. My comment was simply aimed at the many who haven’t.
Amazing how different the technology was … even the science fiction of 1950 did not imagine we’d be using a supercomputer to analyze the speech (and suppress noise) and send it to another supercomputer for the listener, and power it all from a little battery in a handheld package. (supercomputer by 1960 standards)
There was a 47 µF capacitor in line when the hookswitch was open (handset down), which made an approximately resonant circuit with the mechanical bell at about 10 Hz. Turning the dial would open the circuit, reducing the capacitance to a small value. The phone would no longer be able to ring in this state, btw.
[edit] … or was that a 0.47 µF cap and 20 Hz … whatever it takes.
Looking up some rotary phone schematics, I find that there was a bit of variation in them. Generally all full of a tangle of wires, they used a number of different tactics to suppress annoying clicks and some of them had features like built-in lights and volme controls. Whether Arkady’s trick worked, or how well, depends on what the Russian phones had inside them circa 1980.
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