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US Security Classifications Needs Re-Thinking, Says Board
coondoggie writes "The U.S. government's overly complicated way of classifying and declassifying information needs to be dumped and reinvented with the help of a huge technology injection if it is to keep from being buried under its own weight. That was one of the main conclusions of a government board tasked with making recommendations on exactly how the government should transform the current security classification system (PDF)."
US Security Needs Re-Thinking
in my opinion... the entire government needs a revamp... it is stuck in a world 150 years ago... it needs to be made to fit current times.
So a board tasked with finding a way to revamp our security classification system came to the conclusion that our security classification system needs a revamp?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
You wouldn't happen to have a friend waiting in the wings who owns a company that just so happens to supply such solutions at great cost to government entities would you?
Secret: military stuff
Top Secret: CIA drug running and other criminal activity
Top-shelf Secret: the good stuff
Burn Immediately: anything the slightest bit embarrassing
Well, thanks for that astute observation, Captain Fucking Obvious, whatever would we do without you?
On a side note, you're a bit harder to recognize without the mask and cape....
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Just dump the data into the tubes, add a few valves, screens and pumps and boom, problem solved.
Uk is currently moving from the 7 tier IL 0-6 markers to a three tier system, so doesnt surprise the US are looking to follow this
We could just remove the government entirely so we don't have to waste any resources on burocrats clasifying/declasifying documents.
meh... use ldap
"Current page-by-page review processes are unsustainable in an era of gigabytes and yottabytes. New and existing technologies must be integrated into new processes that allow greater information storage, retrieval, and sharing. We must incorporate technology into an automated declassification process" So this article isn't about changing the classification levels, etc. It's about making a computer decide what should be classified or not. Does anyone think it is a good idea to have a computer decide which information is sensitive, based on some kind of context analysis or something? This is someone trying to sell to the government. It just has to be-
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
The military view of security (from the part that uses weapons) is that information needs to be protected only until the enemy can't use it. A classic line is "Where the ship was last week is UNCLASSIFIED. Where the ship was yesterday is CONFIDENTIAL. Where the ship is now is SECRET. Where the ship will be tomorrow is TOP SECRET."
The important secrets in the combat arms are about future plans and current vulnerabilities. The significant ULTRA interceptions during WWII were mostly boring but important position and strength returns from German units. They'd intercept daily reports like "13th Panzer: 1245 men, 45 tanks, 3350 liters fuel, 245 rounds tank ammo." Intel people would translate this into "13th Panzer down to half strength, has only enough fuel to move 6 km and fight for 1/2 hour." Churchill would then sometimes issue orders like "Do not lose heart! Press on and you will be victorious!" Allied tank units would attack the vulnerable unit, the German unit would run out of fuel and ammo and be destroyed.
The intel side wants to classify everything forever, because they don't want the enemy to know how much they know and what sources they have. There's something to be said for this, provided that the intel side shuts up. In the era when NSA was targeted on the USSR and didn't share with law enforcement, that worked. The problem now is a big collection vacuum coupled with selective leaks to the rest of the government.
Then there's pure bureaucratic classification to avoid embarrassment. This has become much worse since anti-terrorism paranoia. It was a big problem before that, though; too much of the USAF budget, for example, is "black". Eventually it comes out what was being built, and there really haven't been significant breakthroughs comparable to, say, the SR-71 in a long time.
That way they will not ever never need to show anything.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
We could go a long way towards cleaning up the current mess if we started classifying things with a clear need to be classified rather than classifying anything without a clear requirement to be public.
Man, let me tell you how hard the current situation is to work with. This one time, I was working on (REDACTED) and then (REDACTED) comes up to me and (REDACTED), "Dude, where are the (REDACTED) on the (REDACTED) flesh-eating (REDACTED)?" To which I had to say, "Well, the problem is that (REDACTED) is all kept over in (REDACTED) so that in the event of (REDACTED) most of the (REDACTED) will be (REDACTED)."
I mean, who here can't identify with that?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
The classification system, as written, is actually pretty decent--information should only be classified under specific circumstances and for a limited duration. How it's applied in practice is not; information is often restricted because people are worried that they might get in trouble for releasing too much, because they don't want scrutiny from the public or other government agencies or even divisions within the same agency, or just because they want control. I don't see how technology solves any of these problem--it's generally a good thing that classified information is need-to-know only, so widespread data sharing and indexing just isn't feasible for most kinds of classified data. Classified data requirements generally aren't too onerous and do a good job keeping classified systems airgapped from unclassified systems.
I think the best solution is to enforce the rules we have in place, and require a higher standard to be met to classify data. The executive isn't going to do this; perhaps Congress needs to impose some limited oversight. That said, I don't trust Congress to do a better job these days, either. American society values perceived security way above government transparency these days; and the way the classification system is interpreted today is a direct result of how values have changed in this country. Things won't get better until the American people stop being afraid and start being critical of their government again.
The intelligence community dramatically overvalues secrecy in the context of counterterrorism. As a result, the US has squandered the most significant advantage it enjoys in the struggle to prevent attacks by terrorist groups like Al Qaeda: the fact that terrorists must act in complete secrecy from conception to execution. Once the details of a terror plot are known to the government, the plot has been thwarted, regardless of whether or not the plotters are aware of the fact they are no longer operating secretly. There is some value in allowing the terrorists to move further along whilst under surveillance (prosecution, organization learning, etc.) These benefits do not trump the potential benefits of tapping into the data analytical capacity of the unclassified internet.
This briefing about your NDA is classified TS/SCI/NOFORN. Please sign this NDA. Please sign this NDA stating you will not talk about the NDA. Now, please sign this attendance sheet for this mandatory briefing about your NDA. This attendance sheet is FOUO. Now please return to your boss who will tell you nothing about your access to information no one cares about, least of all you who would rather have slept in.
oh bullshit. We prosecute people for that. Improperly marking something as classified is a go to jail felony. If you don't know what hte words mean, it's very obscure in the legal documents, but there are people in prison for it right now.
You arrive at your bullshit conclusion because you cut and pasted your opinions from thinkprogress. See, video files have this shit that's called metadata. and in the metadata are things that can be used to back out the location of the aircraft and performance of the sensor. Both of these are generally classified because compromising them can cause "serious harm" to the country. Similarly, when a mass storage device is used in a classified system, that device (disk, etc) is now classified at the level of the system its used in. Therefore, if an unclassified video is sitting on a secret disk, it stays there, unless there's a reason to spend the government's resources (your dollars) on properly moving it to a different system.
When we took the Global Hawk, for example, to Haiti, we emailed a lot of imagery to NGOs and other agencies (US and foreign) to help them do their mission. The images, themselves, are unclassified. However, they were processed on a classified system, so first the metadata was stripped from the image (think EXIF), then translated to a convenient format (JPEG) and then moved to an unclassified system, from which the image was emailed to whomever needed it.
But go ahead and keep your tinfoil hat on.
A big part of the problem, is that they classify by default.
If this one practice was banned, we wouldn't have this issue.
The default should be no classification. They then should prove that it requires a classification, and not just by going "Because we say so".
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
It does not scare people enough. They need to make it more scary.
With who? The civil war occurred because one large physical bloc of the country disagreed with another large physical bloc. If you look at the counties vote in national elections, that isn't the case here. It isn't North vs. South, its more like urban vs rural. How exactly is that going to work?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
This will not happen, because if the mindset of: "What if something that is important slips through? Its better to just classify everything just to be safe."
You want to be the general who's staff accidentally leaks something important? Goodbye career, because a corporal forgot to look at the last page in a folder before handing it to a reporter.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
They are close to classifying everything now, so just do that. Make everything Top Secret. Simple. Done.
E Proelio Veritas.
...US citizens can see any classified information if the employees it pays for.
If you think this is futile.... then what isn't?
Right, your otherwise embarassed bosses will report your incorrect classification of the information that would have embarassed and have you prosecuted. I have noticed that happening a lot in recent years. It is good to see that the system works as intended.