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What's the Government /Really/ Classifying?
Nachtjäger writes "The Federation of American Scientists has an entire section of their site devoted to US Government secrets, including the lately hyped Echelon stuff. " Interesting project - it's an interesting chronicle of the declassification of massive amounts of papers.
Back in 1994 I called my congressman. I asked
for a copy of the crime bill about to be voted on.
Their reply? "We wish we had a copy too".
This was 2 days before it was to be voted on.
A quick search of that site turned up this: http://209.207.236.112/irp/pro gram/process/echelon.htm
Pretty entertaining stuff.. Neat site.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Would it not be wonderful if all of a sudden, rathern than scanning a billion (or whatever the current number is) of daily emails in plaintext, they'd have to sort through a billion encrypted messages. This would be the best way to get back at them; if nothing else this would make scanning all mail traffic next to impossible (unless they can break encryption almost efforless, something I don't quite buy).
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Now why is it that there's this big fuss about Echelon in the US and here in Europe nobody seems to give a rats ass (or even know it exists). I think us Europeans can learn something from our American friends here: political activism about these things is imortant/essential. I really wish us Europeans would have the political tradition of writing/complaining to your congressmen about things you don't like. As far as I can tell, Europeans are more complacent when it comes to interacting with their chosen representatives
As a Marylander, I have several friends who work (or worked) for federal agency sub-contractors. Most of the random projects done by "the government" are doled out to Beltway Bandits (this is the actual term used) like them. At the usual cookouts they would often trade tales about classifying documents.
As far as my friends could tell, the most common reason their companies would make an official Secret is so that the low-ranking bureaucrats in charge of their funding would be unable to read exactly how little work had been accomplished. And obviously all this Classified work must be much more important than some public project that any commie or Iraqi could read about in the paper... In other words, 100% pure Dilberting.
I asked for a copy of the crime bill about to be voted on. Their reply? "We wish we had a copy too".Cute, but I'm sure that bill was never classified, it just wasn't available to anyone outside "the Committee". That's all about stupid congressional politicking (is there any other kind?). More of an Open Source issue, really.
Ah, but they can't just block everything, otherwise our economy and part of our social system would crumble ... I would hope that this price would even be too high for the NSA and their equally paranoid counterparts ...
My question is always did he die from being tortured or something? Or even more sinister, was he set free and told "lay low for the rest of your life." Both scenarios seem realistic to me.
Werd.
If you were actually able to see what's there, you'd probably find laundry lists, chinese take-away receipts, autoexec.bat files, Doctor Who short stories, even restroom graffiti.
Let's be honest, here. The US Government has far fewer REAL secrets than it wants people to believe. It's showmanship, pure and simple. What is said about guys with bigger cars is just as true for guys with bigger vaults of secrets.
Yes, I'm not underestimating the level of real paranoia on the Government's side. They're just as susceptable to that as everyone else - perhaps more so, given their jobs. They probably are hiding things of importance. But so what? Does it really matter if they're scared witless of their own shadows? Does it -really- matter, in the overall scheme of things? Not really. They're only significant because we choose to make them so.
As for Echelon - I believe it's real, but there's no way in hell it's keyword-driven. Check EVERY word in EVERY message on ALL national and international lines in 52 countries? I don't care HOW fast a computer they have - that's TOO SLOW and would yield FAR too many false positives, and FAR too many false negatives. Neural Nets and GA's are where it's at, not SuperGrep!
Fact is, we don't know what the Govt is doing, and all that's happening is that people are projecting their fears to fill the vacuum. It's arguable as to whether the vacuum should be there, but that is a seperate issue to the fact that people are projecting at all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I think you're quite correct that the secrecy ratings in the US would be more appropriately named "Slightly embarassing", "Mortifying", "PR disaster", "Political dynamite", etc.
:) This attitude that all new work, be it law, a product, or source *will* be flawed and needs wide and open review to become efficient, should be emulated in other fields than programming.
This can prevent public reaction from heading off a bad policy early. As we know, it works better to expose mistakes and fix them, or at least avoid repeating them. Can a people really control their own government if they aren't allowed to know what it's done? It's really important that government be open to review and inspection in a democracy. Like source, not many *will* review it, but the fact that someone *could* keeps people honest and on their best behavior.
You said it yourself in your comment, hiding mistakes is gross incompetency and shows a lack of professionalism. Yet our government, military, and corporate power heirarchies are extremely unforgiving of errors. Screw up once and those upward promotions really slow down. Is it any wonder people try to hide mistakes? Many parents demand the same sort of perfection from their kids, much to their and our detriment. It's time to lighten up a little, people make mistakes. Sometimes the best person for the job is someone who has already learned from all the mistakes.
I think programmers learn very quickly that denying the existence of bugs doesn't really work, and that all new software has bugs. Kernel oopses and bluescreens remind us if we forget
I don't deny there is a real need to keep secrets concerning covert operations and military missions. I suspect a very very small percentage of the secrets in Washington actually fall into the category of operational secrecy though.
The basic concepts of the classification system are open, but protected. We all pretty much know what "classified" means, and I bet if you called the front desk at the Pentagon and asked, they would tell you exactly what classifications there are and what each one means.
It would be security by obscurity if they deliberately used a bizarre filing system, such as alphabetical by middle initial.
The language used in most of the documents could qualify as security by obscurity, except that it is used without regard to security level.
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I realize I'm a day late, but could you make sure that package from Isreal gets to Bagdad?
Sanity For Today
Farley Flavors (of Fabulous Fast Food fame)
We apologize for the inconvenience.
yes. It's the good ol' James Bond Syndrome. Media and entertainment have glamorized encryption and computers and secrets.
For example: People think that being a secret agent is really nifty because of the Mission Impossible and James Bond type movies they see. In reality, secret agents spend most of their time sitting around reading newspapers and magazines to put together little bits of information. A lot of the secrets out there are available, if you just collect enough information. A piece in this trade magazine here, a bit in that newscast there... lots of unclassified information put together creates classified information.
But you rarely see this put forth in the media/entertainment because it's not as glamourous and interesting as breaking into a well guarded room to steal a paper stamped with TOP SECRET.
Most "TOP SECRET" stuff is boring, classified for a reason, and not part of a coverup/conspiracy. People should be worrying more about having access to strong encryption for their own uses, than about what the gov't is busy encrypting for gov't purposes.
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
I used to process all the Security Clearances in Pacific Region in Canada, as well as declassify a lot of information in personnel files. And held a Secret clearance.
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There aren't three levels of Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. There are higher levels above that, most dealing with Nuclear weapons and things of that sort. There are also restrictions on Who can see it: For US eyes only, For US/Canadian eyes only, and so on.
Most, 95%, of the material classified as Secret is junk. The same holds for Confidential. I presume, based on inference, that probably 50% of Top Secret material is junk.
And people frequently overclassify docs - one person I knew just liked to stamp things with all the cool stamps they give you - so she'd stamp For Canadian/UK eyes only because she was bored.
There were days when I'd take a three-jacket personnel file and strip it down to a single-jacket file, or take a collection of higher grade docs and declassify most of them.
Ah, the good old days
Will in Seattle
Another common tactic is to "misfile" or "mislabel" pertinent information in an attempt to keep it secret. Sometime under the Bush regime, there were LOTS of documents declassified or released thru FOI but since they removed all document classification/labeling systems reviewers had to pore over ALL of them to figure out what was actually in them and any kind of relationship between documents.
And the October issue over at fas.org mentioned examples of CIA declassfied documents (required by law) were routine things like document check out requests, performance reviews etc.
Sadly, you're right.
It used to cost about $1000 to $2000 for a Confidential clearance, about $8000 for a Secret clearance, and somewhere around $20000 for a Top Secret clearance.
And when they take too long to clear people, people don't use secure methods, because they have work to do.
One of the silliest things is that we give US citizens, born in the US, an edge in getting a clearance, rather than immigrants. Usually it's the native-born citizens who are the greatest security risks, not the recent immigrants. But I wouldn't say the same for Nuclear-grade clearances - just for the usual junk.
Will in Seattle
The first of the show was fascinating in its own right - what happened to Thresher and Scorpion, two US nuclear submarines that were lost in the 60s with all hands aboard. Remember the guy who spent a lot of time hunting for the Titanic and didn't find it the first few times? Part of that was a cover story; he was actually examining the wreckage of Thresher.
That was pretty amazing (short version: You don't want to be in a sub experiencing a catastrophic failure, but if you saw "the camera in the sub" scene in Trinity And Beyond, a movie consisting largely of similarly-amazing declassified footage of nuclear tests, you already knew that), but the second part of the show totally blew me away.
Those of you who are old enough may remember Howard Hughes and his plan to "mine the oceans" for manganese nodules. I remember hearding about this on a NOVA documentary many years ago.
That entire business plan was a cover story for a CIA op. Hughes was asked to come on board as the ideal cover - "Only Hughes would have the money to try mining the oceans, and it's so zany the public would have no trouble believing it as a Hughes project". The real goal was to retrieve - not "examine the wreckage of", not "send a 'bot into the sub to look for neat toys", but to retrieve, intact, a lost Russian nuclear submarine from a depth 17,000 feet.
What Hughes ended up building was pretty far out, even for Hughes. Imagine a large ship with a submarine-shaped bay ("for holding the manganese nodules") in the middle of it. Now imagine a huge contraption that resembled the business end of salad tongs, but was roughly the length of a submarine.
Now drop the contraption 17,000 feet down on long poles, grab your sub, and raise it. Once raised, pop into the sub to get all the codebooks, communications equipment, reactor design info, and for bonus points, three nuclear missiles. The ultimate prize in the Cold War.
Unfortunately, they scraped bottom on their first attempt, and rather than raise the entire thing up to inspect it thoroughly for damage, they went ahead and picked up the sub anyways. About halfway up, three fingers on the "claw" broke off, leading to structural failure of the sub. The bow, with the bridge and all the intelligence information, along with the nukes, went back down to the bottom and was destroyed on impact. All that remained in the stern were bodies and/or parts thereof.
The only official acknowledgement ever made was that a tape - showing a funeral at sea for the Russian sailors - was eventually sent to the Russian Premier when the secret leaked.
Some of this footage - of the wrecks of Thresher, Scorpion, and the operation to retrieve the aforementioned Russian sub, has only recently been declassified.
Finally, one plan that didn't get off the ground, but was hinted at in that "Interception Capabilities 2000" report - the placement of taps on underground cables. Seems the Russian Northern Fleet used to communicate via undersea cables around the North Cape, and it further seems that "since the cables were undersea, they were secure", and the communications were sent unencrypted. The plan was to use a different type of sub to place a listening device in the sand beneath the cable, (Russian navy inspects cable, sees no tap on cable, lays cable back down on top of buried listening device!) and then to string 2,000 miles of new cable to Greenland, where a satellite uplink would provide the US with real-time intel on the Northern Fleet. Apparently, this plan was scuppered when a mole inside NSA compromised it. It would have cost $2-3 billion dollars -- but what's a billion when you're talking about the possibility of having hours, or even days, of advance notice of World War III?
I have a hunch that 20 years from now, we'll be discovering some similarly audacious things from today's era.
It's been said before, but I'll say it again. NSA and CIA have better things to do with their time than worry about you.
In the meantime - for anyone who's ever wondered "why would geeks ever want to work for the spooks", that's probably just the tip of the iceberg of why. Yes, most of the work is probably mind-numbingly dull, and made even duller by government regulations. But the chance to be part of a once-in-a-lifetime "moon shot" operation, and to play with or develop technology that's beyond the state of the art, is probably a significant motivating factor.
If there's anyone out there reading this who's built a quantum computer or some other piece of technolgy the rest of us haven't even dreamt of yet: "Cool hack, dude! 20-30 years from now, I hope we get to hear your story too."