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No, this is not. This is an attempt to bring overclassification under control, which has been admitted in the open press to be an ongoing problem for DOD. No

No, this is not. This is an attempt to bring overclassification under control, which has been admitted in the open press to be an ongoing problem for DOD. No one ever got fired for being too careful with classified. You can lose your job and your career for not being careful enough. On balance this is a good thing, because information is generally classified for a damn good reason, and it's important to keep US adversaries from learning our capabilities and what our playbook would be in a given situation. But it also culturally leads to the default behavior being "don't share information." Which in turn leads to things being more highly classified than they really need to be, which in turn is a huge bureaucratic drag on getting things done beyond just what may involve SpaceX or Boeing. This reads to be as much or more an effort to make sure things are classified at a sane level, and that the right information is sharable to allies and partners who have the proper clearances. Foreign disclosure of classified and managing information sharing between allied governments is already a huge administrative PITA that gets worse the more closely held the information is. So this seems to be an effort to take a step back and say "OK, let's not go round the bend with secrecy, let's balance protecting our interests with sharing what our allies and partners need to know."

alephnerd 3y ago
> This is an attempt to bring overclassification under control, which has been admitted in the open press to be an ongoing problem for DOD Can attest to this. That and our messed up procurement process has caused too much info getting siloed, and slowing down development [0] [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
As well as he very practical uses you've stated for combatting over-classification, there's one other big exciting reason: Government/governance runs on public trust, which is maintained by governments doing things. If the government won't talk about & share what it does, if everything is secret, people will not believe in that government. The government can generate belief in itself by talking about & sharing the cool stuff it does. I'm excited for that to happen more. It was so so cool & weirdly motivational seeing KH-9 Hexagon unveiled at Air and Space in 2011! I dropped everything last minute to go see it. So cool. Hexagon was 40 year old film-bssed satellite, but still so amazing to see, huge & wildly ambitious. I hope this kind of reveal can happen again, can increase in frequency, decrease in number of decades kept cloaked.
- JoshTriplett 3y ago
  > Government/governance runs on public trust, which is maintained by governments doing things. If the government won't talk about & share what it does, if everything is secret, people will not believe in that government. Exactly. The default should be "everything is shared unless there's a very good reason for it to be secret", and overclassification leads to the opposite mindset, "everything is (top) secret unless someone goes to a great deal of effort to declassify it".

alephnerd 3y ago

> This is an attempt to bring overclassification under control, which has been admitted in the open press to be an ongoing problem for DOD Can attest to this. That and our messed up procurement process has caused too much info getting siloed, and slowing down development [0] [0] - https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-weapons-china-00100373 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/06/09/america-we...

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

As well as he very practical uses you've stated for combatting over-classification, there's one other big exciting reason: Government/governance runs on public trust, which is maintained by governments doing things. If the government won't talk about & share what it does, if everything is secret, people will not believe in that government. The government can generate belief in itself by talking about & sharing the cool stuff it does. I'm excited for that to happen more. It was so so cool & weirdly motivational seeing KH-9 Hexagon unveiled at Air and Space in 2011! I dropped everything last minute to go see it. So cool. Hexagon was 40 year old film-bssed satellite, but still so amazing to see, huge & wildly ambitious. I hope this kind of reveal can happen again, can increase in frequency, decrease in number of decades kept cloaked.

JoshTriplett 3y ago
> Government/governance runs on public trust, which is maintained by governments doing things. If the government won't talk about & share what it does, if everything is secret, people will not believe in that government. Exactly. The default should be "everything is shared unless there's a very good reason for it to be secret", and overclassification leads to the opposite mindset, "everything is (top) secret unless someone goes to a great deal of effort to declassify it".