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Top Secret information has been determined to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security if released. Don't read it; don't click on it; don't post l

by wtbob 11y ago

Top Secret information has been determined to cause exceptionally grave damage to national security if released. Don't read it; don't click on it; don't post links to it. It's not funny; it's not clever; it's not fun. The poster does deserve credit for putting the classification in the link text, so I know not to click on it. Seriously, thank you for that.

nitrogen 11y ago
Is this an example of Poe's law? How can you know the information is harmful to you if you don't click on it? Rules, if they exist, preventing government employees from reading leaked documents are the actual harm. Such rules are vaguely reminiscent of the tactics used by cults to keep their members in the dark.
- wtbob 11y ago
  > How can you know the information is harmful to you if you don't click on it? It's not your job to determine if it's harmful to you; it's not your job to determine if it's harmful to national security. That's someone else's job, he did it, and now others have ignored that determination and have released it anyway. > Rules, if they exist, preventing government employees from reading leaked documents are the actual harm. Do you deny the legitimacy of state secrets altogether? When you go into a salary negotiation, do you say, 'I'd be willing to make as little as $X'? If you accept that it's possible for secrets to be legitimate, then you have to accept that there will be secrets you will not be able to personally examine for their legitimacy (because revealing them to you would make them…no longer secret). Likewise, it's not appropriate for someone in a position of great trust to betray that trust and decide for himself to leak something. One does not put the security of 350 million souls at risk due to the determination of a single man. Instead, there are procedures in place for those with access to secrets to challenge their classification; there are people whose job ratings improve if they are able to sustain such challenges. The right thing to do, if someone believes something is misclassified, is to follow those procedures and shepherd that case through that system of people. To do otherwise would be like having a single man with his finger on a nuclear weapon. Sure, he might only unleash it appropriately, but he might not. We have a system for the release of weapons; we have systems in place for the release of information.
  - mrich 11y ago
    When you blindly abide by the rules you will never reveal people abusing this system, as has been done by Snowden. Is this what you would prefer?
    - wtbob 11y ago
      > When you blindly abide by the rules you will never reveal people abusing this system Inspectors general live to find abusers of the system, to pursue and to convict them.
      - nitrogen 11y ago
        I know this is a really old thread, but I have to ask what happens when the system itself (e.g. domestic surveillance) is the abuse?
shitlord 11y ago
That's not always true. A lot of the time, things are marked as classified because they were tangentially related to something else that was classified. It's just easier to do things that way, and people who work for the government really prefer to do things the easy way. I knew a guy who interned at the NSA and he said that really inane stuff (like the internal numbering systems they used to organize stuff) is considered classified as TS.
- wtbob 11y ago
  I have no idea if any internal numbering schemes are classified, but it's not a crazy idea. A numbering system can indicate capabilities (imagine seeing that index 314-15.9 is 'questions to ask Hitler's brain') and how an organisation thinks about things. But yes, over-classification is possible. Fortunately, there are processes to handle that.
jevinskie 11y ago
This post confuses me. The cat is already out of the bag. Anyone can see these slides now. Do you think that, if you read the slides, you will do something to compromise national security that you wouldn't have done otherwise?
- wtbob 11y ago
  This particular cat is out of the bag; people shouldn't be encouraged to commit this crime in the future with the promise of fame and/or fortune. Publicising this sort of thing gives publicity-seekers exactly what they want.
throwawayaway 11y ago
whose national security? you forget you do not live in the only country in the world.

by wtbob 11y ago

nitrogen 11y ago

Is this an example of Poe's law? How can you know the information is harmful to you if you don't click on it? Rules, if they exist, preventing government employees from reading leaked documents are the actual harm. Such rules are vaguely reminiscent of the tactics used by cults to keep their members in the dark.

wtbob 11y ago
> How can you know the information is harmful to you if you don't click on it? It's not your job to determine if it's harmful to you; it's not your job to determine if it's harmful to national security. That's someone else's job, he did it, and now others have ignored that determination and have released it anyway. > Rules, if they exist, preventing government employees from reading leaked documents are the actual harm. Do you deny the legitimacy of state secrets altogether? When you go into a salary negotiation, do you say, 'I'd be willing to make as little as $X'? If you accept that it's possible for secrets to be legitimate, then you have to accept that there will be secrets you will not be able to personally examine for their legitimacy (because revealing them to you would make them…no longer secret). Likewise, it's not appropriate for someone in a position of great trust to betray that trust and decide for himself to leak something. One does not put the security of 350 million souls at risk due to the determination of a single man. Instead, there are procedures in place for those with access to secrets to challenge their classification; there are people whose job ratings improve if they are able to sustain such challenges. The right thing to do, if someone believes something is misclassified, is to follow those procedures and shepherd that case through that system of people. To do otherwise would be like having a single man with his finger on a nuclear weapon. Sure, he might only unleash it appropriately, but he might not. We have a system for the release of weapons; we have systems in place for the release of information.
- mrich 11y ago
  When you blindly abide by the rules you will never reveal people abusing this system, as has been done by Snowden. Is this what you would prefer?
  - wtbob 11y ago
    > When you blindly abide by the rules you will never reveal people abusing this system Inspectors general live to find abusers of the system, to pursue and to convict them.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      I know this is a really old thread, but I have to ask what happens when the system itself (e.g. domestic surveillance) is the abuse?

shitlord 11y ago

That's not always true. A lot of the time, things are marked as classified because they were tangentially related to something else that was classified. It's just easier to do things that way, and people who work for the government really prefer to do things the easy way. I knew a guy who interned at the NSA and he said that really inane stuff (like the internal numbering systems they used to organize stuff) is considered classified as TS.

wtbob 11y ago
I have no idea if any internal numbering schemes are classified, but it's not a crazy idea. A numbering system can indicate capabilities (imagine seeing that index 314-15.9 is 'questions to ask Hitler's brain') and how an organisation thinks about things. But yes, over-classification is possible. Fortunately, there are processes to handle that.

jevinskie 11y ago

This post confuses me. The cat is already out of the bag. Anyone can see these slides now. Do you think that, if you read the slides, you will do something to compromise national security that you wouldn't have done otherwise?

wtbob 11y ago
This particular cat is out of the bag; people shouldn't be encouraged to commit this crime in the future with the promise of fame and/or fortune. Publicising this sort of thing gives publicity-seekers exactly what they want.

throwawayaway 11y ago

whose national security? you forget you do not live in the only country in the world.