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The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

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Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#31

Post by phaus »

lesterbuck wrote: post #28
throwaway31 wrote: post #11

I used to be in the intelligence field, and I held a top secret SCI clearance for about five years. What most people don't realize about classified information is that it's not the information itself that's so sensitive; it's the means via which such information is acquired that must be protected. If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. I rarely dealt with any classifie…

I thought I read somewhere once that it was a violation of security procedures to reveal your security clearance level (unless it was in doing your job to access information). Is it ok to mention you used to hold a top secret SCI after the fact?

If you weren't allowed to mention the fact that you have one, then nobody would ever be able to apply for a government contracted job.

What the government doesn't want is people going out to a club and getting hammered and then telling a bunch of strangers that you have a clearance because it makes you a target in a situation where you are already vulnerable.

The funny thing is, a clearance doesn't give you a need to know. From my experience the overwhelming majority of people with a Top Secret clearance don't have access to anything that is even remotely interesting.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#32

Post by dasht »

throwaway31 wrote: post #11

I used to be in the intelligence field, and I held a top secret SCI clearance for about five years. What most people don't realize about classified information is that it's not the information itself that's so sensitive; it's the means via which such information is acquired that must be protected. If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. I rarely dealt with any classifie…

What authority creates and polices an SCI clearance? Who makes the decision about whether and when to extend that clearance?

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#33

Post by [deleted] »

lesterbuck wrote: post #28
throwaway31 wrote: post #11

I used to be in the intelligence field, and I held a top secret SCI clearance for about five years. What most people don't realize about classified information is that it's not the information itself that's so sensitive; it's the means via which such information is acquired that must be protected. If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. I rarely dealt with any classifie…

I thought I read somewhere once that it was a violation of security procedures to reveal your security clearance level (unless it was in doing your job to access information). Is it ok to mention you used to hold a top secret SCI after the fact?

[deleted]

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#34

Post by Sniffnoy »

throwaway31 wrote: post #11

I used to be in the intelligence field, and I held a top secret SCI clearance for about five years. What most people don't realize about classified information is that it's not the information itself that's so sensitive; it's the means via which such information is acquired that must be protected. If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. I rarely dealt with any classifie…

> If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors.

Sorry, could you explain this? I can't seem to put this together.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#35

Post by scott_s »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #34
throwaway31 wrote: post #11

I used to be in the intelligence field, and I held a top secret SCI clearance for about five years. What most people don't realize about classified information is that it's not the information itself that's so sensitive; it's the means via which such information is acquired that must be protected. If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. I rarely dealt with any classifie…

> If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. Sorry, could you explain this? I can't seem to put this together.

If the people we're gathering intelligence on (the "targets") knew how we are collecting that intelligence (the "vectors"), then they'd be able to avoid being spied on.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#36

Post by bdr »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #34
throwaway31 wrote: post #11

I used to be in the intelligence field, and I held a top secret SCI clearance for about five years. What most people don't realize about classified information is that it's not the information itself that's so sensitive; it's the means via which such information is acquired that must be protected. If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. I rarely dealt with any classifie…

> If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. Sorry, could you explain this? I can't seem to put this together.

If you knew your phone was tapped, you could stop using it.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#37

Post by ChuckMcM »

Does anyone know of any research into compartmentalized network protocols? Specifically I'm wondering about protocols where components co-operate to acheive some goal but don't know enough to compromise the entire network. I'm sure the botnet guys have done a lot of work on this but I'm wondering there are any good references in the open literature.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#38

Post by derefr »

extension wrote: post #30
derefr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect there isn't really anyone who knows what every compartment is. Unless the process is completely decentralized, there must be someone approving new compartments. They probably know at least a little about each one.

Once the authority to keep secrets has been delegated, it seems almost inconceivable that anybody would know all of them.

It seems to me that either someone knows about all the compartments, or there is a high likelihood of redundant and overlapping compartments being created accidentally. It probably is okay for one clearance to actually be represented as five or six because of bureaucracy (that's basically just denormalization, and product management systems deal with it all the time); the real problem is that project X might be half-covered by compartment A, and half by compartment B, and you just end up getting assigned both (thus exposing you to more classified material than you should know) because there's no one with enough oversight to create compartment C = A∩B, make A and B into A'=A-C and B'=B-C, and then just assign people A and C while leaving out B.

Basically, imagine trying to do library science without being able to know what information you're managing. The classifications created would quickly become senseless and incoherent.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#39

Post by mindcrime »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #16

There's a flip side to this as well: as a voter, I don't know what information my elected leaders have when making decisions. In theory, with a small amount of secrecy needed to make diplomacy and security function, this makes sense. The problem is that it's not actually working in practice. There are so many un-elected people who have jobs for life and also the ability to classify broad swaths of information that th…

Taken to this level, it is a very unstable way to maintain consent of the governed.

Bingo. Even a radical anarcho-capitalist like me is grudgingly willing to accept a minimal amount of government, in the sense that Bastiat described it as no more than "the collective extension to our individual right to self defense." BUT... with a big caveat that said "government" must be accountable to "We The People" and must be subject to our oversight, supervision and - possibly - dismantling if it fails to serve the end it was organized for. But when this entity accumulates and hoards crucial information about the world we live in, it's removed itself from that oversight and supervision.

This is the same reason why - despite the fact that I generally don't advocate "black hat" hacking - I don't really have a problem with people hacking government systems and releasing information contained therein, and why I generally support Bradley Manning. We need to know what our government is doing and how/why it's justifying those decisions, in order to maintain the feeling that the government is serving us.

Not only does it make it impossible for an elected official to take advice, it makes it impossible for voters to make reasoned and educated judgments about the actions of officials. Secrecy corrupts everything it touches. That's why it must be aggressively minimized.

This.

Re: The mental gymnastics involved in having a high security clearance.

#40

Post by rdl »

scott_s wrote: post #35
Sniffnoy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If this were not so, targets could simply sidestep our intelligence collection vectors. Sorry, could you explain this? I can't seem to put this together.

If the people we're gathering intelligence on (the "targets") knew how we are collecting that intelligence (the "vectors"), then they'd be able to avoid being spied on.

Also, sometimes the vectors themselves, if exposed, would cause diplomatic incidents -- human intelligence (spies), placed within a foreign government, or illegal means of collection (black bag job breakins, tapping undersea cables in national waters, ...).
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