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But are they declassifying the actual documents this time? > The CIA started feeding flawed shuttle designs — NASA rejects — to the Soviet spies, which they passed off as new “improvements.” It worked. Included in the phonies were outdated heat shield designs that could have risked the spacecraft burning up on reentry. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...
I remember back in school one student got called in front of the program CO and threatened with jail time for removing "classified material" from the school building after barracks inspectors found nuclear-related paperwork in the student's bedroom. (This was years before the student was assigned to an actual ship where they could learn the half dozen actually important secret numbers.) The student pointed out that they did not remove any paperwork from the school; the papers in their bedroom were printouts from wikipedia. The student was ordered in writing to not read about nuclear engineering outside of the school building, regardless of the source. Even though it's all publicly available information that is taught in any undergrad engineering program.
But are they declassifying the actual documents this time? > The CIA started feeding flawed shuttle designs — NASA rejects — to the Soviet spies, which they passed off as new “improvements.” It worked. Included in the phonies were outdated heat shield designs that could have risked the spacecraft burning up on reentry. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...
How cool. I wonder if we still do awesome things like this.
Unfortunately, the nuclear scientist patsy they used, who was supposed to just deliver the designs, noticed some flaws. So he corrected them.
So they now have the real designs.
But are they declassifying the actual documents this time? > The CIA started feeding flawed shuttle designs — NASA rejects — to the Soviet spies, which they passed off as new “improvements.” It worked. Included in the phonies were outdated heat shield designs that could have risked the spacecraft burning up on reentry. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...
They could have just given them the updated designs. Those risked burning up on reentry too (and of course did in the case of Columbia).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 adver…
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 co…
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".
Aside from increasing contractor availability this has the bonus of increasing the access to these capabilities for actual operations (both ours and our allies'). If your magic satellite that can tell who in a crowd is running a fever is SAPed then you might not be able to use it to help your troops or your allies hunt down artillery launches (as an example). So then you need to either do some parallel construction t…
As it stands, I recall seeing at least a few images of objects in space in the news attributed to sources I know for an absolute fact were not the real sources and no one I'm aware of ever questioned it. So at least some of this stuff is already getting disseminated to the public. It's pretty rare for the content of an image to be classified. More often, it's specifics of the collection capability, i.e. collection angles, occlusion, weather conditions, or in many cases the fact that something can be collected from space at all, but if you tell the viewer it came from a ground telescope, or a collection of the ground was from aircraft rather than satellite, they'll believe it. They have no way of telling otherwise without collection metadata.
Hopefully, this effort can further enhance the way files get portion-marked to make it easier to release content when metadata has been redacted, though. My still favorite anecdote is analying test data in which the file was literally just plain ASCII text of the preamble to the US Constitution but it was marked TS/TK/NF because the collection capability was sensitive enough that every file it generated automatically got marked as such even though it had no metadata at all. It was just text. The metadata was in a completely separate file.
But are they declassifying the actual documents this time? > The CIA started feeding flawed shuttle designs — NASA rejects — to the Soviet spies, which they passed off as new “improvements.” It worked. Included in the phonies were outdated heat shield designs that could have risked the spacecraft burning up on reentry. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/real-life-rogu...
> The CIA started feeding flawed shuttle designs — NASA rejects — to the Soviet spies, which they passed off as new “improvements.” It worked. Included in the phonies were outdated heat shield designs that could have risked the spacecraft burning up on reentry. They could have just given them the updated designs. Those risked burning up on reentry too (and of course did in the case of Columbia).
It's important to note the cost savings of declassification. Overclassification is incredibly expensive and burdensome (though it also covers the asses of a lot of incompetent bureaucrats). I used to work in the naval nuclear community. There are honestly only a handful of numbers related to the nuclear power plant on each class of ship that actually need to be classified, but every single scrap of paper associated w…
What do you actually mean by numbers in this context?
It's important to note the cost savings of declassification. Overclassification is incredibly expensive and burdensome (though it also covers the asses of a lot of incompetent bureaucrats). I used to work in the naval nuclear community. There are honestly only a handful of numbers related to the nuclear power plant on each class of ship that actually need to be classified, but every single scrap of paper associated w…
We got called not long after by the site's compliance officer asking why classified data was being accessed by non-ITAR-compliant personnel. It was explainable and we got through it just by implementing and adhering to an additional deployment control, but I still remember him telling us that the products being built don't become classified until the serial number label is applied to the board. That label is what ultimately identifies the product and the program ... so if we had a way of testing things without labeling them (for example, by creating dummy labels that didn't mean anything but could still be UUIDs), it was no problem. So then we adapted our software to allow for these dummy serials for testing purposes ... and we also created a classified compliance trigger in our BI tools to prevent manufacturing history for any classified unit from being visible to an non-compliant personnel after the manufacturing step where the real SN label was applied.
Speaking of naval nuclear, I grew up in Lynchburg, VA, home of BWXT, and my dad is a [retired] naval officer & nuclear engineer who spent his career at B&W (commercial). I had several friends who went to work at BWXT and they took data controls extremely seriously. No computers (including cell phones) allowed through the gate. No paper allowed back out, and any new hire who didn't already have a security clearance had to work in a physically airgapped (trailers, enclosed in razor wire fencing) office on not much of anything until they got cleared. For some it took 6-9 months after they were hired.
It's important to note the cost savings of declassification. Overclassification is incredibly expensive and burdensome (though it also covers the asses of a lot of incompetent bureaucrats). I used to work in the naval nuclear community. There are honestly only a handful of numbers related to the nuclear power plant on each class of ship that actually need to be classified, but every single scrap of paper associated w…
that in particular seems extreme, but I know someone who worked on nuclear reactors for the DOD and they were told to not comment on/confirm anything related to nuclear as a CYA, even if it was widely available public info.