I agree; not for a minute do I believe this was an accident.

Just to pick this particular nit:

From my long ago experience (United States Army Security Agency, 1968 - 1972) "Classified" material is all limited access. The three grades of classified material are "Confidential", "Secret", and Top Secret".

Security clearances were granted for any of these grades after FBI investigation. If your clearance is "Top Secret", you can also see "Confidential" and "Secret".

I don't remember if "Confidential" information was ever "codeword", which is an additional limiting factor, but I dealt with "codeword" material (signals intelligence, AKA Sigint) in "Secret" and "Top Secret", as my clearance was "Top Secret-Codeword". People without the particular codeword clearance should not have access to that particular material; for us it was generally done to preserve our information sources and acquisition methods, since how you found out was often more important than what you actually did find out. Codewords were five characters with no repeats, i.e., "Spook" would not be used because it had two O's, but "Black" or "Ultra" would be OK. BTW, we sigint wienies were generally called spooks among ourselves, and our own classified communication was done by the "Black" section of the particular post. Ultra was the British effort to read Nazi codes (which they made the movie about).

And as I remember, the juicy stuff was "Confidential" - "Top Secret" was boring because we were generally used that classification for stuff that showed our technical capabilities and resources.

All that having been said, we were well drilled about not screwing around with classified info, and would never take anything out of the operations building (such as NSA); we would burn used paper rather than shred or otherwise dispose of it.

Like I said, this was long ago, but it worked then and I don't see why it would be different now.

Some other little additions. Below all that is 'eyes-only', which is about as secure as passing notes in class.

The real neat stuff comes in when you begin playing with 'need to know'. Take the general in the Enigma example. If he was cleared to know about Ultra, but did not have need to know, say, specific messages, he gets no access. Of the two sides, need to know trumps all hell out of clearance. So Sandy had to not only have specific clearances to the information, he had to have a need to know, approved by someone higher up the food chain than him. Perhaps looking at this person might be interesting.

Geoff,

Yes, I know the thing about need-to-know within need-to-know. I almost mentioned that, but I was speaking generally.

I think that Sandy Berger was legitimately cleared for all of this, since he was, of course, an NSA. And he wrote a lot of this material. He was by and large reviewing memos he sent, or that were sent to him.

The problem isn't that he was cleared to read it. It's that he stole it, and then destroyed -- or "inadvertently discarded" -- some of it.

Although the fact that he did that sort of casts doubt on the wisdom of having originally granted him such a high clearance.

Tom,

"Confidential." Right, my mistake. I'll correct that.

Incidentally, the very fact that the British had broken Enigma was kept secret until 1974. A fact which adds to my amusement every time I see some nitwit going on about how conveeeenient it is that some of the information the Butler report relied on is still secret.

The need-to-know issue is highly relevant to the Valerie Plame case; it's hard to believe that anyone at all in the White House would have the need to know the real identity of any CIA agent. I'm willing to bet that it will turn out to be a codeword thing: the "leaker" was Georgetown-cocktail-party-cleared to know Plame's secret.

...I was a communicator in the Corps for 5 years... "codeword" refers to SCI information... compartmented (or codeworded) information.. indeed, need to know information... a standard clearance did not allow you to see something that was classified "Confidential - CODEWORD".. if you had a normal TS clearance, you couldn't even view a lower classified codeworded document.. you had to have a SCI clearance... be it Confidential, Secret, TS, etc... it had to have the SCI tag on the end...

Eric,

What does SCI stand for?

Ace, you hit the nail on the head with the "fruitful fishing" analogy. Some of the episodes in Cryptonomicon, a very good book by Neal Stephenson, showed the elaborate lengths you can go to to conceal a source. One that I particularly liked was how, after decrypting messages indicating sailing dates when supplying Rommel in North Africa, they would send out observation planes BEFORE bombing the convoys, so that the Germans would think the convoys had been spotted by normal reconnaissance; the real object, and danger, came from making sure that the observation planes had been spotted by the convoys.

Well done to Eric for filling in the gap on clearance plus need to know. I was trying to give the short course. Stop me before I get into the difference between encryption and encoding.

And I don't know what SCI stands for either.

Tom,

I read a nonfiction book -- I think maybe called The Codebreakers -- that recounts a similar story. A funny one.

[Pardon if the details of this account are erroneous. This is from memory. The details may be botched, but the central point -- and the punchline -- are accurate enough.]

The Allies were reading German traffic in the Mediterranean or Africa. I think actually they were reading the Italians' traffic, but that often contained the Germans' plans.

So, every time the Allies used that information against the Germans, they had to come up with some bullshit alternative explanation of how they got the information. As you mention, one technique was to always have several observation planes that "just happened" to fly over the target, just before an attack.

But someone realized they couldn't keep going to this well, so one message sent to an Allied general -- intended to be decrypted and read by the Germans -- claimed that the Allies knew about a German air squads' actions and intent because there was a local Italian who was watching the airfields and communicating their take-off times and such to the allies.

At any rate, the Allied General was delighted to have such a well-placed observer, and he immediately drew up a list of things this phantom spy should go and look at. He became frustrated by HQ, who kept telling him that the "spy" just couldn't do what he wanted for one reason or another.

More triva regarding classifications, from the contractor/project side:

Aside from the three levels of clearance (which, incidentally, Honeywell spinoff "L3 Communications" has the L3 for Level Three, or Top Secret, classification - Secret being Level Two, and Confidential being Level One), certain programs are "special access". Meaning that regardless of your clearance minimum, you must be cleared to work on the program.

For the trivia minded, a discussion of history on this subject regarding the old Tagboard/Senior Bowl project (D-21 drone, originally designed to be mated to a SR-71) is here: http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/srbowl001.htm

Author describes, among other things, his experiences at being classified Top Secret, Special Access to the Senior Bowl project.

Enjoy...

Per Google, SCI could be either Sensitive Compartmented Intelligence or Sensitive Compartmented Information

Take your pick, six of one if you ask me.

For bonus hilarity, programs with classified code words have unclassified code numbers that refer to the code words. So if a "Special Access Required" program was code named "Twilight Hamster", it might also be known as code 403, of which you could talk about "program 403" or "DoD 403" all you wanted, but uttering the words "Twilight Hamster" was streng verboten.

I think the "code word" phrase came into play because all documents classifed under a special access program will have "classification/code word" at the top and bottom of each page. For example, the aforementioned project would have "TOP SECRET/TWILIGHT HAMSTER" all over its docco.

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