14 May 2008
 
Controlled Unclassified

Gentle Colleagues,
 
I apologize in advance for anyone who may, or even those who may not have occasion to interact with me prior to the opening of Big Pink’s pool. It will be another ten days, as the crow flies, before I can put water over my head and effectively take cover from the world. The comforter and the pillow are not making an effective enough seal.
 
This is going to take a lot of cool, blue, chlorinated water.

I am precluded by the proprietary nature of my business from nattering on about the sundry joys of this extremely busy time. There are things that should not be shared willy-nilly, and must perforce remain protected in the bosom of the company.
 
Business secrets are not classified things, since industry does not have a magic wand to wave like the government does. They have to be protected by common sense.
 
When working with once of the great commercial laboratories, I came across interesting demonstrations of the Wand. Scientists are insular creatures, happy and content with their experimentation, and operating on the cutting edge of their disciplines, sometimes on the cutting edge of the physical world itself, would sometimes demonstrate a capability that, once extrapolated into a practical system, would become of immense use in the national security arsenal.
 
Accordingly, one morning the rumpled white-coat would park his car in the vast asphalt lot, and wander down to his lab only to find it padlocked, sealed, and placed in to the Classified world.

Sometimes the academic could not pass successfully through the clearance process, so you can imagine how very strange everything became, and why sometimes people have classified dreams.
 
It is a way of life, and a way of thinking. In some programs there were reliability criteria associated with continued employment; I remember one stamp in the personnel jacket that meant a cleared person had to accompany another for certain medical procedures which involved the administration of anesthetics.
 
The safeguard was to protect the nation from the  inadvertent muttering of secrets in the twilight between rational thought and drugged sleep.
 
I don’t know why cleared persons were not assigned to sleep  with one another, since the continuation of that line of logic is unassailable.
 
The system put in place was complex and heavily nuanced. The basic structure is simple enough. You start with “confidential” information, the disclosure of which carries risk. Cooler information is “secret,” and really cool stuff is “Top Secret.” There is nothing higher than that, or so they say, though at that level there is an off ramp into a bewildering world of vertical chambers that are specially compartmented.
 
You can read all about it in the histories of World War Two, which is where the current system originated. With the exception of re-labeling some of them, and adding a gazillion new ones, the structure is all the same. Or, you could pick up a copy of Executive Order 12958, which is the National Security Classification Guide, as amended. It is online, and is unclassified, though since it contains critical information, it probably should be controlled.
 
The EO is under revision, by the way, as are many things in this twilight of the current Administration. There are some real problems that need to be resolved, and some good people have wrestled long and hard with them.
 
Since 9/11, we have wrestled with the idea that there is a lot of information out there in the open source world- the one you live in. Pick up any newspaper or log onto any website and there it is: information, word after word of it.
 
If you can put enough words together, it is possible to figure out what is going on. Naturally, the government became alarmed. In the early days of the Internet all sorts of things were put on line, diagrams of power-plants, dams and electrical grids, for example, things that used to be locked up in back offices of utility plants.
 
This was sensitive information that could be used to great harm.
The traditional means of handling this sort of information was to term it “For Official Use Only,” which meant that it did not have to travel in a locked pouch, or be stored in a safe, but needed safeguards.
 
With the incredible amount of potentially damaging information readily available, and with over 50,000 law enforcement or first response entities in the country, the concept of Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) information came into vogue. The term covered a multitude of sins, though no one could quite agree on what they were.
 
The problem was the number of agencies and offices that had their own definitions of what that information might be. It was pretty confusing, as you might imagine, and very important, since the basic legislation underpinning the War on Terror told the government to improve the sharing of information.
 
The Information Sharing Environment, the ICE, as it is known in the trade, became a morass into which hundreds of bureaucrats disappeared without a trace.
 
There have been some letters that came back, and one of them was signed out by the President this week as a new Executive Order. He can do that for months and months to come, I understand.
 
The term “Sensitive but Unclassified” has been banished to the outer darkness. A new, and uniform system has been decreed. I personally feel safer knowing that we now have a system for the Designation and Sharing of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).
 
You will be comforted to know that a council has been established to provide a Framework for “designating, marking, safeguarding, and disseminating information designated as CUI.”
 
This is an immensely important step, and if you think I am making fun of it you would be wrong. We have been down this road before, since the people in the business are not stupid. I recall one of the unintended consequences of trying to fix things.
 
There used to be a special handling instruction for secret information that could not be released to foreign nationals- SECRET NO FOREIGN DISSEMINATION was the full name. It was cumbersome and more than a little ambiguous, since the Brits and the Aussies and the Canadians were all honorary Americans in most cases.
 
A bold stroke came down on day like a thunderclap from on high: the NOFORN handling system was eliminated. That was going to fix everything.
 
It took a couple days for the euphoria to wear off. Some bureaucrats at Fort Meade reasoned that if there was no longer a way to determine if something was not releasable to foreigners, that logically meant that nothing could. Everything became NOFORN.
 
Nothing that idiotic could happen again, of course. We are a lot smarter these days, and naturally much safer. But there are unintended consequences even to good ideas. With the thunderclap of CUI, I think you might find that the Government just classified everything.
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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