Security Clearances Fiasco 2: Another Bugaloo

 I wrote this piece a few years ago about how serious it is not to store classified documents seriously.  This week, the story is not documents but a group chat via an insecure system.  Lovely.  Now, the bullshit artists are trying to claim that the info was not classified.  Sure.  First, to be clear, the key official with authority to declassify stuff can't just say stuff was declassified after it is revealed that the info was mishandled.  There is a process by which stuff is declassified, and this ain't it.  

Ok, how does classification work?  Let's see what I remember (I learned this stuff my first week 20+ years ago and is very much burned in my head since, well, it was the only stuff that might have led to jail if I screwed up).

 Any document (and yes, a group chat counts) has a number of pieces of information.  Each bit of info, each clause or paragraph gets its own rating, so that a document may consist of unclassified stuff, some confidential info, some secret, and some top secret stuff:

(C)  Indicated confidental

(U) Unclassified

(S)  Secret

(TS) Top secret.

I guess there would also be either SCI--for need to know, compartmentalized info, but, guess what?  Since I wasn't cleared for SCI, I never saw any SCI stuff.  I inferred that mostly involved Special Ops or NSA stuff, but that is just a guess.

Anyhow, there are other classifications: NOFORN for not to be released to foreigners, NATO Only to be released to NATO countries, SFOR only to be released to countries participating in the NATO stabilization mission in Bosnia.. which included the Russians so not much secrety stuff there,  and so on.

 The key is that when a doc has a bunch of different info at varying levels of secrecy, the entire doc is rated at the level of the most secret piece.  So, a doc with lots of open source info having one bit of Top Secret in it would be classified as Top Secret.

Guess what a war plan consists of?  Heaps of Top Secret stuff.  For the Houthis group chat texts, the most secret thing there is probably the reference to the targeting of an individual.  We can't be certain of how they did that, but it probably involved a human source, given the context.  Guess who needs to know that?  Damned few people, and definitely not those on this chat.  So, probably TS/SCI--top secret, sensitive compartmentalized info.   You know what the opposite of compartmentalized is?  A 19 person chat on insecure channels.  

So, don't buy any excuse this assholes give--they were reckless because they were trying to show each other how tough they are, how cool they are.  So, they broke heaps of rules ... and laws.  But since their boss did so quite flagrantly, and since he pardons his loyalists, they can act with impunity. This is what impunity looks like.  A shit show.