Was talking to a friend tonight that spent 5 years in a DOD SCIF.
Let me preface.
In years of talking to this friend they have never told me anything they saw or did in the SCIF. True ironclad on the security.
Anyway, they said something interesting to me tonight.
When they went for intelligence training, one of the first things they were taught was, all classified information is actually unclassified.
"You just have to be smart enough to piece it together"
So i asked them, "kind of like Sundance at CTH about Russiagate and the current barrage of doctors talking out about Covid and the vaccines"?
" and about Q"
They replied, "Yes, precisely"
I apologize for use of they as pronoun. Hopefully, it is understood.
I hold a TS/SCI clearance. Your friend is correct, although they're being a bit unnecessarily vague.
Information itself is almost (almost) never classified. However, the means to gather that information is classified.
In a lot of instances, if you find out that someone knows something about you that they shouldn't, then you can probably figure out how they know and stop doing that thing.
In other words, classification is used to protect the means of gathering intelligence, not necessarily to protect the intelligence itself.
Let me put it in layman's terms. If your parents walk in and say "Hey little Timmy, we know you've been looking at boobies on the internet". You can then do some deductive reasoning... "Hrmmm, I only look at boobies on the internet on my phone when they go to sleep and I always clear the browser history, but sometimes I download my favorite booby pictures... so they must have the password to my phone and looked at my pictures."
So then little Timmy deletes the pictures and changes the password on his phone to keep his parents from accessing his phone.
If the people you're collecting on know that they're being collected on, then they can either feed bad intel into that channel or stop using it. So you classify information to hide the fact that you're collecting it.
That is fascinating. To be honest, my friend is very vague for reason. They have healthy income and are cautious of government, but love the people.
We live in clown world.
Thank you for the reply. It was a good one.
Further note: As someone that has a TS/SCI, many of our former Presidents would not even pass that clearance.
Crazy clown world we live in, haha.
On another note, if I had done what HRC did with classified data, then I would be under the prison, yet she's still walking free.
We no longer live in a democratic republic where the rules apply to everyone equally no matter your social strata. Instead we live in a country with a protected neo-royal class that can get away with literally anything.
It depends on the type of information being protected. Engineering specs and designs are protected to prevent others from being able to steal or copy sensitive designs. Intelligence is protected to prevent others from determining how you obtained that intelligence.
Yep, that's why I said almost never classified on it's own. However, pieces of raw intelligence outnumbers engineering specs by something like ten million to one, so it's far more of the former than the latter.
How do I get into a position using my TS/SCI? Mine expired a few years ago.
If it expired a few years ago, then you're in a bit of a quandary. The backup on activating clearances and even renewing current clearances is so large that I'm two years past my re-investigation date and they simply keep extending my clearance.
However, if you want a cleared position again, then there are some companies out there so desperate for certain types of work that they'll push your clearance through for you.
The best thing to do is hit up ClearanceJobs.com and see what's out there in your skill set and then talk to some recruiters. They can tell you the process for it far better than I can.
Thank you for the help. I really wish I would not have let it lapse. I think I have a membership to that site. I also have dangerzonejobs.com memebership as well. I totally forgot about those.
Me also and I spent time adjudicating sf86s back in the day.
Thanks for sharing,
Grammatically, it's OK to say "they" when you don't want to reveal someone's identity and it has nothing to do with "my pronouns are what/ever".
I do this also when I do not want to reveal someone's personal information as far as their gender goes (See?! I used "their" rather than "his/her").
The same is true when you are unsure of what that person's gender is when talking to someone -- and yes I know it's a bit SJW-ish -- but you can say, "they/their" instead of "he/she". It has been around for a long time until the stupid SJW crowd ruined the pronouns thing.
So you're cool with us, but when you start saying, "Hey I'm CigarTsar and my pronouns are..." then get the fuck outta here! lol
Lol, thanks for that.
So, where is lil'Tommy hiding the boobies now?
We ALL know lil'Tommy is still looking.
Ooh! "That's Classified" right?
This is Alex Jones prophetic power, reading between the lines.
Kind of falls in line with 'you have more than you know '.
The real interesting thing about a lot of TS/SCI type info is that you can find an enormous amount of it published in very unclassified places. For instance, the exact TS mission I had in the AF was published plain as day by Time Life books of all things. Bit of a shocker when I read it ... and it was published 20 years prior to when I joined. It's all out there somewhere, and what isn't, is generally not too hard to figure out if you look at the shape of the hole in the info.
There is a NATO document concerning OSINT.
http://www.oss.net/dynamaster/file_archive/030201/ca5fb66734f540fbb4f8f6ef759b258c/NATO%20OSINT%20Handbook%20v1.2%20-%20Jan%202002.pdf
Combine that with resources Corey Diggs uses, or what Yaacov Appelbaum is doing, some real interesting things can surface.
Given the nature of threats, it seems imperative to be on top of things. Real time data comes in very handy.
It seems to me the latter is another reason why things are classified. it provides an advantage, both strategic and tactical, in certain theaters.