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.
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.