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.
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.