SECRET ISN'T IT

Once one delves into the code word world one loses touch with reality. SSES would occasionally share some data with us mortals. It was usually pointless but it revealed meaningful capabilities that should have been part of OUR toolkit.

Intel made its own world and then it strained to the max to make it stay in that world. Not much use there. You know, not much value added to the guy fighting the war since all the intel stayed at TS/SCI code word and could not possibly be shared with the guys on the pointy end. Oh, sure the VADM and his intel staff knew it but they didn't/couldn't share it. So how much use was that? It usually boiled down to deploying surveillance units and telling them to be vigilant. Thank you. Vigilant for what? Can't tell you.

I deployed in response to that sort of garbage many times over the last 25 years and it was all garbage. We have signs and warnings they would say. Show me I would say in return and they would toss back that we did not have the need to know what caused the nation to suddenly divert a C5 to the mission of deploying a surveillance unit overnight to the Far East, Middle East. A lot of us held TS/SCI but outside the intel community. We didn't have the need to know.

All the spies and operatives burned to death when the top leadership of the spy sheds at CIA and FBI sold out make me question the value of anything we develop beyond the national technical means. Probably we'll find in a year or two that traitors at NSA canceled out a lot of the technical means capabilities too.

As a very old hand I find it absolutely amazing that some soviet agents convinced EVERYBODY to create the SIPRNET and put all that stuff online where it could be drained off every day, every single day.

When I joined up classified was classified, need to know enabled access and it was all controlled. With SIPR, it all went on line. And we told ourselves that was useful. Perhaps. Can you suss out the underlying madness of making a thing a SECRET for national security purposes and then allowing 2 million people access to that secret?

We have gone way down a path that I don't think is acceptable in a republic. SECRET used to be something that caused major damage to the republic if it became known. We used to do annual page checks of secret material and you don't want to know what we did with the TS. Now we've created some organizations into being that routinely classify the local news in Chicago as TS/SCI/code AND we've created organizations beyond the law to execute people beyond the Pale. (look up Pale/Ireland. It had a dreadful meaning once and it ain't based on color though it was most assuredly race based).

There are several networks that combine all that is known that run at different levels of classification. Ask me if I think that the best government sponsored hackers on earth haven't compromised all of them. Go on. Ask.

Still, I used to work for a guy. He was XO and CO of an OCEANUNIT. He told me one day about how the US Embassy in a certain country once delivered his mail to his ship. It came on a host nation bus, unescorted, including all his new crypto. Red spies didn't, don't have to work very hard.