
90-year-old Cryptanalytic Efforts Must Stay Secret, says NSA - wolframio
https://nsarchive.wordpress.com/2016/06/20/90-year-old-cryptanalytic-efforts-must-stay-secret-says-nsa/
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cperciva
It's easy to imagine scenarios where this continued classification could be
appropriate. Remember, classification doesn't just attach to facts; it also
attaches to _how that information was obtained_.

If, for example, the censored paragraph was "a US agent placed within the
Soviet Communist Party participated in the design of Soviet ciphers and
deliberately weakened them", and that agent continued working in the USSR for
several decades, then it could only be declassified if _everything that agent
had ever been involved with_ was no longer sensitive.

~~~
wavefunction
So you're saying that a 91 year old (I'm being conservative in assuming your
hypothetical agent was at least one years old at the time of their mission) is
a good reason to maintain the classification of state secrets that have most
assuredly out-lived anyone else involved?

~~~
taneq
More like that that agent, if they were involved in this 90-year-old crypto
action, may later have been involved in something else (a mole in the Russian
nuclear program, say) in such a way that their exposure as an American agent
would compromise the result of that other thing as well (in my hypothetical
example, maybe they'd embedded a remote kill switch in all Russian nuclear
ICBMs, which would still be there today).

~~~
eru
Or they just had a protege, another American agent. Think starting a
'dynasty'.

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chris_va
No one (well, almost no one) ever got fired keeping something confidential.
Agencies always get referred to as "The NSA" or something, as if the
collective consciousness of everyone working there should be merged.

Let's replace "The NSA" with "Joe, who happens to work at the NSA, doing a
spot check".

 _Joe, who happens to work at the NSA, while doing a spot check decides to
keep redactions in 20-year-old document confidential_ doesn't sound like as
much of a headline, though.

~~~
caf
The very ordinariness of the institutionalised bias against declassification
and its predictable result of large numbers of things remaining unnecessarily
classified is the whole point.

~~~
chris_va
Point, but there is generally a specific timeframe for documents to combat
that tendency. Usually ~25 years. The document in question here is only 20
years old, even if the information it references is older.

~~~
colejohnson66
I thought anything written past 72 year should ago is declassified? Or is that
just for the census?

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1945throwaway
This seems like a good thread to ask this: is there any way to find out if a
document has been declassified? I ask this because I came into possession of a
document from 1945 which is marked classified (it is a prototype computer user
manual) and I would like to make sure that it is actually declassified. If it
isn't, then even asking about it seems... problematic. I expect that it would
be, but with the amount of overclassification that occurs, I can't bet on it.

At some point I'd love to donate it to the ACM museum or something, but I
don't want to get in trouble over a historical document, so I'm just keeping
it for now.

~~~
tbihl
It looks like they redid classification markings in 2006, so what I thought I
knew (and likely the same for plenty of people here) is probably not
applicable. In particular, there's a release date now, or a statement saying
how the declassification is handled.

Here's the newer instruction so you can see if any of it is applicable to what
you found:
[https://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/af053006.pdf](https://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/af053006.pdf)

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jonathankoren
I one time saw a story on 60 Minutes many years ago that was either about the
CIA or the NSA. It doesn't really matter. During the interview, the reporter
asked what the oldest thing still classified was. It's from World War I, and
refers to sources and methods. When pressed that everyone involved is dead,
and the former enemies are now allies, the answer came back that it was
sources and methods.

Apparently, it's recipe for invisible ink.[0]

[0]
[http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/jmpoldest.html](http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/jmpoldest.html)

~~~
jkot
I think Vatican archives might have some older classified documents.

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iaw
On a related note, is anyone familiar with the blank segments on ITAR? I have
been puzzling over what they could be reserved for for a few years now.

~~~
erlehmann_
Could you be more specific? If so, please be.

~~~
iaw
§120.43 is marked [Reservered]

§120.50 and §120.51 are marked XXX

§121.1 : e-f and j-w after "Note to Paragraph (d)" in Category IV are Reserved

    
    
      d and h-w in Category VI are reserved
    

etc.

[1][https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/itar.html](https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/itar.html)

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dogma1138
This blog post is the reason why the NSA or any other government agencies do
not want to declassify documents at all.

What the blog post fail to understand is that:

a) Intelligence operations run for years and decades, you wouldn't be hard
pressed to find 5 documents over a period of 90 years which are cross
referenced / linked by CODEWORD level programmes. So if this document was
referring "SPRING CRICKET" which references "SPRINGROLL" which references
"CHINATOWN" which references "BOUNCY CASTLE" which might reference "PRISM" for
all we know. You don't give people bread crumbs.

b) Intelligence operations involve human assets, even if it was in the 1920's
it can still have human assets who are alive or their descendants, and it
doesn't have to be a US agent, it could be some soviet mathematician who
passed information to the US (willingly or not) that has living descendants in
modern day Russia and there is absolutely no reason to colossally fuck up
their lives today by revealing that fact.

Declassifying information is a very expensive process you need to do a full
impact analysis on every word in every paragraph and cross reference it with
any other materials that are revealed, considering the age of these documents
many of them might not be digitized which makes this process even more
expensive and time consuming.

Beyond that once a document is set for release a very expensive process of
document recovery is kicked off, all copies and revisions of the document must
be collected to ensure that no revisions other than the approved for
declassification and no unredacted copies remain to be found or leaked.

And once you release some document which is redacted if by some coincidence it
is missed by the OSINT departments of foreign intelligence agencies some
'BuzzFeed' "reporter" that his next meal of cup ramen noodles is dependant on
his daily blogspam quota will dig it up and make a click bait out of it and
depending on how sensational they make out to be going to be picked up by some
bigger news outlets and by then every counterintelligence outfit will step up
their game if only to have a response to this for their next oversight hearing
and if they kick their bug sweeps and mole hunts into high gear they might
actually find something even it's completely unrelated.

The likelihood of a tool/method/source that has been used in 1925 being
relevant today is about zero, the likelihood of them not being able to
complete an impact analysis on that paragraph and hence having to redact it or
not wanting to get the grandchild of some Russian asset harassed by the FSB
the media and the immediate public is considerably more likely.

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joebergeron
>> "Details of what was thought to be a Bolshevik code used in Java in 1928"

What a rich history Java has. Wonder if they were developing trusty ol'
JavaScript back then too... ;)

~~~
mikeash
Of course, JavaScript has been around for a long time.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_script](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javanese_script)

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rm_-rf_slash
I suspect there are psychological reasons for this. Excessive classification
projects more power than may actually exist. The longer the redaction lasts,
the more credence is lent to vast conspiracy theories: aliens, illuminati,
take your pick.

Either way, the message is clear: "don't fuck with us."

~~~
orblivion
Similarly, there is real tactical advantage to hide the fact that there is
nothing interesting behind the curtain. It keeps the enemies guessing. This is
why they say "I can neither confirm nor deny..." (Source: a podcast I listened
to)

~~~
taneq
Also it adds plausible deniability for the times they _do_ have some
interesting McGuffin behind said curtain. "Sorry guys, it's just some moth-
eaten old folders but gotta follow procedures, ya know..."

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kazinator
> _reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to
> national security._

So they're holding out for ... _indescribable_ damage? ;)

~~~
Godel_unicode
Essentially, yes. If you can't describe the damage it doesn't count. Isn't
that what we want?

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ktRolster
I understand. That was the time of the star gate chasm, with those secrets de-
classified, the location of the translerion will be revealed, and the wrong
candidate will be elected president.

~~~
jessaustin
Yeah they don't want to reveal to Red Skull that they've located the
Tesseract.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
Is this some reference I'm not getting?

~~~
jessaustin
Hey at least my goofy words are googleable. "Translerion", that's some top-
shelf secret voodoo right there. We're probably all on a very exclusive and
soon-to-be very unfortunate list, now.

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andrewclunn
Man that must be one shell of a cipher.

