Comment by extension
14 years ago
Once the authority to keep secrets has been delegated, it seems almost inconceivable that anybody would know all of them.
14 years ago
Once the authority to keep secrets has been delegated, it seems almost inconceivable that anybody would know all of them.
It seems to me that either someone knows about all the compartments, or there is a high likelihood of redundant and overlapping compartments being created accidentally. It probably is okay for one clearance to actually be represented as five or six because of bureaucracy (that's basically just denormalization, and product management systems deal with it all the time); the real problem is that project X might be half-covered by compartment A, and half by compartment B, and you just end up getting assigned both (thus exposing you to more classified material than you should know) because there's no one with enough oversight to create compartment C = A∩B, make A and B into A'=A-C and B'=B-C, and then just assign people A and C while leaving out B.
Basically, imagine trying to do library science without being able to know what information you're managing. The classifications created would quickly become senseless and incoherent.
This is the United States Federal Government we're talking about here, remember.
Holy crap is there every redundancy and overlap!