90-year-old Cryptanalytic Efforts Must Stay Secret, says NSA

It&#x27;s easy to imagine scenarios where this continued classification could be appropriate. Remember, classification doesn&#x27;t just attach to facts; it also attaches to <i>how that information was obtained</i>.<p>If, for example, the censored paragraph was &quot;a US agent placed within the Soviet Communist Party participated in the design of Soviet ciphers and deliberately weakened them&quot;, and that agent continued working in the USSR for several decades, then it could only be declassified if <i>everything that agent had ever been involved with</i> was no longer sensitive.

No one (well, almost no one) ever got fired keeping something confidential. Agencies always get referred to as &quot;The NSA&quot; or something, as if the collective consciousness of everyone working there should be merged.<p>Let&#x27;s replace &quot;The NSA&quot; with &quot;Joe, who happens to work at the NSA, doing a spot check&quot;.<p><i>Joe, who happens to work at the NSA, while doing a spot check decides to keep redactions in 20-year-old document confidential</i> doesn&#x27;t sound like as much of a headline, though.

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&#x27;t, then even asking about it seems... problematic. I expect that it would be, but with the amount of overclassification that occurs, I can&#x27;t bet on it.<p>At some point I&#x27;d love to donate it to the ACM museum or something, but I don&#x27;t want to get in trouble over a historical document, so I&#x27;m just keeping it for now.

I one time saw a story on 60 Minutes many years ago that was either about the CIA or the NSA. It doesn&#x27;t really matter. During the interview, the reporter asked what the oldest thing still classified was. It&#x27;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.<p>Apparently, it&#x27;s recipe for invisible ink.[0]<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fas.org&#x2F;sgp&#x2F;news&#x2F;jmpoldest.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fas.org&#x2F;sgp&#x2F;news&#x2F;jmpoldest.html</a>

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.

This blog post is the reason why the NSA or any other government agencies do not want to declassify documents at all.<p>What the blog post fail to understand is that:<p>a) Intelligence operations run for years and decades, you wouldn&#x27;t be hard pressed to find 5 documents over a period of 90 years which are cross referenced &#x2F; linked by CODEWORD level programmes. So if this document was referring &quot;SPRING CRICKET&quot; which references &quot;SPRINGROLL&quot; which references &quot;CHINATOWN&quot; which references &quot;BOUNCY CASTLE&quot; which might reference &quot;PRISM&quot; for all we know. You don&#x27;t give people bread crumbs.<p>b) Intelligence operations involve human assets, even if it was in the 1920&#x27;s it can still have human assets who are alive or their descendants, and it doesn&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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 &#x27;BuzzFeed&#x27; &quot;reporter&quot; 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&#x27;s completely unrelated.<p>The likelihood of a tool&#x2F;method&#x2F;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.

&gt;&gt; &quot;Details of what was thought to be a Bolshevik code used in Java in 1928&quot;<p>What a rich history Java has. Wonder if they were developing trusty ol&#x27; JavaScript back then too... ;)

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.<p>Either way, the message is clear: &quot;don&#x27;t fuck with us.&quot;

&gt; <i>reasonably be expected to cause identifiable or describable damage to national security.</i><p>So they&#x27;re holding out for ... <i>indescribable</i> damage? ;)

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.

Man that must be one shell of a cipher.