NSA warned Bush it needed to monitor networks

[John Kelsey]

...
>Obviously any bureaucrat with the authority to categorize
>something as secret will more or less automatically so stamp
>any information that passes through his hands, to inflate his
>importance, and thus his job security and prospects for
>promotion.  

I think a bigger issue here is a sort of rational (to the bureaucrat) risk aversity: if he declassifies something and it turns out he's leaked something valuable (in the eyes of his boss), he's in trouble.  As long as there's no cost to stamping "secret" or "FOUO" on every document his office produces, this is safer for him than any other course of action.   Along with this, going through a document to make sure there's nothing secret in there is a lot more work than just classifying it.  The same logic works in the private world--how much of the stuff you've seen under NDA was genuinely going to cause a problem to the company that produced it, if someone just posted it to their website?

...
>This results in "top secret" information being treated as not
>very secret at all, as documented by Richard Feynman, which in
>turn results in ever higher secrecy classifications, more top
>than top, a process of classification inflation and debasement. 

I suspect something very similar happens with the watchlists.  I wonder how many different layers of watchlist there are by now....

>    --digsig
>         James A. Donald

--John Kelsey

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