Home Office Admission

[Ross Anderson]

> Government has a clear definition of material which should be treated as
> SECRET.  I can't remember precisely what it is (and I'm probably not
> supposed to tell you if I could)

In the old days, Secret meant simply that `compromise could cost lives'
while Top Secret meant `compromise could cost many lives'.

There have been a series of reviews, the last under John Major, which
steadily expanded the definitions to include economic harm and even
political embarrassment:

[SECRET:] The compromise of this information or material would be
likely to raise international tension; to damage seriously relations
with friendly governments; to threaten life directly or seriously
prejudice individual security or liberty; to cause serious damage to
the operational effectiveness or security of UK or allied forces or
the continuing effectiveness of highly valuable security or
intelligence operations; to cause significant damage to UK economic
and commercial interests; or to lead to additional government
expenditure on a scale likely to affect the UK economy as a whole.

(see my course notes, cited earlier today, or my web page)

> It is likely that all but a tiny fraction of intercepted data would
> fall well outside the definition.

Wrong. Under the traditional rules, all comsec product was classified
above Top Secret (TS/SCI, TS/Umbra, ...) because of concern that the
leakage of such information could compromise sources and methods.
From WW2 onwards there was a rule that no-one with access to this kind
of product could ever go somewhere they might be captured, and it was
not shared with most of the political leadership.

Instead, intelligence analysts produced bowdlerised compilations of
intelligence for distribution to people such as commanders in the
field and the political leadership. These compilations are classified
Secret. There's quite a lot about this in successive proceedings of
theNational Information Systems Security Conference, including matter
on the technical design of the `compartmented mode workstations' that
the analysts use.

> So I'm not surprised that they won't apply their SECRET protection

It's a scandal that they even proposed anything less than Top Secret
(Codedword).

Ross