There's a whole bunch of stuff like this. Turn up at a classified government site and ask to see the silos, and watch a press officer do impressive mental gymnastics.
In 1993, an MP finally "revealed" the location to draw attention to the idiocy by exercising parliamentary privilege and mentioning the location in parliament.
For those of you who have not been to London, or isn't aware which tower I'm talking about, this is it (note the pictures showing it in the London skyline...):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BT_Tower
It is rather hard to miss, given that it rises 177 meters above street level in a part of London where the nearest other highrise is a 117m building about 1km away...
It also had a viewing platform and restaurant open to the public for 15 years while it was still an official secret...
The UK is quite fantastic at this. When you know about stuff like this, it puts UK comedy like Monthy Python's Dead Parrot Sketch[1] into very different perspective as a good illustration of behaviour that officialdom in the UK see as perfectly rational.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993
1993 is the year bookmakers cut their odds on the monarchy being abolished by the year 2000 from 100/to 1 to 50/1
New Teletext service on ITV and Channel 4
Ford unveils its new Mondeo
Unemployment is still just short of the 3,000,000 (no real change there then?)
and
The Bank of England lowers interest rates to 6%
Not having a go, just interesting what was also going back then.
E.g. in 2004, a government source leaked a document purporting to show that Bush discussed plans with Blair to bomb Al Jazeera, and eventually it got into the hands of Daily Mirror who put it on their front page.
Government officials subsequently tried to threaten the other national papers with the Official Secrets Act if they republished the information (it didn't work; the papers ignored the threats).
I'm sure the overall level of idiocy in this respect has fallen as they've come to terms with a reality where trying to restrict information like this just makes things worse, but it's not because they wouldn't like to.
I am fairly certain I remember the BBC broadcasting the christmas morning special of the Multi Coloured Swap Shop[0] from the BT Tower at least once during the "secret" period.
It did used to have US nuclear artillery under a dual-key arrangement, but admittedly those didn't have silos.
What? There's no gymnastics. They just don't talk to you. "We don't confirm or deny that" is one standard answer.
The first section referenced in OP says:
>A relevant telecommunications provider who has been required under this Part to provide assistance in giving effect to a targeted equipment interference warrant, and any person employed for the purposes of the business of the relevant telecommunications provider, may not, without reasonable excuse, disclose to any person— (a) the existence and contents of the warrant
>(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), it is, in particular, a reasonable excuse if the disclosure is made with the permission of the person who imposed the requirement.
So the fact that the FBI made it public is a reasonable excuse to talk about it.
The second section says:
>A person to whom a relevant notice is given, or any person employed or engaged for the purposes of that person’s business, must not disclose the existence and contents of the notice to any other person.
We have
>In this section “relevant notice” means— (a) a national security notice under section 188, or (b) a technical capability notice under section 189
while
> But a national security notice may not require the taking of any steps the main purpose of which is to do something for which a warrant or authorisation is required under this Act.
So the first category couldn't have included this, which required a warrant. The second category seems like it could apply (although there's some ambiguity over whether it applies to entities outside the UK which I haven't dug through), but it's for general "maintain ability to comply".
>The only steps that may be specified in a technical capability notice given to a person are steps which the Secretary of State considers to be necessary for securing that the person has the practical capability of providing any assistance which the person may be required to provide in relation to any relevant authorisation
So a specific warrant would not fall under that.
I don't see how any section that the OP refers to would apply.
Do you have a link to the specific tests?
Yet disclosing its location would still have caused you to run foul of the Official Secrets Act for years.
The UK government and courts has very little sense of humour about these things and you most certainly can not in general assume that making information public even in the most blatant manner will mean that they won't still insist that the information is still legally restricted as if it is still a secret.
It remains to be seen if "reasonable excuse" as interpreted under UK law will be interpreted the way you assume it should, but assuming that making information public in one context means it should no longer be treated as secret has often been a bad bet in the UK, even when it gets totally ridiculous.
Is that a typo, or is it "doublethink"?!
The opposite of "secret", meanwhile, is "unrestricted"—it's about whether people charged to act in the country's interests (public servants, politicians, members of the military, and corporate employees who have signed contracts granting them clearances) are required to avoid mentioning it in any document or speech that would be public-accessible.
A well-known example is the content of the Edward Snowden leaks. They're also "public secrets": things civilians are allowed to talk about, but which people with clearance—having more restricted rights than regular people—are prevented from talking about to civilians.
Do note that there are good reasons for this distinction, although it can seem absurd. Things are restricted or classified in large chunks. Because of this, a part of a secret can be public (e.g. the name and purpose of a secret project), without the entire secret becoming public.
If public awareness meant declassification, you'd see a lot more still-secret information leaking out, as various people would think—since there's no "here's exactly what was leaked and what wasn't" memos that go around—that some part of the secret was leaked which wasn't, and is therefore fine to talk about.
The simplest way to avoid leaking anything else is to just go on pretending that even the first part of the secret hasn't been leaked and preventing everyone from talking about even that—so that the rest of the secret can't be socially engineered out of them.