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Comment by snoshy | Hacker News Reader

Seems safe to assume that the Speaker of the House and her aides would have access to classified national intelligence that might not be open to the world, and would be valuable in it's own right. Things like progress and updates with Covid vaccines, their deployment plans, and lack of security around them would make information like it ripe for the black market and adversary governments in these times.

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Access to classified intelligence means that they are allowed to enter a secure room/facility and view the material. They still should not be taking said material out into an unclassified environment.

There are different levels of classification that carry different restrictions. Also, govt infosec being what it is, there are likely plenty of lapses.

Even the lowest level of classification (confidential) means that the data should not be stored on an unclassified system, and has additional physical storage requirements that Pelosi's main office doesn't meet.

At worst, the laptop had FOUO/CUI (for official use only/controlled unclassified information) data. Not great for that to get leaked; but not that scary from a national security perspective (we're pretty aggressive about classifying stuff).

If anything damaging comes out of this, I would expect it to be of a political nature; where something that Pelosi and friends would prefer to keep secret gets leaked, but doesn't have much influence on national security.

Sure. Unless their security policies are completely broken, any laptops they are using should also have disk-level encryption.

Black market? Legislators use that info on the stock market. Somebody is going to go Robinhood on defense, construction and pharma stocks with that laptop.

What would enemy spies get out of that.

Even prima fascie top military secrets like battle plans (those must be updated and shuffled regularly to prevent a situation exactly like that) have very little immediate usefulness.

It's 21st century, it's beyond anybody's ability to hide things like size, dislocation, and basic capabilities of your force

Oh you think the generals readily involve old Pelosi with the battle plans? I sort of doubt they would trust her with anything digital that’s supposed to be a secret.

I think the same, and I very much doubt US general staff being inept to a point of holding war plans on a computer.

Intel reports? Again, most real deal intel sources would be either kept real deal secret, or really not being such.

Pelosi just had a confidential conversation with the general in charge of US nuclear codes.

Just wondering, small thing; did you mean to type "disposition" instead of "dislocation"?

No, I mean dislocation, as in military dislocation.

https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/SR-1998-CPMW-Tactic...

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