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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

When I worked in a SCIF, we had people who inspected what we brought in and out. I always assumed this was standard practice. I must be wrong.

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There are some 1-person SCIFs.

Not every SCIF is a multi-story black tint'd cube.

It maybe was when you were there. But just look at how almost all aspects of our government work today and how dysfunctional it all is. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see that standards have dropped or people just do not care anymore.

Do you have any hard evidence that it's changed or that it's disfunctional relative to other large organizations?

Overclassification has been a problem for years. Every year, millions of classified documents are generated--not all of it top-secret, scif-class stuff, but still restricted. Which makes the job of keeping tabs on all of it difficult. It is arguable that too many people have classification authority, and that a lot of material is classified for categorical reasons but have no real security meaning.

Oh, definitely. For anyone who hasn't been, you should really see the meme folders wasting space on these resources.

This is generally true, but there is the human factor of people getting lax. You would think something as simple as passive RFID stickers on all documents could be done to automatically scan as you go in and out of doors, but there is such a huge "nothing wireless, ever!" bias that the whole system is going to be stuck in error-prone human controls forever.

Presumably "nothing wireless, ever" makes it much easier to detect malicious wireless devices...

I could see legitimate risk with RFID tags. One of the tools sigint uses is simply the volume of transmissions going from one point to another. You can wrap tagged documents in RF blocking covers but eventually you'll have to unwrap them to view. You might even be able to infer the kinds of documents being moved if you track routes. White House to DoE etc.

Sounds far-fetched but there have been some pretty wild methods lately about timing screen flashes to determine hash creation and stuff like that. Nothing is too far-fetched to intelligence gathering.

When you have secrets that affect the fate of humanity, freedom, your country, and millions or possibly billions of lives, it seems reasonable to not broadcast any information.

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