Even if all sources were unclassified, there still looms Classification by Aggregation. (An NSA phone number is Unclass; the NSA phone Book is Confidential.) Ultimately, the pulled Clearance/loss of contract is the Tall Peg. PHM --- Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com> wrote:
At 08:22 AM 08/02/2001 -0700, John Gilmore wrote:
Just because it is public DOES mean it's declassified. There are Supreme Court cases on this. If the government can recover all the copies, then it can REclassify it. But if it can't, then the document is not classified.
It's not that straightforward, because Postol has a security clearance, so he's under more restrictions than somebody who doesn't.
If he obtained the information entirely from already-public sources, as opposed to obtaining documents with classification markings that don't also have declassification markings on them, he should be safe from prosecution, but that doesn't mean they can't pop his security clearance for it.
===== Paul H. Merrill, MCNE, MCSE+I, CISSP * PaulMerrill@ACM.Org __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger http://phonecard.yahoo.com/