At 09:13 AM 8/10/95 -6, you wrote: As with Peter and Nathan, I'm also a former tool of the military-industrial complex (:-), and Peter's right that the probably source of this assertion is that there's seldom any "vanilla" TOP SECRET data - anything that's sensitive enough to get TOP SECRET handling rules is usually part of some compartmented project (compartmentalization is a formalized version of Need to Know, where you need to be read into PROJECT X to get PROJECT X data.) Sensitive Compartmented Information is one well-known class of stuff. Codeword projects are identified by words picked off a list of content-free names; some codewords that have been outed in the past are ULTRA and UMBER. In addition to project-specific classifications, some of the kinds of labels on material include variants on INTEL, CNWDI (Critical Nuclear Weapons Design Information), RESTRICTED DATA (less critical nuclear weapons data), FORMERLY RESTRICTED DATA ( a weird classification for material that isn't RESTRICTED DATA any more but they still don't want to let folks see.) And then there's the sort of data that's SECRET by the time the people doing the grunt-work see it, but it's various extracts of REALLY SPOOKY DATA, that only a few people back in some agency know the whole picture, and it's parcelled out so one group of people gets asked to build a laser-scanner like this, and another gets asked to build a computer system like that, or a mirror adjuster like that, and none of the grunts know whether the whole deal is personal teleportation system (the cover project) or a space-based assassination system, much less how they decided on the targets.... #--- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, Freelance Information Architect, stewarts@ix.netcom.com # Phone +1-510-247-0664 Pager/Voicemail 1-408-787-1281 #--- Storyteller makes no choice - soon you will not hear his voice. His job was to shed light, and not to master. RIP, Jerry