Classified Information Quotes

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Heinrich replied, “The fact that Kramer’s radio station has  been wiped out by the British Navy in now classified information!
Michael G. Kramer (His Forefathers and Mick)
I was told you are carrying around a USB. Is there classified information on it?
Karl Braungart (Lost Identity (Remmich/Miller, #1))
It’s not classified information, Chace. You can read all about it on Wookieepedia.” His body started shaking again, as did his voice when he asked, “Wookieepedia?” “Stop making fun at me when I’m pissed,” I snapped. “Wookieepedia?” Chace repeated, his body now rocking, taking mine and the bed with it.
Kristen Ashley (Breathe (Colorado Mountain, #4))
Valek had learned the best way to distribute information was to classify it as secret.
Maria V. Snyder (Shadow Study (Soulfinders, #1))
Why doesn’t the CIA hire your grandmother to interrogate terror suspects? She does a much better job than they do of getting classified information.
Meg Cabot (Royal Wedding (The Princess Diaries, #11))
What are the dead, anyway, but waves and energy? Light shining from a dead star? That, by the way, is a phrase of Julian's. I remember it from a lecture of his on the Iliad, when Patroklos appears to Achilles in a dream. There is a very moving passage where Achilles overjoyed at the sight of the apparition – tries to throw his arms around the ghost of his old friend, and it vanishes. The dead appear to us in dreams, said Julian, because that's the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star… Which reminds me, by the way, of a dream I had a couple of weeks ago. I found myself in a strange deserted city – an old city, like London – underpopulated by war or disease. It was night; the streets were dark, bombed-out, abandoned. For a long time, I wandered aimlessly – past ruined parks, blasted statuary, vacant lots overgrown with weeds and collapsed apartment houses with rusted girders poking out of their sides like ribs. But here and there, interspersed among the desolate shells of the heavy old public buildings, I began to see new buildings, too, which were connected by futuristic walkways lit from beneath. Long, cool perspectives of modern architecture, rising phosphorescent and eerie from the rubble. I went inside one of these new buildings. It was like a laboratory, maybe, or a museum. My footsteps echoed on the tile floors.There was a cluster of men, all smoking pipes, gathered around an exhibit in a glass case that gleamed in the dim light and lit their faces ghoulishly from below. I drew nearer. In the case was a machine revolving slowly on a turntable, a machine with metal parts that slid in and out and collapsed in upon themselves to form new images. An Inca temple… click click click… the Pyramids… the Parthenon. History passing beneath my very eyes, changing every moment. 'I thought I'd find you here,' said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry. His gaze was steady and impassive in the dim light. Above his ear, beneath the wire stem of his spectacles, I could just make out the powder burn and the dark hole in his right temple. I was glad to see him, though not exactly surprised. 'You know,' I said to him, 'everybody is saying that you're dead.' He stared down at the machine. The Colosseum… click click click… the Pantheon. 'I'm not dead,' he said. 'I'm only having a bit of trouble with my passport.' 'What?' He cleared his throat. 'My movements are restricted,' he said. 'I no longer have the ability to travel as freely as I would like.' Hagia Sophia. St. Mark's, in Venice. 'What is this place?' I asked him. 'That information is classified, I'm afraid.' 1 looked around curiously. It seemed that I was the only visitor. 'Is it open to the public?' I said. 'Not generally, no.' I looked at him. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn't time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point. 'Are you happy here?' I said at last. He considered this for a moment. 'Not particularly,' he said. 'But you're not very happy where you are, either.' St. Basil's, in Moscow. Chartres. Salisbury and Amiens. He glanced at his watch. 'I hope you'll excuse me,' he said, 'but I'm late for an appointment.' He turned from me and walked away. I watched his back receding down the long, gleaming hall.
Donna Tartt (The Secret History)
Accountability is the essence of democracy. If people do not know what their government is doing, they cannot be truly self-governing. The national security state assumes the government secrets are too important to be shared, that only those in the know can see classified information, that only the president has all the facts, that we must simply trust that our rulers of acting in our interest.
Garry Wills (Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State)
By instructing students how to learn, unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Psychologist Herbert Gerjuoy of the Human Resources Research Organization phrases it simply: ‘The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction—how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn.
Alvin Toffler
Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.
Carl Sagan
The lines between his brows smooth. “I need you to know that no matter what information I hold, you trust me, love me enough to realize I’d never let it hurt you. I’m not the easiest person to know, but I’ve learned my lesson, believe me. Even if it’s classified, I won’t withhold any information that affects your agency.” He swallows, then balances his weight on one arm and runs the back of his hand down the side of my cheek. “I need to know you won’t run, that you know you’ll never have to.
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
The average expert was a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, academic degrees, and even (for some) access to classified information made no difference. They were bad at short-term forecasting, bad at long-term forecasting, and bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that some future event was impossible or nearly impossible, it nonetheless occurred 15 percent of the time. When they declared a sure thing, it failed to transpire more than one-quarter of the time.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
It’s not classified information, Chace. You can read all about it on Wookieepedia.
Kristen Ashley (Breathe (Colorado Mountain, #4))
What is your job?” “Now that’s classified information, ma’am. If I tell you, I may have to kiss you.” “Shouldn’t that be, ‘I’d have to kill you?’” “No, it’s definitely kiss you,” he says seriously. “I think I would know.” And by the look on his face, I know he really does want to kiss me.
J.B. Morgan (Holly Lane)
In Hinayana Buddhism, practice is classified in four ways. The best way is just to do it without having any joy in it, not even spiritual joy. This way is just to do it, forgetting your physical and mental feeling, forgetting all about yourself in your practice.
Shunryu Suzuki (Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice)
Our investigation required us to answer two questions. The first question was whether classified documents were moved outside of classified systems or whether classified topics were discussed outside of a classified system. If so, the second question was what the subject of the investigation was thinking when she mishandled that classified information.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received.
James B. Comey
In Secretary Clinton’s case, the answer to the first question—was classified information mishandled?—was obviously “yes.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
I have never seen any indication that Powell discussed on his AOL account information that was classified at the time, but there were numerous examples of Secretary Clinton having done so.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban - those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.
Sibel Edmonds
The underlying ideology within social media is not to enhance choice or agency, but rather to narrow, filter, and reduce choice to benefit creators and advertisers. Social media herds the citizenry into surveilled spaces where the architects can track and classify them and use this understanding to influence their behavior. If democracy and capitalism are based on accessible information and free choice, what we are witnessing is their subversion from the inside.
Christopher Wylie (Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America)
Even with the misdemeanor, the Department of Justice has long required that investigators develop strong evidence to indicate government employees knew they were doing something improper in their handling of the classified information.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
SCI: Special Compartmentalized Information. Classified information concerning or derived from sensitive intelligence sources, methods, or analytical processes. Often found on private basement servers in upstate New York or bathroom closet servers in Denver.
Jack Carr (In the Blood (Terminal List, #5))
President Reagan proposed further broadening the use of the polygraph test. All executive departments were authorized to “require employees to take a polygraph examination in the course of investigations of unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
Paul Ekman (Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage)
Some children like how-to-do-it or all-about-everything type books, but I suspect parents like them best because they look so educational. These really should be in a separate category because they don't usually classify and literature but are more nearly manuals of information. Paul Hazard suggests that instead of pouring out so much knowledge on a child's soul that it is crushed, we should plant a seed of an idea that will develop from the inside.
Gladys M. Hunt (Honey for a Child's Heart)
I might be seeing you all sooner than you think,” said Charlie, grinning, as he hugged Ginny good-bye. “Why?” said Fred keenly. “You’ll see,” said Charlie. “Just don’t tell Percy I mentioned it … it’s ‘classified information, until such time as the Ministry sees fit to release it,’ after all.” “Yeah, I sort of wish I were back at Hogwarts this year,” said Bill, hands in his pockets, looking almost wistfully at the train. “Why?” said George impatiently. “You’re going to have an interesting year,” said Bill, his eyes twinkling. “I might even get time off to come and watch a bit of it. …” “A bit of what?” said Ron.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
I know people who read interminably, book after book, from page to page, and yet I should not call them 'well-read people'. Of course they 'know' an immense amount; but their brain seems incapable of assorting and classifying the material which they have gathered from books. They have not the faculty of distinguishing between what is useful and useless in a book; so that they may retain the former in their minds and if possible skip over the latter while reading it, if that be not possible, then--when once read--throw it overboard as useless ballast. Reading is not an end in itself, but a means to an end. Its chief purpose is to help towards filling in the framework which is made up of the talents and capabilities that each individual possesses. Thus each one procures for himself the implements and materials necessary for the fulfilment of his calling in life, no matter whether this be the elementary task of earning one's daily bread or a calling that responds to higher human aspirations. Such is the first purpose of reading. And the second purpose is to give a general knowledge of the world in which we live. In both cases, however, the material which one has acquired through reading must not be stored up in the memory on a plan that corresponds to the successive chapters of the book; but each little piece of knowledge thus gained must be treated as if it were a little stone to be inserted into a mosaic, so that it finds its proper place among all the other pieces and particles that help to form a general world-picture in the brain of the reader. Otherwise only a confused jumble of chaotic notions will result from all this reading. That jumble is not merely useless, but it also tends to make the unfortunate possessor of it conceited. For he seriously considers himself a well-educated person and thinks that he understands something of life. He believes that he has acquired knowledge, whereas the truth is that every increase in such 'knowledge' draws him more and more away from real life, until he finally ends up in some sanatorium or takes to politics and becomes a parliamentary deputy. Such a person never succeeds in turning his knowledge to practical account when the opportune moment arrives; for his mental equipment is not ordered with a view to meeting the demands of everyday life. His knowledge is stored in his brain as a literal transcript of the books he has read and the order of succession in which he has read them. And if Fate should one day call upon him to use some of his book-knowledge for certain practical ends in life that very call will have to name the book and give the number of the page; for the poor noodle himself would never be able to find the spot where he gathered the information now called for. But if the page is not mentioned at the critical moment the widely-read intellectual will find himself in a state of hopeless embarrassment. In a high state of agitation he searches for analogous cases and it is almost a dead certainty that he will finally deliver the wrong prescription.
Adolf Hitler
Despite the endless drumbeat in the conservative media, filled with exaggerated scandals and breathless revelations of little practical import, Hillary Clinton’s case, at least as far as we knew at the start, did not appear to come anywhere near General Petraeus’s in the volume and classification level of the material mishandled. Although she seemed to be using an unclassified system for some classified topics, everyone she emailed appeared to have both the appropriate clearance and a legitimate need to know the information.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
strong team working solely on this special access program. This means only those around this table—and some hand-picked intelligence specialists and NSC officials—have access to this most sensitive of classified information.” Lieutenant General Black leaned forward and allowed his gaze to wander around the assembled faces. “Assistant Director Meyerstein’s word is law. She
J.B. Turner (Hard Kill (Jon Reznick, #2))
Writers and other artistic personalities historically attempted to describe art, what consist of, and inform us how a person creates art. If art is so difficult to describe and quantify, why do we feel compelled to attempt to describe the ineffable? At its core, does all art represent an attempt to communicate the unsayable? Is any discussion about art absurd? Is classifying a piece of writing as literature simply another form of elitism?
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
On July 6, 2015, the Bureau received a referral from the inspector general of the intelligence community, a congressionally created independent office focused on finding risks and vulnerabilities across the nation’s vast intelligence community. The referral raised the issue of whether Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had mishandled classified information while using her personal email system. On July 10, the FBI opened a criminal investigation.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
Finally, another large-scale study [of false rape allegations] was conducted in Australia, with the 850 rapes reported to the Victoria police between 2000 and 2003 (Heenan & Murray, 2006). Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, the researchers examined 812 cases with sufficient information to make an appropriate determination, and found that only 2.1% of these were classified as false reports. All of these complainants were then charged or threatened with charges for filing a false police report." Lonsway, K. A., Archambault, J., & Lisak, D. (2009). False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault. The Voice, 3(1), 1-11.
David Lisak
Between the Benghazi Committee, which would take depositions from Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, and Jake Sullivan among other Hillary aides, the drip-drip nature of evolving federal lawsuits, and judicial orders for the State Department to release Hillary’s e-mails on a rolling basis, the early months of the campaign became a private and public hell. It was only a matter of time before voters would know that Hillary had not told the truth about not sending or receiving classified information.
Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
Sensei?” she asked. “Yes?” “Why are you always leaving about halfway through a workout to give Oberon a snack?” “What? Well, he’s a good dog.” “Granted, but he’s a good dog all the time, and the only times you interrupt what you’re doing to give him a snack are during workouts.” “I reward him sometimes for using big words. And sometimes I reward him for shutting up.” Now would be a good time to shut up. Deal. “So what did he say just now?” Granuaile asked. “I’m sorry, but that’s classified information.
Kevin Hearne (Two Ravens and One Crow (The Iron Druid Chronicles #4.3))
Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of “biological dark matter.” In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier.
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery, #2))
Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
James Comey should have been fired the day he held a very public news conference in July 2016 announcing his recommendation that Hillary Clinton not be criminally prosecuted for mishandling classified information and jeopardizing national security. He acted without authorization and in dereliction of his duty to follow the policies and regulations established by both the FBI and the Department of Justice. In so doing, he demeaned the work of the agency he led, damaged the integrity of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency, and breached the public’s trust.
Gregg Jarrett (The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump)
It would have been so easy for her--men would have told her anything. They’d have given up secret information just like that.” Snapping her fingers, Ashley coolly confronted Parker’s indignation. “Come on, give us guys a little credit. Why would any high-ranking officer share classified information with his little groupie, huh?” “Because those high-ranking officers were men.” Roo’s stare was as condescending as her tone. “And men only think with their--” “Downstairs brain,” Ashley finished. While the guys conceded with slight embarrassment, Roo and Miranda laughed. “Good one, Ash.
Richie Tankersley Cusick (Walk of the Spirits (Walk, #1))
Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified.
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery, #2))
Although the British Home Office knew all about his communist past, by the spring of 1941 Fuchs was working with Peierls and other British scientists on the highly classified Tube Alloys project. In June 1942, Fuchs received British citizenship—by then, he was already passing information to the Soviets about the British bomb program.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
The cult of government secrecy is growing. ¶ The practice has become so widespread and routine that, according to testimony given before the House government information sub-committee, more than a million Federal employees are empowered to classify information. This means that one out of every 180 Americans is stamping the word 'secret' on papers.
William J. Lederer (A Nation Of Sheep)
Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified. Even in the blood, up to two percent is a sort of “biological dark matter.” In many ways, this biological dark matter, this sea of unknown viruses and bacteria, is the ultimate frontier. Almost all viruses are harmless until they jump to another host—a life form different from their natural hosts. The virus then combines with a completely new genome and causes a new and unexpected reaction—an illness. That was the ultimate danger with viruses,
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery, #2))
[ Dr. Lois Jolyon West was cleared at Top Secret for his work on MKULTRA. ] Dr. Michael Persinger [235], another FSMF Board Member, is the author of a paper entitled “Elicitation of 'Childhood Memories' in Hypnosis-Like Settings Is Associated With Complex Partial Epileptic-Like Signs For Women But Not for Men: the False Memory Syndrome.” In the paper Perceptual and Motor Skills,In the paper, Dr. Persinger writes: On the day of the experiment each subject (not more than two were tested per day) was asked to sit quietly in an acoustic chamber and was told that the procedure was an experiment in relaxation. The subject wore goggles and a modified motorcycle helmet through which 10-milligauss (1 microTesla) magnetic fields were applied through the temporal plane. Except for a weak red (photographic developing) light, the room was dark. Dr. Persinger's research on the ability of magnetic fields to facilitate the creation of false memories and altered states of consciousness is apparently funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency through the project cryptonym SLEEPING BEAUTY. Freedom of Information Act requests concerning SLEEPING BEAUTY with a number of different intelligence agencies including the CIA and DEA has yielded denial that such a program exists. Certainly, such work would be of direct interest to BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKULTRA and other non-lethal weapons programs. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. Persinger as an Interview Source in his book on remote viewing operations conducted under Stargate, Grill Flame and other cryptonyms at Fort Meade and on contract to the Stanford Research Institute. Schnabel states (p. 220) that, “As one of the Pentagon's top scientists, Vorona was privy to some of the strangest, most secret research projects ever conceived. Grill Flame was just one. Another was code-named Sleeping Beauty; it was a Defense Department study of remote microwave mind-influencing techniques ... [...] It appears from Schnabel's well-documented investigations that Sleeping Beauty is a real, but still classified mind control program. Schnabel [280] lists Dr. West as an Interview Source and says that West was a, “Member of medical oversight board for Science Applications International Corp. remote-viewing research in early 1990s.
Colin A. Ross (The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists)
David had spent the last fourteen days, while Kate was away, learning how to operate the ship’s systems. He was still learning them. Kate had enabled the voice command routines to help with any commands David couldn’t figure out. “Alpha, what is Dr. Warner’s location?” David asked. The disembodied computer voice of the Alpha Lander boomed into the small room. “That information is classified.” “Why?” “You are not a senior member of the research staff.
A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis World (The Origin Mystery #3))
The government must realize that it is the leader and not the slave of public opinion; that public opinion is not a static thing to be discovered and classified by public-opinion polls as plants are by botanists, but that it is a dynamic, ever changing entity to be continuously created and recreated by informed and responsible leadership; that it is the historic mission of the government to assert that leadership lest it be the demagogue who asserts it.
Hans J. Morgenthau (Politics Among Nations)
During mission planning, we had intelligence concerning dogs that might impede our goal and were part of the target’s contingencies. The exact method used to neutralize aggressive dogs in the field is classified information. However, Special Ops has some really incredible dogs. In fact, during the raid to kill Osama bin Laden, the highly trained men of SEAL Team Six had with them a uniquely trained dog as part of the mission. SEAL canines are not your standard bomb-sniffing dogs. The dog on the bin Laden mission was specially trained to jump from planes and rappel from helicopters while attached to its handler. The dog wore ballistic body armor, had a head-mounted infrared (night-vision) camera, and wore earpieces to take commands from the handler. The dog also had reinforced teeth, capped with titanium. I would not want to try the techniques this book recommends on this dog. Thank God he’s on our side.
Cade Courtley (SEAL Survival Guide: A Navy SEAL's Secrets to Surviving Any Disaster)
I need you to know that no matter what information I hold, you trust me, love me enough to realize I'd never let it hurt you. I'm not the easiest person to know, but I've learned my lesson, believe me. Even if it's classified, I won't withhold any information that affects your agency." He swallows, then balances his weight on one arm and runs the back of his hand down the side of my cheek. "I need to know you won't run, that you know you'll never have to.
Rebecca Yarros (Iron Flame (The Empyrean, #2))
Flouting federal laws governing record-keeping requirements. Failing to preserve emails sent or received from her personal accounts, as required by law. Circumventing the Freedom of Information Act. Instructing her aides to send classified materials on her unsecure network. Running afoul of the “gross negligence” clause of the Espionage Act (which meant prosecutors would not have to prove “intent” to find her guilty). Pretending she didn’t know that Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) was classified. Transferring classified material that originated at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and other intelligence sources, to her unsecured network. Authoring hundreds of emails with classified information to people who did not have security clearance. Inducing aides to commit perjury. Lying to the FBI. Engaging in public corruption by using the office of secretary of state to feather the nest of the Clinton family foundation.
Edward Klein (Guilty as Sin: Uncovering New Evidence of Corruption and How Hillary Clinton and the Democrats Derailed the FBI Investigation)
In the EPJ results, there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts. The first failed to do better than random guessing, and in their longer-range forecasts even managed to lose to the chimp. The second group beat the chimp, though not by a wide margin, and they still had plenty of reason to be humble. Indeed, they only barely beat simple algorithms like “always predict no change” or “predict the recent rate of change.” Still, however modest their foresight was, they had some. So why did one group do better than the other? It wasn’t whether they had PhDs or access to classified information. Nor was it what they thought—whether they were liberals or conservatives, optimists or pessimists. The critical factor was how they thought. One group tended to organize their thinking around Big Ideas, although they didn’t agree on which Big Ideas were true or false. Some were environmental doomsters (“We’re running out of everything”); others were cornucopian boomsters (“We can find cost-effective substitutes for everything”). Some were socialists (who favored state control of the commanding heights of the economy); others were free-market fundamentalists (who wanted to minimize regulation). As ideologically diverse as they were, they were united by the fact that their thinking was so ideological. They sought to squeeze complex problems into the preferred cause-effect templates and treated what did not fit as irrelevant distractions. Allergic to wishy-washy answers, they kept pushing their analyses to the limit (and then some), using terms like “furthermore” and “moreover” while piling up reasons why they were right and others wrong. As a result, they were unusually confident and likelier to declare things “impossible” or “certain.” Committed to their conclusions, they were reluctant to change their minds even when their predictions clearly failed. They would tell us, “Just wait.” The other group consisted of more pragmatic experts who drew on many analytical tools, with the choice of tool hinging on the particular problem they faced. These experts gathered as much information from as many sources as they could. When thinking, they often shifted mental gears, sprinkling their speech with transition markers such as “however,” “but,” “although,” and “on the other hand.” They talked about possibilities and probabilities, not certainties. And while no one likes to say “I was wrong,” these experts more readily admitted it and changed their minds. Decades ago, the philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote a much-acclaimed but rarely read essay that compared the styles of thinking of great authors through the ages. To organize his observations, he drew on a scrap of 2,500-year-old Greek poetry attributed to the warrior-poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” No one will ever know whether Archilochus was on the side of the fox or the hedgehog but Berlin favored foxes. I felt no need to take sides. I just liked the metaphor because it captured something deep in my data. I dubbed the Big Idea experts “hedgehogs” and the more eclectic experts “foxes.” Foxes beat hedgehogs. And the foxes didn’t just win by acting like chickens, playing it safe with 60% and 70% forecasts where hedgehogs boldly went with 90% and 100%. Foxes beat hedgehogs on both calibration and resolution. Foxes had real foresight. Hedgehogs didn’t.
Philip E. Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)
Lest you dismiss this as just another conspiracy theory, in November 1998 in an interview with The Observer, former US Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry told a remarkable story. Korry described still classified cables, and information censored in papers, but now available under the FOIA. He had served under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He told how US companies from Cola to copper used the CIA as an international debt collection agency and investment security force. The Observer reported that the CIA's Oct. 1970 plot to overthrow Chile's Allende was the result of a plea for action a month earlier by PepsiCo chairman Kendall to the company's former lawyer, President Nixon.
Carol Rutz (A Nation Betrayed: Secret Cold War Experiments Performed on Our Children and Other Innocent People)
Kay found six and a half acres of land just off the Ouachita River at the mouth of Cypress Creek outside of West Monroe, Louisiana. It was at the end of a dirt road in one of the most heavily forested areas on the river. The classified advertisement in the newspaper described it as a “Sportsman’s Paraside.” When we drove out to see the land, I knew it was perfect as soon as we crested the hill that leads down to the house where we still live today. The place was absolutely perfect. The real estate lady sensed my excitement and told me, “Now, Mr. Robertson, I’m required by law to inform you that this home sits in a floodplain.” “Perfect,” I told her. “I wouldn’t want it if it didn’t.
Phil Robertson (Happy, Happy, Happy: My Life and Legacy as the Duck Commander)
Laura Poitras I knew as a documentarian, primarily concerned with America’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Her film My Country, My Country depicted the 2005 Iraqi national elections that were conducted under (and frustrated by) the US occupation. She had also made The Program, about the NSA cryptanalyst William Binney—who had raised objections through proper channels about TRAILBLAZER, the predecessor of STELLARWIND, only to be accused of leaking classified information, subjected to repeated harassment, and arrested at gunpoint in his home, though never charged. Laura herself had been frequently harassed by the government because of her work, repeatedly detained and interrogated by border agents whenever she traveled in or out of the country. Glenn Greenwald I knew as a civil liberties lawyer turned columnist, initially for Salon—where he was one of the few who wrote about the unclassified version of the NSA IG’s Report back in 2009—and later for the US edition of the Guardian. I liked him because he was skeptical and argumentative, the kind of man who’d fight with the devil, and when the devil wasn’t around fight with himself. Though Ewen MacAskill, of the British edition of the Guardian, and Bart Gellman of the Washington Post would later prove stalwart partners (and patient guides to the journalistic wilderness), I found my earliest affinity with Laura and Glenn, perhaps because they weren’t merely interested in reporting on the IC but had personal stakes in understanding the institution.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
MEANWHILE, a group of scientists in Chicago, spurred on by Szilard, organized an informal committee on the social and political implications of the bomb. In early June 1945, several members of the committee produced a twelve-page document that came to be known as the Franck Report, after its chairman, the Nobelist James Franck. It concluded that a surprise atomic attack on Japan was inadvisable from any point of view: “It may be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon as indiscriminate as the [German] rocket bomb and a million times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement.” The signatories recommended a demonstration of the new weapon before representatives of the United Nations, perhaps in a desert site or on a barren island. Franck was dispatched with the Report to Washington, D.C., where he was informed, falsely, that Stimson was out of town. Truman never saw the Franck Report; it was seized by the Army and classified. By contrast to the people in Chicago, the scientists in Los Alamos, working feverishly to test the plutonium implosion bomb model as soon as possible, had little time to think about how or whether their “gadget” should be used on Japan. But they also felt that they could rely on Oppenheimer. As the Met Lab biophysicist Eugene Rabinowitch, one of the seven signatories of the Franck Report, observed, the Los Alamos scientists shared a widespread “feeling that we can trust Oppenheimer to do the right thing.
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
Every Pirate Wants to Be an Admiral IT’S NOT AS though this is the first time we’ve had to rethink what copyright is, what it should do, and whom it should serve. The activities that copyright regulates—copying, transmission, display, performance—are technological activities, so when technology changes, it’s usually the case that copyright has to change, too. And it’s rarely pretty. When piano rolls were invented, the composers, whose income came from sheet music, were aghast. They couldn’t believe that player-piano companies had the audacity to record and sell performances of their work. They tried—unsuccessfully—to have such recordings classified as copyright violations. Then (thanks in part to the institution of a compulsory license) the piano-roll pirates and their compatriots in the wax-cylinder business got legit, and became the record industry. Then the radio came along, and broadcasters had the audacity to argue that they should be able to play records over the air. The record industry was furious, and tried (unsuccessfully) to block radio broadcasts without explicit permission from recording artists. Their argument was “When we used technology to appropriate and further commercialize the works of composers, that was progress. When these upstart broadcasters do it to our records, that’s piracy.” A few decades later, with the dust settled around radio transmission, along came cable TV, which appropriated broadcasts sent over the air and retransmitted them over cables. The broadcasters argued (unsuccessfully) that this was a form of piracy, and that the law should put an immediate halt to it. Their argument? The familiar one: “When we did it, it was progress. When they do it to us, that’s piracy.” Then came the VCR, which instigated a landmark lawsuit by the cable operators and the studios, a legal battle that was waged for eight years, finishing up in the 1984 Supreme Court “Betamax” ruling. You can look up the briefs if you’d like, but fundamentally, they went like this: “When we took the broadcasts without permission, that was progress. Now that someone’s recording our cable signals without permission, that’s piracy.” Sony won, and fifteen years later it was one of the first companies to get in line to sue Internet companies that were making it easier to copy music and videos online. I have a name for the principle at work here: “Every pirate wants to be an admiral.
Cory Doctorow (Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age)
To understand my doctor’s error, let’s employ Bayes’s method. The first step is to define the sample space. We could include everyone who has ever taken an HIV test, but we’ll get a more accurate result if we employ a bit of additional relevant information about me and consider only heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who have taken the test. (We’ll see later what kind of difference this makes.) Now that we know whom to include in the sample space, let’s classify the members of the space. Instead of boy and girl, here the relevant classes are those who tested positive and are HIV-positive (true positives), those who tested positive but are not positive (false positives), those who tested negative and are HIV-negative (true negatives), and those who tested negative but are HIV-positive (false negatives). Finally, we ask, how many people are there in each of these classes? Suppose we consider an initial population of 10,000. We can estimate, employing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that in 1989 about 1 in those 10,000 heterosexual non-IV-drug-abusing white male Americans who got tested were infected with HIV.6 Assuming that the false-negative rate is near 0, that means that about 1 person out of every 10,000 will test positive due to the presence of the infection. In addition, since the rate of false positives is, as my doctor had quoted, 1 in 1,000, there will be about 10 others who are not infected with HIV but will test positive anyway. The other 9,989 of the 10,000 men in the sample space will test negative. Now let’s prune the sample space to include only those who tested positive. We end up with 10 people who are false positives and 1 true positive. In other words, only 1 in 11 people who test positive are really infected with HIV.
Leonard Mlodinow (The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives)
Although there are no set methods to test for psychiatric disorders like psychopathy, we can determine some facets of a patient’s mental state by studying his brain with imaging techniques like PET (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanning, as well as genetics, behavioral and psychometric testing, and other pieces of information gathered from a full medical and psychiatric workup. Taken together, these tests can reveal symptoms that might indicate a psychiatric disorder. Since psychiatric disorders are often characterized by more than one symptom, a patient will be diagnosed based on the number and severity of various symptoms. For most disorders, a diagnosis is also classified on a sliding scale—more often called a spectrum—that indicates whether the patient’s case is mild, moderate, or severe. The most common spectrum associated with such disorders is the autism spectrum. At the low end are delayed language learning and narrow interests, and at the high end are strongly repetitive behaviors and an inability to communicate.
James Fallon (The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain)
The disaster was the first major crisis to occur under the fledgling leadership of the USSR’s most recent General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev. He chose not to address the public for three weeks after the accident, presumably to allow his experts time to gain a proper grasp of the situation. On May 14th, in addition to expressing his anger at Western Chernobyl propaganda, he announced to the world that all information relating to the incident would be made available, and that an unprecedented conference would be held with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in August at Vienna. Decades of information control proved difficult to cast off in such a short time, however, and while the report was made available in the West, it was classified in the Soviet Union. This meant those most affected by the disaster knew less than everyone else. In addition, although the Soviet delegation’s report was highly detailed and accurate in most regards, it was also misleading. It had been written in line with the official cause of the accident - that the operators were responsible - and, as such, it deliberately obfuscated vital details about the reactor.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
People today are used to seeing not only the incredible but the impossible as well, all provided by the mega-pixel. We witness miracles and dismiss them as diversions. The line between reality and fantasy has been blurred to the point that we no longer know what it is we see, and so put little faith in the experience. And there is no darkness anymore, no place for things like mystery and magic to make their abode. There is nothing nowadays that is not exposed, caught on camera and pixilated to be stored and classified forever in some phantom zone called cyber space. Nothing is too small to remain unseen by our microscopes or too far away to be seen by our satellites. The world is a strumpet, every inch of her exposed and explored. Whether she is thrusting herself into the camera's gaze, or we as voyeurs intrude upon her most intimate moments, nothing is left to the imagination. The world today is all light and no darkness. But too much light can blind. An excess of it deprives our eyes from the necessary contrast required to give definition to what we see. The light precludes magic, gives us explanations in its place. It denies love and informs us of the chemicals in the brain that are active given certain conditions. We have gained knowledge but in the process we have been forced to surrender the very reasons we sought knowledge in the first place.
James Rozoff
Ultimately, the World Top Incomes Database (WTID), which is based on the joint work of some thirty researchers around the world, is the largest historical database available concerning the evolution of income inequality; it is the primary source of data for this book.24 The book’s second most important source of data, on which I will actually draw first, concerns wealth, including both the distribution of wealth and its relation to income. Wealth also generates income and is therefore important on the income study side of things as well. Indeed, income consists of two components: income from labor (wages, salaries, bonuses, earnings from nonwage labor, and other remuneration statutorily classified as labor related) and income from capital (rent, dividends, interest, profits, capital gains, royalties, and other income derived from the mere fact of owning capital in the form of land, real estate, financial instruments, industrial equipment, etc., again regardless of its precise legal classification). The WTID contains a great deal of information about the evolution of income from capital over the course of the twentieth century. It is nevertheless essential to complete this information by looking at sources directly concerned with wealth. Here I rely on three distinct types of historical data and methodology, each of which is complementary to the others.25 In the first place, just as income tax returns allow us to study changes in income inequality, estate tax returns enable us to study changes in the inequality of wealth.26 This
Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
The largest and most rigorous study that is currently available in this area is the third one commissioned by the British Home Office (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan, 2005). The analysis was based on the 2,643 sexual assault cases (where the outcome was known) that were reported to British police over a 15-year period of time. Of these, 8% were classified by the police department as false reports. Yet the researchers noted that some of these classifications were based simply on the personal judgments of the police investigators, based on the victim’s mental illness, inconsistent statements, drinking or drug use. These classifications were thus made in violation of the explicit policies of their own police agencies. There searchers therefore supplemented the information contained in the police files by collecting many different types of additional data, including: reports from forensic examiners, questionnaires completed by police investigators, interviews with victims and victim service providers, and content analyses of the statements made by victims and witnesses. They then proceeded to evaluate each case using the official criteria for establishing a false allegation, which was that there must be either “a clear and credible admission by the complainant” or “strong evidential grounds” (Kelly, Lovett, & Regan,2005). On the basis of this analysis, the percentage of false reports dropped to 2.5%." Lonsway, Kimberly A., Joanne Archambault, and David Lisak. "False reports: Moving beyond the issue to successfully investigate and prosecute non-stranger sexual assault." The Voice 3.1 (2009): 1-11.
David Lisak
Though Hoover conceded that some might deem him a “fanatic,” he reacted with fury to any violations of the rules. In the spring of 1925, when White was still based in Houston, Hoover expressed outrage to him that several agents in the San Francisco field office were drinking liquor. He immediately fired these agents and ordered White—who, unlike his brother Doc and many of the other Cowboys, wasn’t much of a drinker—to inform all of his personnel that they would meet a similar fate if caught using intoxicants. He told White, “I believe that when a man becomes a part of the forces of this Bureau he must so conduct himself as to remove the slightest possibility of causing criticism or attack upon the Bureau.” The new policies, which were collected into a thick manual, the bible of Hoover’s bureau, went beyond codes of conduct. They dictated how agents gathered and processed information. In the past, agents had filed reports by phone or telegram, or by briefing a superior in person. As a result, critical information, including entire case files, was often lost. Before joining the Justice Department, Hoover had been a clerk at the Library of Congress—“ I’m sure he would be the Chief Librarian if he’d stayed with us,” a co-worker said—and Hoover had mastered how to classify reams of data using its Dewey decimal–like system. Hoover adopted a similar model, with its classifications and numbered subdivisions, to organize the bureau’s Central Files and General Indices. (Hoover’s “Personal File,” which included information that could be used to blackmail politicians, would be stored separately, in his secretary’s office.) Agents were now expected to standardize the way they filed their case reports, on single sheets of paper. This cut down not only on paperwork—another statistical measurement of efficiency—but also on the time it took for a prosecutor to assess whether a case should be pursued.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
You also may have heard teachers say that students have different learning styles—for example, some are “visual learners” and others are “auditory learners.” The way the brain processes information actually runs counter to these classifications. Research shows that if children are taught new information using several modalities, such as learning letters of the alphabet by looking at them, writing them, and naming them, the brain areas underlying each modality become activated even when children later process information using one modality, such as vision only (James, 2007). This suggests that rather than classify students as one type of learner or another, we should ask students to learn information in a variety of ways. This is consistent with research indicating that providing students
Cheryl Cisero Durwin (EdPsych Modules)
Despite the classified nature of the event it’s really pretty boring: we’re here to swap departmental gossip about our mutual areas of interest and what’s been going on lately, update each other on new procedural measures and paperwork hoops we need to jump through to requisition useful information from our respective front-desk operations, and generally make nice. With only a decade to go until the omega conjunction—the period of greatest risk during NIGHTMARE GREEN, when the stars are right—everyone in Europe is busy oiling the gears and wheels of our occult defense machinery. Nobody wants their neighbors to succumb to a flux of green, gibbering brain-eaters, after all: it tends to lower real estate values.
Charles Stross (The Jennifer Morgue (Laundry Files, #2))
On March 7, 2017, WikiLeaks released CIA Vault 7, a cache of classified CIA documents containing information about the spy agency’s hacking tools. Vault 7
Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
The DOJ did not charge Wolfe with leaking classified information, though the document contained both “Secret” and “Top Secret” information about Carter Page.
Mary Fanning (THE HAMMER is the Key to the Coup "The Political Crime of the Century": How Obama, Brennan, Clapper, and the CIA spied on President Trump, General Flynn ... and everyone else)
Most of the classified, mission-oriented remote viewings could not be evaluated as controlled, formal experiments, because that was not their intent. In some cases, however, unexpected information obtained through remote viewing was later confirmed to be correct, and this was important because it demonstrated the pragmatic value of this technique for use in real-world missions.
Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
theory led to Horney’s hypothesis of 10 neurotic needs, which she saw as so overwhelming and all-encompassing as to define a person. She classified the neurotic needs into three categories: those that compel us to comply (the need for affection, the need for a partner, and the need for simplifying life), those that lead us to withdraw (the need for independence and the need for perfection), and those that make us aggressive and turn us against other people (the need for power, the need to exploit, the need for prestige, and the need for personal achievement). These needs become neurotic only when they exist at dysfunctional levels or come into play too indiscriminately and too extremely in daily life. Most of us, Horney believed, can navigate these needs in healthy ways and reduce our interpersonal conflicts. And the more secure, tolerant, loving, and respectful our family life has been, the greater our chances of doing so. On the other hand, for a person who has developed neurotic needs, dysfunctional behavior can beget still more dysfunctional behavior and lead to the creation of vicious circles (or cycles). Moreover, Horney felt that healthy people see themselves as they are, while a neurotic person’s identity is split into a despised self and an ideal self. It’s the gap between these two concepts of self that continues to perpetuate anxiety and neurosis. Horney
Andrea Bonior (Psychology: Essential Thinkers, Classic Theories, and How They Inform Your World)
He's back as a 'volunteer' - as punishment for leaking classified information to Bella. MI5 must have a dark sense of humour, silencing him with the very experiments that he was trying to expose
J.S. Monroe (The Man on Hackpen Hill (DI Silas Hart, #3))
The Cover-Ups By now, most discerning conservative Americans know that anyone who is a part of the Deep-State Cabal receives the protection of the men and women within their inner-circle. A prime example is Hillary Clinton. Much of what she did with her personal servers and e-mails broke federal laws. She placed a personal server in her closet that held several classified e-mails that, by law, were only to be on a government-protected classified server. She then erased tens of thousands of e-mails to prevent them from being downloaded by investigators. She had her computer hard drive wiped clean to prevent professionals from finding what she had written, and she destroyed phones. She broke election laws by contacting a foreign government and paying for fake information to trap Trump. There are also questionable donations for the Clinton Foundation from world leaders to perhaps gain political favors. Despite all of this, why was she protected and never charged for criminal misconduct?
Perry Stone (America's Apocalyptic Reset: Unmasking the Radical's Blueprints to Silence Christians, Patriots, and Conservatives)
Yuh-huh. They spooled it off the back of a big boat. My dad said it was for the bird sanctuary’s telecommunications and Internet system. I asked him if birds use landline phones and Web browsers. He told me that information was classified.
Chris Grabenstein (The Island of Dr. Libris)
Long pause. Somehow Stephan immediately knew this was a lie. Jane was interested in having a good time, not in espionage. Her smiling face momentarily appeared in his memory. But it wasn’t customary to ask the KGB for proof. Nevertheless, he asked a stupid question: “And how do you know? She’s never behaved in a strange or suspicious way.” “Well, this is our work. I can’t tell you about our sources. All you need to know is that your friend is an agent of the enemy.” Technically speaking, according to Soviet custom, this makes me a traitor, thought Stephan. Prosecutor, judge, and juror. Three in one. And not to forget, the executioner. Years of training, millions of guinea pigs. What could be his counterargument? He wished this day had never happened. The major was apparently following a familiar routine: “Do you think you can help us?” “Help how?” Stephan was receiving too much information to digest quickly. “We need to make sure that our state secrets remain safe. That the enemy doesn’t infiltrate our ranks and use such a respected family as yours to gain access to classified information.” “But I don’t have access to any secrets!” Stephan said naively. “Your brother does, though.
Sergei Kasian (The Cure: An Experimental Guide to Eternal Life)
This wasn’t even China’s first cover-up of a coronavirus. Global health authorities and world leaders should have, from the very get-go, been more alert to the possibility of a cover-up of the contagion from China, given immediate past experience from SARS in late 2002 and 2003. Back then, China had faced international condemnation for covering up the virus outbreak and failing to alert global health authorities. In China, public health information is classed as a “state secret” until the Ministry of Health approves its release.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
Chinese authorities started systematically removing any mention of the virus online. This began on December 31, when technology services in China censored key words linked to the pandemic. The live-streaming platform YY censored words including “unknown Wuhan pneumonia” and “Wuhan Seafood Market”. WeChat censored phrases related to the pandemic, banned both speculative and factual information related to the outbreak, and removed even “neutral references to Chinese government efforts to handle the outbreak that had been reported on state media”, according to the Citizen Lab’s March 2020 report. The CCP censorship alarmed doctors and Chinese health authorities, who knew the precise opposite approach should be taken in order to save lives. This crucial point clearly shows China’s deliberate, intentional and clear-eyed decision to cover up the virus; to stop their own people and those internationally from finding out about it.
Sharri Markson (What Really Happened in Wuhan: The Cover-Ups, the Conspiracies and the Classified Research)
Trump’s reflex effort to talk his way out of anything, however, even a public-health crisis, only undercut his and the nation’s credibility, with his statements looking more like political damage control than responsible public-health advice. One particularly egregious example was a news report that the Administration tried to classify certain public-health information regarding the United States on the spurious excuse that China was involved.33 Of course China was involved, which is a reason to disseminate the information broadly, not restrict it. This, Trump was reluctant to do throughout the crisis, for fear of adversely affecting the elusive definitive trade deal with China, or offending the ever-so-sensitive Xi Jinping.
John Bolton (The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir)
We thrive in information-thick worlds because of our marvelous and everyday capacities to select, edit, single out, structure, highlight, group, pair, merge, harmonize, synthesize, focus, organize, condense, reduce, boil down, choose, categorize, catalog, classify, list, abstract, scan, look into, idealize, isolate, discriminate, distinguish, screen, pigeonhole, pick over, sort, integrate, blend, inspect, filter, lump, skip, smooth, chunk, average, approximate, cluster, aggregate, outline, summarize, itemize, review, dip into, flip through, browse, glance into, leaf through, skim, refine, enumerate, glean, synopsize, winnow the wheat from the chaff, and separate the sheep from the goats.
Edward R. Tufte (Envisioning Information)
Another reason the longshoremen in Brooklyn were not talking to the navy was because President Roosevelt had declared that the country’s six hundred thousand nonnaturalized Italians be classified as “enemy aliens.” It was insulting, and it was an unwise move to offend the very people who were handling the materials that were being transported for war.3 By late February 1942, Haffenden and his section had failed to produce a single informant on the waterfront. Every officer at ONI had been trained to know that developing informants was essential for counterintelligence work, and on the waterfront, B-3 was coming up short.4
Matthew Black (Operation Underworld: How the Mafia and U.S. Government Teamed Up to Win World War II)
FEMA is the government entity assigned to prepare for nuclear war. Its special access programs are highly classified. They also hide, or obscure, a misperception. The truth is, there is no federal agency to help citizens survive a nuclear war per se. What FEMA does is focus on how to save specific government officials in the event of a nuclear attack. This is part of a classified FEMA program built upon classified information called the Continuity of Operations Plan, or COOP.
Annie Jacobsen (Nuclear War: A Scenario)
I am convinced now that I and the rest of the expedition were given access to these records for the simple reason that, for certain kinds of classified information, it did not matter what we knew or didn’t know. There was only one logical conclusion: Experience told our superiors that few if any of us would be coming back.
Jeff VanderMeer
All forms of electronic communication use electromagnetic waves. And all electromagnetic waves have a place, classified by their length, on the electromagnetic spectrum. On one end are long waves—signals like the ones broadcast from huge antennas that project songs onto AM and FM radio stations. These undulating waves might measure several meters, or even hundreds of meters. Next come shorter waves whose lengths might only be measured in centimeters or millimeters. These wavelengths are commonly used for TV signals and radar. Generally speaking, the shorter the wavelength, the higher its frequency, and the more information it can carry. By the early 1960s, Bell Labs executives had concluded that millimeter waves would serve as the communications medium of the future. The idea at Bell Labs was to send information through such waves not by wires or broadcast towers but by means of the circular waveguide,
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
As in the case of the individual, not all the information which is available to the race at one time is accessible without special effort. There is a well-known tendency of libraries to become clogged by their own volume; of the sciences to develop such a degree of specialization that the expert is often illiterate outside his own minute specialty. Dr. Vannevar Bush has suggested the use of mechanical aids for the searching through vast bodies of material. These probably have their uses, but they are limited by the impossibility of classifying a book under an unfamiliar heading unless some particular person has already recognized the relevance of that heading for that particular book. In the case where two subjects have the same techniques and intellectual content but belong to widely separated fields, this still requires some individual with an almost Leibnizian catholicity of interest.
Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics: or the Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine)
The United States fends off millions of attempted cyber intrusions into military and other government networks each month.86 In 2015, hackers most likely acting at the behest of the Chinese government stole the highly classified security clearance information of twenty-two million Americans from the Office of Personnel Management.
Condoleezza Rice (Political Risk: How Businesses and Organizations Can Anticipate Global Insecurity)
Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye. Yet our brains evolved to receive a pleasant shot of dopamine when we learn something new and again when we can classify it systematically into an ordered structure.
Daniel J. Levitin (The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload)
Information isn’t neutral; neither are the choices we make about how to present it, structure it, write it, juxtapose it, or classify it. Every design decision makes an impact; it’s just a question of whether we can stand up and own that impact.
Lisa Maria Martin (Everyday Information Architecture)
Kerry addressed Cardin directly: “I don’t view this as a completely finished product, and I don’t want it judged as such.” Kerry then carried on in his condescending Boston Brahmin voice with a lot of barely intelligible thoughts about how the Magnitsky Act could potentially compromise classified information, and that while it was “very legitimate to name and shame,” he was “worried about the unintended consequences of requiring that kind of detailed reporting that implicates a broader range of intelligence equities.
Bill Browder (Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice)
4.2 million people hold SECRET security clearances; 1.3 million of them hold TOP SECRET clearances. In the Washington, D.C., area alone, more than 17 million square feet of space is dedicated to storing classified information.
Jack Carr (Red Sky Mourning (Terminal List #7))
Among the high-ranking spooks drawn to South Florida, who perhaps dined with the foulmouthed founder at Asher’s favorite spot, the Boca Raton Club, or shared a bottle of his favorite Opus One wine at his mansion, was John Brennan. A future director of the CIA, Brennan was at the time director of something else: the newly formed Terrorist Threat Integration Center, a post-9/11, cross-agency clearinghouse then nominally under the umbrella of the CIA. Later known as the National Counterterrorism Center, it was created to take in streams of classified and sensitive data from more than a dozen federal bodies—including the CIA, NSA, FBI, Department of State, and Department of Defense—and continually fuse and make sense of it all. Brennan, who oversaw the center’s rushed genesis, has described it as a “start-up” and “an unprecedented multiagency entity that would need to access, leverage, correlate, and ultimately integrate different sources of terrorism-related intelligence.” It would have needed a computer system capable of doing that.
McKenzie Funk (The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives)
If Holden had chosen to become a government informant, living in Geneva afforded him the perfect cover, allowing him to transport classified information to and from a variety of destinations.
Howard Johns (Drowning Sorrows: A True Story of Love, Passion and Betrayal)
the club had become a gathering place for international spies, who traded classified information about the Soviet Union’s infiltration into Africa. Code-named the “Safari Club,” the covert group was comprised of intelligence operatives from France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco and Iran, which were united in the fight against Communism.
Howard Johns (Drowning Sorrows: A True Story of Love, Passion and Betrayal)
Effective managers make effective decisions. There are six steps of effective decision making and five characteristics of effective decisions. First, and by far the most important step, effective decision makers define and classify the problem. It is much easier to fix a wrong solution to a problem if the problem has been defined correctly than it is to fix a “correct” solution to a problem that has been defined incorrectly. If a problem has been defined incorrectly, no solution to that problem can be found. Conversely, if a problem is defined correctly, then an incorrect solution will provide useful feedback information, leading the executive closer to the right solution. The remaining five steps of effective decision making are Ask, “Is this problem generic or unique?” Decisions that are generic ought to be solved by finding and applying a rule that someone else has used to solve the problem. For problems that are unique, the decision maker must next determine the boundary conditions that must be satisfied in order for the decision to be effective. Establishing boundary conditions requires an answer to the question, “What does the decision have to accomplish to be effective in solving the problem?” Next, the decision maker asks, “What is the right solution, given these conditions?” Then—and this is where a great many decisions fail—the decision maker must convert the decision into action by assigning to one or more persons the responsibility for carrying out the decision and by eliminating any barriers faced by those who must act. Finally, the effective decision maker follows up on the decision, obtains feedback on what actually happened as a result of the decision, and compares this with the intended or desired results.
Peter F. Drucker (Management, Revised Edition)
But U.S. computer systems have back doors, too: just ask Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked classified information about such vulnerabilities. In cybersecurity, a good offense is the worst defense. U.S. officials should work to prevent a “cyber–Pearl Harbor” through better defenses. But waiting for cyberwar, as Limnéll suggests, is a failure of imagination. “This is our cyber-9/11,” a British intelligence official told me, referring to the Snowden leaks. “We just imagined it differently.
Anonymous
functions as an art. The functions are recording, classifying and summarizing transaction and events. Also it says that events & transactions should be of financial character. This definition also adds another function of interpreting the results of accounting. 1.1.2. The American Accounting Association (AAA) defines Accounting as “the process of identifying, measuring and communicating economic information to permit informed judgment and decision by user of the information.
Anonymous
year, hackers steal roughly $300 billion worth of information, from intellectual property to classified state secrets, according to a 2013 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Anonymous
e-mailing the right people on the wrong system. But from a public relations perspective, the technicalities didn’t matter. Hillary had told the nation that she didn’t traffic in classified information, and government investigators put the lie to that assertion day after day. In
Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
If Sam had been caught passing classified information on a private email server, she would be in jail. Simple as that.
William Miller (Noble Vengeance (Jake Noble, #2))
But it bothered me that there was classified information that would someday become public—likely decades from now—and be used to attack the integrity of the investigation and, more important, call into question the independence of the FBI.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
I had no plans to talk to the press or leak classified information
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
To be clear, this was not a “leak” of classified information no matter how many times politicians, political pundits, or the president call it that. A private citizen may legally share unclassified details of a conversation with the president with the press, or include that information in a book.
James B. Comey (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership)
The Aryan identity got broken off and forked historically in ancient Egypt where we witness the Osirian identity being passed down to the Jew while the Atenian one being inherited by their Christian successors. The Jew for example keeps his sidelocks (i.e. Payot) as his Egyptian plagiarized heritage states in Leviticus 19:27. This is the very same hair style worn by Horus The Child (Harpocrates/Heru-P-Khart) while sitting protected between the Aker lions; he also had seven manifstations just as Yahweh has seven authentic names (which are not to be classified as, attributes, according to Maimonides' magnum opus 'Mishneh Torah' as we read in Sefer Madda - Yesodei haTorah). The significance of this form of Horus is that it became the type of new birth starting from the New Kingdom onwards when the triads of gods got renewed and rejuvenated as Budge informs us. Horus, hence, became the Lion of Judah who was called by the ancient Egyptians as the 'Great Protector' and was also depicted as a lion with a head of a hawk.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (The Mill of Egypt: The Complete Series Fused)
So, I work at a defense contractor. We deal with classified information. Everyone understands how to handle information at that company. There are five hundred people that work there and that’s one site; there’s multiple sites. There’s no way that in her position she didn’t know what she was doing with the information. I mean, I have to tell you the amount of checks and security that we go through…And it’s insulting for people who understand that for her to sit there and lie,” she says.
Salena Zito (The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics)
Many of Tesla's inventions still remain classified. People have requested some of them via the Freedom of Information Act, and have received them, although they are highly censored
Hourly History (Nikola Tesla: A Life from Beginning to End (Biographies of Inventors))
Terminology and classification Leukaemias are traditionally classified into four main groups: • acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) • acute myeloid leukaemia (AML) • chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) • chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). In acute leukaemia there is proliferation of primitive stem cells leading to an accumulation of blasts, predominantly in the bone marrow, which causes bone marrow failure. In chronic leukaemia the malignant clone is able to differentiate, resulting in an accumulation of more mature cells. Lymphocytic and lymphoblastic cells are those derived from the lymphoid stem cell (B cells and T cells). Myeloid refers to the other lineages, i.e. precursors of red cells, granulocytes, monocytes and platelets (see Fig. 24.2, p. 989). The diagnosis of leukaemia is usually suspected from an abnormal blood count, often a raised white count, and is confirmed by examination of the bone marrow. This includes the morphology of the abnormal cells, analysis of cell surface markers (immunophenotyping), clone-specific chromosome abnormalities and molecular changes. These results are incorporated in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification of tumours of haematopoietic and lymphoid tissues; the subclassification of acute leukaemias is shown in Box 24.47. The features in the bone marrow not only provide an accurate diagnosis but also give valuable prognostic information, allowing therapy to be tailored to the patient’s disease.
Nicki R. Colledge (Davidson's Principles and Practice of Medicine (MRCP Study Guides))