Front page of the day. Sunday’s NY Post is, simply, a masterclass in tabloid front-page creation:
The Department of Corrections. Top secret … classified … apparently there’s a difference. From Saturday’s Sydney Morning Herald:
TVNZ issued search warrant for ‘cup of tea’
“TVNZ has received a search warrant from police seeking footage of the ‘cup of tea’ meeting between National leader John Key and Act candidate John Banks.The pair met at an Auckland cafe last Friday as a show of support for Banks in his bid to win the Epsom seat in the General Election. However, there has been much debate about the meeting after it emerged a recording had been made of it.” — TVNZ
Milly Dowler’s parents to testify at inquiry
“The parents of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler are expected to give powerful testimony on the impact of press intrusion as the first witnesses to Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry into media standards on Monday.” — The Guardian
News Magazines rebrands to emphasise lifestyle focus
“News Magazines has relaunched as NewsLifeMedia in a move which positions the publisher as the lifestyle publishing arm of News Limited.” — mUmBRELLA
Gold Coast mayor unhappy with 60 Minutes
“Delinquent boys The Inbetweeners may be visiting the Gold Coast to promote their feature film, but Mayor Ron Clarke is unimpressed with last night’s 60 Minutes after the show depicted the tourist destination as ‘Australia’s crime capital.'” — TV Tonight
Erm, of course there’s a difference between “classified” and “top secret”. Classified means that the information has been formally assessed for security purposes, and has been assigned a certain level of sensitivity. “Top secret” is one of those levels — depending on the classification system in question, usually at the upper end of secretness.
So in this case, the mislaid document was presumably classified, but not to the “top secret” level. For a report on the poor handling of a classified document, I’d have thought getting the classification level right goes to the very core of the story — therefore making the correction 100% necessary.
That Dylan Welch’s story in the SMH was a beat up was obvious to anyone with federal bureaucratic or military experience (around 50% of Canberra’s population), and demonstrates why journalists, even those writing for the broadsheets, are so poorly regarded by those they write about. It wasn’t just the headline writer’s error in labelling the document ‘top secret’, but the reporter (‘diplomatic correspondent’ no less) who described it as ‘secret’ in the first paragraph, but then went on to reveal it was classified ‘in confidence’ (a low level of security classification).
And as for the ‘top security analyst’, Sydney-based Alan Dupont, to describe it as ‘a significant security breach’ — what nonsense. Certainly, you shouldn’t loose such a document, but nothing classified at that level is particularly sensitive.
FTR, the (non military) range is Top Secret, Secret, Highly Protected, Protected, Confidential, Rstricted.
Highly Protected requires the threat of serious damage to National Interest, Secret danger to life or national security and Top Secret – run for the hills, or caves.
@AR
Actually, until a recent update of the classification system defined by the Commonwealth Protective Security Policy Framework the non-national security (which is mostly used by civilian agencies) has the following classifications (bottom up): In-confidence, Protected and Highly Protected. The national security classifications were: Restricted, Confidential, Secret and Top Secret. The review has merged the classification streams to simplify the system.
Documents can also be classified as Unclassified which obviously makes no sense. But, such documents are also generally to be handled with care.
For reference sake the rules for handling documents/information marked as In-Confidence are quite strict – in fact generally significantly more strict than any non-government organization that labels their materials as commercial-in-confidence.
You can read all about this in the Commonwealth Protective Security Policy Framework and the Commonwealth Information Security Manual. Both can be found on Commonwealth Government agency websites for free. It would be good for the average journalist writing about such things to read them before writing hyped up articles. But then, doing the research would involve some effort wouldn’t it? And, a beat up sells papers…