Abu Suleyman, you are spot on! Far more insidious than classification is the new twist on the old theme of "administrative protection" usually FOUO. We all understood pretty well tha FOUO was not a classification but was used to protect privacy or the government from running afoul of plagiarism charges and copyright violations. But now some idiot has come up with Sensitive But Unclassified - whatever the hell that means! By the EO that establishes US classification (see Wm's link for the ref) information is classified if its unauthorized diclosure will harm (classification guidance provides the terms for degree of harm that establish whether information is Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret) the security of the US. If the information doesn't fall into that category, it is unclassified - period! SBS is just what the las 2 letters say - BS, designed to protect the guilty!!!!! So much for my rant of the day.

Marc, when I was doing my dissertation on local politics in rural Peru (1966 -68) I followed the anthropological convention of disguising the names of my informants and the people under observation. At the time, we didn't assume a power relationship, rather it was simply to protect their privacy. Had my dissertation been translated into Spanish, anybody from my towns could easily have identified the people I was talking about. As to the English, since a couple of key players were Peace Corps Volunteers, it was a matter od peotecting their privacy and not much more. Again, any social science researcher could easily have discovered the identities of my informants and the people I observed - even if they didn't ask me. I would have been happy to have given them that information anyway.

Cheers

JohnT