Interesting thread and discussion.

I have been in classified briefings inside the 5 Sided Puzzle Palace and have read about them the next day in the Washington Post AND Washington Times to my amazement.

Overclassification is a MAJOR problem and bogs down the system. Anyone who has been deployed to OIF or OEF and used SIPR understands the mind-numbing stupidity that has become the norm. The system was so abused in Afghanistan that the J3 on our staff called in all the team leaders and read us the riot act on classification standards...people were either overclassifiying information, or misclassifying information.

And now that SIPR has become the medium of choice for anything significant - to include scads of unclassified info - and more people than ever have access to it, I suspect the confusion is only going to get worse.