UNCLASSIFIED//SECRET//UNCLASSIFIED
I'm downstairs doing some work to be included in a large, very long and boring document. We're back to flowcharting, folks! And in order to do it right, I need to read all these little stories that describe what people are doing. I had a stack of them printed out and took the unclassified/fouo ones out of the SCIF with me. I started reading one of the packets in the middle, and it was pretty boring until the 6th page when it suddenly occurs to me that oh-shit-there's-a-bunch-of-SECRET-stuff-in-here. What do I do? This isn't something you can pretend didn't happen because the materials were in my possession now for two work days and an entire weekend. The pages looked like they were loose from another document, and just made their way into my loose papers that I grouped and stapled together.Enter panic mode. I'm envisioning the poly. I'm envisioning the bad-letter they're going to put in my file. It stays there for an entire year, and if there are no subsequent incidents, it comes out. I'm spewing out every four-letter word imaginable as I shove the documents back into the folder and go straight into the SCIF. Of course security is not in their office. I go to the program manager and tell him what happened. I had to write an email documenting what just happened and everywhere those papers were since I took them out of the SCIF on Friday. I had to cc gov't security, my company's security, the government big-cheese-in-training, and everybody and their mother.
How could this happen? I've always been really careful with things leaving the SCIF. I usually never take anything out. Why didn't those documents have an overall classification marking? So, the moral of the story...there are two, actually.
1. Don't take anything out of the SCIF.
2. If you MUST take something out, either check every single portion marking and diagram for classified material, or better yet, run the document through security for screening and sanitizing.
Dammit.
posted by v @ 3:33 PM
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