[lbo-talk] LAT: When secrecy gets out of hand

[Carrol Cox]

This reminds me of an amusing incident (not so funny at the time) while 
I was at NSA. Arlington Hall Station (this was before the huge building 
at Fort Meade) was right next to the Buckingham Apartments & a small 
shopping center, including a drug stoe with a lunch counter. On this 
morning, I had attended a one-hour Czech class, in which we used 
deciphered messages as our reading material. Of course they were marked 
Top Secret. Returning to my section, I folded up the copy of the message 
and tucked it in my shirt pocket. (It was summer & I was wearing 
khakis.) That noon my wife and I with a friend walked over to the drug 
store for lunch. At one point I reached in my pocket, felt this piece of 
paper there, pulled it out . . .. One fantasizes -- hit by a car; a 
nurse pulls out the Top Secret document. I was really quite frightened 
until I was 'safely' back inside my building.

Seriously -- I was scared. NSA can get very nasty about such things, as 
can the Air Force.

Then there was the day a mathematician in the unit put his coffee cup 
down on a 3x5 card (on which he had scribbled something on the other 
side). That made it classified. Clearing his des  to go home, and seeing 
this card with a coffee ring on it, he tossed it into the "regular" 
trash instead of a burn bag. A cleaning person noticed it, turned it in. 
There was hell to pay for a day or two about this terrible violation of 
security regulations.

Carrol

Carrol