There is in fact some reluctance to over-classify. Protectively marked material at certain grades attracts certain
protection and monitoring requirements – including restrictions on electronic transfer.

The less highly-classified material the better, from the point of view of security staff!

In fact I’ve been surprised at the relatively lowly classification of some of the material released for Hutton and from FoI
requests. Of course, once something is classified (even classified as unclassified!) it can’t be released without
authority. The authority is usually the document originator, who may have specified a distribution list.

As all perusing this blog will know, there are FoI exemptions which can be applied regardless of the level of classification
which seems the normal method of avoiding disclosure.

There have been many examples where I have read documents and wondered why it was classified as I had read more in a magazine article that would impact on the classification requirements. I’ve even seen documents that are copies of Web Pages available on the WWW available to the general public.

Each classification comes with a clear definition of what each classification covers but the UK security community continually marks documents classified even when they clearly don’t meet the requirements. We even classify US documents that are available in the US unclassified.

It’s all for our protection though so it must be OK. Better safe than sorry. After all no one can give any details or they can be prosecuted under the OSA and everything else can be denied. So our backsides are protected.