Top INFO

Classified INFORmations

Search"Top Secret" redirects here. For other uses, see Top Secret (disambiguation).
"State secret" redirects here. For the 1950 British film, see State Secret.
This article is about information restricted by law or regulation. For the music album, see Unclassified (album). For the evidentiary rule, see State secrets privilege.

A typical classified document. Page 13 of a U.S. National Security Agency report[1] on the USS Liberty incident, partially declassified and released to the public in July 2004. The original overall classification of the page, "top secret", and the Special Intelligence code word "umbra," are shown at top and bottom. The classification of individual paragraphs and reference titles is shown in parentheses - there are six different levels on this page alone. Notations with leader lines at top and bottom cite statutory authority for not declassifying certain sections.Classified information is a categorization applied to information that a government claims is sensitive information. Access is restricted by law or regulation to particular groups of persons. A formal security clearance is often required to handle classified documents or access classified data. The clearance process requires a satisfactory background investigation. There are typically several levels (classes) of sensitivity, with differing clearance requirements. This sort of hierarchical system of secrecy is used by virtually every national government. The act of assigning the level of sensitivity to data is called data classification. Although the root sense of the word "classified" is simply synonymous with "categorized", it has developed a sense synonymous with "censored" in the context of classified information.
A distinction could be made between formal security classification and privacy markings such as "Commercial in confidence".

Some corporations and non-government organizations also assign sensitive information to multiple levels of protection, either from a desire to protect trade secrets, or because of laws and regulations governing various matters such as personal privacy, sealed legal proceedings and the timing of financial information releases.

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