As someone who spent years working in government-ese, there is nothing new here at all. None of the documents are actually classified. They are standard policy propositions layered with heavy technical/government jargon. The intelligence community and DOD is meticulous about properly classifying even the most mundane information that could be connected to anything of consequence for national security. Hence, it has been the standard for decades that every single classified document must have a header and footer with its classification level clearly posted. I was put on the spot once in a brief for not having a footer with the brief's classification on one slide in a PowerPoint. None of these documents have the required headers or footers. Logical conclusion, none of them require it because none of them are classified.
The real government is far more boring than the one that appears in popular conspiracy theories and movies. Trust me, the real government is a boring employer...great health insurance though!
I skimmed those docs and my eyes started to glaze over at all the government-ese in them. Most of those documents seem to be high level proposals for things like PRISM and some of the other programs that we more or less already know exist in some form or another, but it's unclear whether they're just proposing the creation of such networks, or whether they're documenting what already exists. There's also a lot of "System A must conform to Standard B Sub-Section C unless interaction with System D Sub-Section F (See Req E)" type gibberish all over the documents so it's really hard to understand exactly what any particular piece of it is describing.
Aside from that the only other thing I see is a list of what appear to be boilerplate redaction requests for a list of NSA spies posted on cryptome, with ironically most of the information redacted. Mildly interesting in that they'd be so transparent as to use near identical wording on what should be apparently unrelated requests, but otherwise not particularly notable.
Can someone with a higher pain threshold for bureaucracy please try to go more in depth on some of these and let us know if there's any meat to any of these documents, or is this all sound and fury signifying nothing.
The more government-ese, the higher the chance that it goes over-budget or never gets completed / never does what it was supposed to / is working but not usable in real world. I like that kind of text in things that should be never completed. I hope they also contract out each piece of it to a different country and lowest bidder.
At the very least, the documents lay out in uncertain terms the stated goals for GIG and NetOps.
That's good information to have. As this story develops and more information comes to light, it is handy to be able to compare what we know, with what we know they want to achieve.
As someone who spent years working in government-ese, there is nothing new here at all. None of the documents are actually classified. They are standard policy propositions layered with heavy technical/government jargon. The intelligence community and DOD is meticulous about properly classifying even the most mundane information that could be connected to anything of consequence for national security. Hence, it has been the standard for decades that every single classified document must have a header and footer with its classification level clearly posted. I was put on the spot once in a brief for not having a footer with the brief's classification on one slide in a PowerPoint. None of these documents have the required headers or footers. Logical conclusion, none of them require it because none of them are classified.
The real government is far more boring than the one that appears in popular conspiracy theories and movies. Trust me, the real government is a boring employer...great health insurance though!