All right. All right, here we go. It is that time of the week for the global Bob Show. Globalbob show, we are the crossroads of technology and politics. Listen to that rock and roll music. And that gets me all good and jazz stuff gets me in the zone where I'm ready to record the show. Now, if you paid attention to the title, you'll see that this show is G 14 classified. It's not classified that fair, I need to put a disclaimer out. If you say someone's classified and have authority to generate classified material, you need to be careful when you throw that word around. Because you could say something's classified, and it would be classified if you are someone with a clearance. So that's what we're going to talk about today, we're going to talk about classification. And what's got me wanting to talk about classification is all the stuff going on in the news. Lots of stuff going on. And so I get this phone call from time to time. And this happened when the dirtbag Edward Snowden released a bunch of classified information people call Hey, what, what is all this stuff and what's classified what's not classified? And I tell them, Well, if it's classified, I can't tell you that it's classified. So we're gonna break all that down. So awesome that everybody that continues to tune into the show each and every week. And I like to really thank those that promote the show, I do get a couple of folks that tell me that they've had some folks tune in to the show. And I look at the stats, and they continue to go up. So I appreciate that. You can always get a hold of me on Twitter. You can send me a DM, which is a direct message. I do get DMS on Twitter, because it's you know, it's open. You don't have to be friends with each other and stuff like that. Of course, we do have the public page there on Facebook Globalbob show, you can go out to the show website Globalbob show.com. And get a hold of me. So let's, let's break this down. So why am I wanting to talk about classified information? Well, it's no secret that filled Commander Globalbob, before he settled into his permanent house, here in beautiful central Florida, I actually worked for the government, most of you guys know that. Gals know that. Plenty of coverage in the news. Remember, one of the one of the Bloomberg articles came out, gave an interview to Bloomberg and it said something to the effect that security companies hire ex spies. So anyways, my name is listed in it. So my cover is blown. So as you can imagine, there has been a couple of calls here to global Bob, regarding what happened down at Mar a Lago. And I can tell you all just like anything that I've been involved with in the news, it doesn't matter what side of the aisle your field commander hears on. It doesn't matter if I'm Democrat, Republican, Independent, I just say how it is. And trust me when we talk about the election hacking, I'll tell some stories where people wanted me to basically fit into their narrative, and I would not do it. So this has nothing to do with the ex president, Donald Trump. Whether I support him or not, I'm just here to talk about, you know, classified information and what could have led them to go in and give them a reason to go in to try to retrieve this information. So you know, throughout the years here before, you would talk about folks that leaked classified information, and it was a very big deal, but I just feel bad, especially being in that realm where you have dirtbags like Edward Snowden and I say he's a dirtbag because he is. He released a lot of classified information of which the classified information he was not a producer of and whether your hell him as a hero, because he shed some light on something If that supposedly our government was doing to me, I don't think so because haven't lived in that world. Very simply, it takes people to produce that classified information. And if you really sources and methods at a bare minimum, your cost in our country millions and probably billions of dollars of what it took to produce that information. So yeah, he's a dirtbag Bradley Manning. He's a dirtbag. And I guess now his name is Chelsea Manning. So she's a dirtbag. And whether your same thing you know, held him as a hero or not, it doesn't matter to me, my opinion is, is that that's not their information to disclose. And there are proper channels of which they could go through that process if they thought something was wrong with what was going on. And apparently, they may or may not have followed that. But regardless, you don't go directly to the public and become a whistleblower, you put lives in danger. And to me, the juice just is not worth the squeeze. And of course, there's been other dirtbags throughout the ages. Aldrich Ames comes to mind. And you know, a couple other ones. But anyways, so when we talk about classified information, there's basically you know, four categories of classified information. And each one is kind of like, more sensitive, more sensitive, more sensitive as you get all the way up to the top. And at the bottom layer here is not really a classification, classification, but it could be called a classification. But I guess for our audience will say it is and that's on classified information. Now, of course, in the term, it says unclassified, so it is unclassified. But a lot of it has a little tick mark there that says, for official use only. That means it is unclassified. But it's only supposed to be used for official use. And some of those uses could be, you know, working with various software vendors, and you're talking about IP addresses and stuff like that. Or you're talking about a person that worked for us certain agency, that's unclassified, but really shouldn't be spilling that information, unless it's for official use. So that's the lowest level, and then there is confidential. And we'll go through what all the terms of these are, but the next one is confidential. And then after that, you have secret information. And so as you climb up to the ranks, at the very, very tip top is called Top secret. And so with these different rankings, you can have one document, and you'll have different paragraph markings in there. And so if you see the old spy movies, they get out the folder, and it's got top secret, you know, stamp across it with that crazy font. I don't know how to describe it. But we all have seen that font. And it says top secret? Well, when you see that, that means that inside that folder, that's the highest classification. And inside of a document, that's the highest classification. But inside that document, you can have different markings where some of it is top secret. Some of it is confidential, some of it is secret, some of it is unclassified. And so the documents that are put together like that, they're supposed to be put together with the minimum classification to protect the information that's in there. So what I want you guys to understand and gals to understand is that when they say that documents, Top Secret, well, yeah, that document is but there's portions of it in there that could actually be unclassified. Now, when you go looking through the definition, I'm going to skip the unclassified part, but an example of confidential data would be something like military strength and weapons, right? And that means that if that information got out, it wouldn't be good, but it's not you know, super damaging. It's basically could give the enemy an edge. But then when you see stuff inside the document that's marked secret, and this is where a lot of the documents are. We got some stats here a little bit later in the podcast, but most of the information isn't, you know, that top secret level A lot of it's at the secret level. And by the way, if any of my FBI friends are listening, or my fellow ex intelligence officers are listening, all of this information that I'm giving you can be found at various public sites, not these sites like wiki leak and stuff like that. So, you know, I joke around saying that we're going to talk about the classified episode here of the Globalbob show, but nothing that I'm revealing is classified in nature. So I just want to put that disclaimer in there, I don't need the ranch here rated at four o'clock in the morning, I prefer that if there is a raid that they would do it, you know, after I've had my, my morning juice. So anyways, so at the secret level, if that information was to get out, it basically would cause serious damage to national security. And this is the, like I said, the level of classification that a lot of classified documents are classified at. So a lot of your military folks and these type people, I don't know of anybody that has just a confidential clearance, I'm pretty sure the lowest one I've heard of a secret. So you can see even with the Secret clearance there that it could cause serious damage to our national security. So hush hush not for tell at the secret level. Now, when you get into the top secret, this information could be expected to cause grave damage to national security. So that's a that's a real, real big deal. And a lot of these leaks that they do, if you look at especially Snowden, since he did work for the National Security Agency, as a contractor, he would have had probably access to top secret information, probably at the least, just given the level of the classified material that he supposedly leaked, he would have, you know, had access to that. And so at that top secret level, you start getting into other areas of further restricting the data. So when you think about classified documents, it's all about restricting who has access to it, and how that data is handled, how that data is stored, which is going to be really important when we talk about Mar Lago and each time you go up the, the birthday cake, as you call it, a pyramid, more like a pyramid, you know, at the top, there's not a lot of material up there, you got a big base and not a lot of material. And so you have these things called Special Access Programs. And it doesn't mean that there's other levels of clearances higher, it's kind of like parallel, when you think of it that way. So think of top secrets, the top and then you start getting all these different designations that even further restrict access to the data to a small group. Sometimes the people that have access to this special access program or SAP data, or the Sei, which is your Sensitive Compartmented Information, these people may have to go under even more scrutiny themselves. Now, we haven't really talked about how people access classified information. We just talked about how we handle classified information. And then these Special Access Programs. Some of it, you have to have what they call a lifestyle polygraph to be able to access some of this data. And that lifestyle polygraph is where they basically put the person that is requesting access to that information on a polygraph machine. And they ask all kinds of questions because they want to make sure that there's not something in your past that you could be exploited against to get this information divulged. And so I'm cannot go into the details of how all this works. But basically, they're looking for things that that an intelligence officer of another country could use to exploit you. You also go through what they call a CI polygraph, which is a counterintelligence polygraph. And that's where they're looking into your past and looking at you as a person and seeing what your level of loyalty is. And if there's anything that would make you pick another country besides the United States, and that's all I want to say about that, but they're basically trying to say, how trustworthy are you when you leave outside those walls? Where this information is, would you divulge it? And so These Special Access Programs, this is the highest part. And there's other ones that are higher that you know, some people don't even know about. So to pull it all together, you have these different levels of classification about handling data, you also have to go through different scrutiny to see if you are mentally able to, to be given this information and to make sure that you can't be exploited to get this information out. So it is a really big deal. Now, all of this classification stuff that we speak of, has not been around for really to me that long. I mean, my dad was born in 1952. And the modern US classification system was created in September of 1951. So less than a year before my dad was born, they said, Hey, we need to, we need to put some rules around this. Because before Harry Truman actually signed this as an executive order that established Top Secret, secret and confidential, there was a lot of people just kind of doing their own thing, right? Like, hey, this is like some important stuff. So let's don't, let's don't leave it out. And when, when they formed the commission, they noticed i Wow, there's a lot of sensitive data, we really don't have exactly a means to classify it and basically have a measuring stick that what other documents could be classified as so anyways, they went around, and they saw that people were leaving classified data all over the place that wasn't locked up, even some people were taking it home, so they could work on their stuff at home. And there was not even a way to even punish people for for security, neglect. So Harry Truman 1951, decided that, we need to put some stuff around this. Now, when you think about classified information, there's one person that sits at the very tip top of the heap. Now, if you have a clearance, and you are writing documents, and you're producing now, whether that's code or you're producing, you know, Intel reports, and stuff, then you are generating classified information. And there's a classification book almost for every possible job role. And you look it up to say, Okay, well, this particular information, if it's combined with these other pieces of information, that makes it classified at this level. Now, I'm not going to go into the details. Because it's, you know, it's just not something that I feel that everybody needs to know, but just know that if you're a farmer, and you use Monsanto seeds, and you plant those seeds in February, and then you use this other special fertilizer three days later, exactly three days later, right? So I'm gonna show you how this could be classified. Now, the fact that you use Monsanto seeds would be considered, let's say unclassified. And the fact that you use this other company's fertilizer that's unclassified. The fact that you ordered your seeds or fertilized your seeds three days later, that's unclassified. Right? So each individual piece is unclassified. And when you think of information out in the world, pretty much everything is kind of unclassified and still, until you start aggregating the data and putting it together. And so if and so back to my farmer analogy, Monsanto seeds that give you a really, really high yield on your crop if you use this other companies fertilizer, well, those two pieces together. Let's say that that's confidential, right? We don't want anybody to know that that's part of the secret sauce. But really, where things start getting real interesting is, is that Monsanto's says you can only use their fertilizer and you find out that if you put this other people's fertilizer on those seeds, if you do too early, it will burn them, and they will not produce anything. If you do it too late, it won't help you out and say the worms eat your seeds or whatever goes on. And so the secret is, is that exactly three days after you get those seeds, and you get them in the ground, you get the fertilizer on there. And it you know exactly at this time, let's say that that's secret information, right? Because if someone found out your competitor there, the farmer down the road, if he was to find out about this, then he could maybe get his crops to, to market early or something like that. Now, here's the top secret information. This is what you cannot have anybody know. And if they were to find out your competitor, you'd basically be out of business and and stuff is, is that when you put that fertilizer on, you got to come back when the temperature is exactly, say 73 degrees, and you have to come back usually at nighttime when the dew is coming in. And you have to blow like a propeller on there to blow that do away. Because just that little amount of dew will be enough to make these seeds grow 20 times faster, and all this good stuff. So think about that as the top secret layer. And the reason why I give you something funny about a farmer is is because people think that you know, the top secret level, that means Hey, I get to know where the space aliens are. It's not like that. And also, what I want you to understand is that inside these documents, there could be everything from unclassified all the way up to these special access program classifications. And so it's not like well, confidential just means not as important. Well, you put a bunch of confidential information together, and you can get something that's top secret. Or you can put a bunch of unclassified information together, and a bunch of unclassified information. And it can be top secret, maybe certain people meet at certain times. And, you know, there's tons of history books written on this. But you know, the story about during the Cuban Missile Crisis, where there was a bartender, Saul to people talk, and that was part of the cabinet or the war or something like that. And they said that they knew that the Cuban missile crisis would be de escalated, because these two people would not be out drinking together. And so that would be top secret. Another piece of top secret stuff that is unclassified is is that and this is all out on the news, too. So I mean, I'm not giving away anything. But you know, when we were going to invade Iraq, that was top secret and secret and different levels and stuff like that troop movements. But there has been a lot of reports that they knew that when we were going to invade Iraq, because at the Pentagon, there was a crazy amount of lights on in the building. And there were a lot check this out. Unclassified, there were a lot of pizzas being delivered. And so they knew the Pentagon was hopping that night, and people started speculating, hey, we're fixing to go in to Iraq and invade them. So you know, but if someone was to come out of the Pentagon and say, Hey, tomorrow night, we're going to invade Iraq. Well, that would be you know, highly top secret information. If someone said, Hey, by the way, we're going to take the deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, that would be top secret, but you know, this unclassified stuff when it's fused together. That's how things become top secret. So now, let's talk about the topic at hand. Like I said, does not matter what side of the aisle you're on? Here is what is being accused that the former President Donald Trump had information at Mar a Lago that was classified. Now, mind you, I didn't say it was top secret. I didn't say it was confidential, right. I mean, now we're seeing that some of the information coming out that supposedly it was top secret. And like I mentioned, top secret information means that there would be grave harm, or people put in grave danger if that information was to be leaked out. And so they went in with a search warrant. And now mind you, I don't want to get into all the the legality of the search warrant. Was it too general? Was it this was it that I mean, the ultimate thing is, is that it's a yes or no question was their top secret information there? That was being In stored, and then not proper manner, which could be a safe or some kind of armed guard, some of this information is stored around. And so that's what they went in there to do. They are in search or war in search of information that was classified. Now, I don't want to get into all the legalities of the search warrant. Was it too broad? Were they on a witch hunt? To just, you know, use that as an excuse. We'll just have to see, and we'll let the courts decide. But the other thing that has happened that I'm getting some phone calls from, they say, See, they're trying they being the FBI, they're trying to hide something, because they released this affidavit, search warrant, whatever. And there's a lot of it that's redacted. There's a lot of black lines on there, and what are they trying to hide? Well, I can tell you what they're trying to hide. They are trying to hide classified information from being released to the public. Now. This is a game that any of them can play. You know, I don't I don't know if they're playing the game or not. But when they redact things, then it comes up for interpretation like well, do we really need to redact that? Did they over redact, but like I mentioned earlier is, is that, you know, the various positions I've been in, there's classification guides, and it says this information is classified at this level. So, you know, the DOJ, they have their own classification guides. And I can tell you one thing that is almost always certainly classified, is sources, whether they are human sources of what we call a human, or if they are technical sources. Those are almost always classified. And this is the same thing in a different world where there don't release names of confidential informants. Right. And so, you know, you got to think that that's probably a lot of the stuff that they redacted was, who told them this information, what led them down this path? If they had surveillance on the place, you know, they're going to redact all of that because this has been released to the public. And the public, as I mentioned earlier in the podcast, does not have the proper classification. Level, they have not been through the proper scrutiny, not even for confidential information to be released to them. So that's probably a lot of what you're seeing now whether they over read over redacted almost said over reacted with some people may say they probably overreacted, but over redacted the information. Well, we just simply will not know. The last thing I'll mention is, is that there is this little thing where the President is the ultimate classification authority, the President himself. So right now we have President Joe Biden. He is in the Oval Office, and if he wants to declassify that there's really unicorns and these unicorns fly around and they excrete golden nuggets, then he can declassify that. And so what I'm wondering is, is that these boxes that they went to go retrieve, if that was the case, if President Trump was still president at the time, did President Trump maybe declassify that information himself? I don't know what all that entails because I have not been president of the this great nation. But, you know, so it could still be marked classified. And maybe he declassified them. But what I will say is, is that for us that we're in the business during the time of the WikiLeaks boom, and these other leaking sites, just because things are out in the public doesn't mean that they are unclassified. So someone like Snowden leaking top secret information, I never went to the sites and got plenty of people that I worked with, they did like heck, no, we're not looking at that, because that would be us viewing classified information in an unclassified space or a space that's not able to adhere to the security standards of which that information is classified at so my house is not rated for top secret Compartmented Information, some little fun fact there. So if President Trump did in fact wave the Presidential wand and say these are now on classified the Then the portion markings would have had to been updated. And you can see this I mean, there's plenty of stuff that's declassified all the time. And you'll see where top secret is scratched out, and then it's actually declassified. And it makes its way into the National Archives. And this is where anybody can view it. Now, one other thing, I will say, President Trump was a servant as our Commander in Chief and President of this great nation. And technically, that would make him an employee. And one of the things that is very much instilled in you when you're going through the indoctrination process, or they call it end dock. Is is that this is basically a lifetime commitment. And just because you're no longer employed by the government, they debrief you, and they tell you, hey, you know, there's a certain amount of years based on the different classification of information that you've received, and it's locked up in your head that you cannot talk about. And I think it's 70 years since the time it was classified. So that basically makes it a lifetime commitment. So just because you don't work for the government anymore, doesn't mean that you can start telling people where the space aliens are, because some of this stuff takes years and years and years and even decades to formulate. So something that you worked on 10 years ago, could still be alive and active operation. And at the end, the people that are out there on the frontlines are military soldiers or intelligence officers and those people, they are out there risking their life and limb, and some of these folks are operating in various countries that they be killed, and they have been killed. Plenty of stars on the outside of the CIA, plenty of stars at the NSA. I'm sure the FBI has, you know, their, their various monuments that people have been killed by, you know, being discovered as being an intelligence source. So anyways, that's what we have for today. Appreciate everybody for riding along here in the Globalbob show. And like I said, We joke around, we say this is classified. But what I wanted to do is give you all a primer and a little 101 lesson of why the FBI, I mean, for all intents and purposes, they were under the impression there's classified information there. And so why they went in now, whether they went in the right way, the wrong way. We don't know. You know, I don't want to get into the politics of this. I stay out of the politics whenever I'm talking about a lot of stuff that could be spun politically, but you know, what does have to see. And hopefully, by the end of this podcast here, you now will understand that there's, you know, things that are classified, and if that information was to get out, it would cause us grave damage. All right. Well, thank you, everybody, for tuning in. I will see everybody next week. Please continue to support the show. This is why you This is for you all and be safe out there. And just know that when there's various operations to retrieve this classified information, it's because they're trying to protect the sources and methods. All right. Until next week.