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There’s new reason to think Trump still has classified documents (wapo.st)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (9 children)

You don't need clearance to know a document exists, and you don't even need to know the contents or even the subject matter of the document. Just give the document an RFID sticker or similar and you can then track it pretty much anywhere on government property. So an audit would just be scanning tags and comparing with a database that says where those tags should be.

That's obviously simplistic, but it's a proof of concept that the people at places like the NSA or FBI could refine. It should be fairly easy to tell if a document is where it ought to be.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (8 children)

With long range RFID readers existing that is bad opsec. You don't need to know the contents of a document to exploit it's dissemination, in certain cases.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (7 children)

I'm thinking something like this:

All classified docs are kept in a secure room for storage with external RF blocking; the folder has an RFID (or similar) tag
When an item is requested, the contents are moved to a new folder with a temporary barcode or similar
When the item is returned, the temporary barcode is destroyed and the document is placed back in the secure room

Step 2 could use a temporary RFID tag as well, which gets replaced at each checkout. That way all an attacker would know is that an RFID tag is being used, they wouldn't necessarily know it's a classified document.

Obviously the approach would need to be refined (I don't deal with classified documents), but the general approach should work, especially if RFID is used for a bunch of less sensitive documents as well so RFID tags become commonplace.

What's nuts to me is that it took so long for authorities to track those documents down, and they didn't even get them all. They should have all been tracked down between the time Trump lost reelection and the time he left office, and perhaps confined to the White House.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I’m thinking there wouldn’t be enough secure rooms to house all the documents, without making it difficult to access them. I

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

The mundane documents don't need to be stored in a secure room, they just need to reuse tags from the secure vault to help obscure the classified documents.

Presumably secure storage already exists and blocks RF, so the main change here should be tagging.

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