moothemagiccow: "Classified information" is kind of a silly way of putting it, especially when people on TV say "that's classified." That doesn't mean anything on its own. It's "classified secret." (or top secret, or confidential.) Saying "that's classified" is like saying "that's categorized."

It is, but it's not. It's possible to draw certain inferences from the actual classification level, whether it's the importance of the data or the means and methods that were used to acquire it.

I'm named the same as someone rather high up in DoD, and because of that, I've received some email "spillage" from a Lieutenant Colonel at the Pentagon when I was working as a DoD contractor. Dude just picked the wrong guy out of the global address book. It was during the Obama administration, and it was the President's lunch plan for a certain day (he was going to be away from the WH). OK, sure, classified because you wouldn't want a foreign bad actor to know it, but it wasn't going exactly nuclear secrets. It took me a second to even realize there was a "confidential" marking on the document.

It was such a "nothing" that I immediately became a good worker bee and reported it to my security manager because I figured it was the type of thing they'd do to make sure you followed procedure, and if you didn't, there'd be a mandatory hour-long online course on proper spillage procedure. No, it was legit- that LTC was just a dumbass.

There's a HUGE difference between that and TS docs marked SCI that deal with nuclear arms.