Sensitive but unclassified
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Sensitive but unclassified, or SBU, is the intelligence community's term for the category other parts of government call controlled unclassified information. John Kiriakou's first point about it is definitional: "it's not a classification, it's a control."

What it covers

The examples he gives are deliberately mundane, "a training manual for how to clean a gun," or "the Department of Commerce's trade numbers that are going to come out in three days." Such material "has nothing to do with sources and methods. They may potentially, possibly cause a little bit of embarrassment if they were to leak, but they are not classified."

The expansion he objects to

Kiriakou was responding to a proposal to bring controlled unclassified information inside insider-threat monitoring. His objection is about reach: "to include information like that under the Espionage Act would be to add an entire layer of federal employees underneath the Espionage Act's auspices."

He works the example. Nobody at the Office of Personnel Management has access to classified information, or needs it, "so everything that they do, because it's personnel-based, it's sensitive but unclassified." A hard-working branch chief takes files home to finish and leaves them on the subway, "what, you're going to be charged with espionage? Come on. This is really entering the realm of the absurd."

See also

- Espionage Act
- Classification compartments
- Over Classification
