United States Marine Corps

We will be discussing the information flow of the United States Marine Corps. We will go over everything from marking to safeguarding to control measures to security check to other security measures. The first thing that we will discuss is the marking of information. To do this first we must understand the classification types of information that is within the military branch of services. Those classifications are as follows: unclassified, official, restricted, confidential, secret and top secret. Every country has the same levels of confidentiality levels for their specific types of information. And those specific types are usually restricted, confidential, secret and top secret. Depending on your rank and your specific job within the military you will need to get a security clearance to be able to even view certain levels of information that flows through the military. A clearance is the military’s way of checking your background and your history very thoroughly to ensure that you don’t have anything in your background that the enemy could use to get you to divulge and information that they deem necessary to destroy us. For example, let’s say that you have a top secret clearance and you work for the department of defense’s special weapons division and you are overseas and you decide to unwind and have a few drinks with fellow workers in the same division that you work in and all of you are at a bar. You do not realize that you are talking very loud and other people start to hear everything that you are talking about. So they decide to send a woman to you to start to work you for little bits of information and over time they find out enough information to bury you and they decide to blackmail you to keep giving them information about what you are working on or they will tell your superiors about your mistake. That is one of the reasons why you have to get a background check which encompasses the government digging into your soul before giving you a security clearance to make sure that you are morally able to handle that responsibility. Now back to markings, information was usually marked with stickers and electronics that dealt with whatever levels of information was also marked with specific stickers that said either unclassified, classified, secret or top secret. And depending on the specific level of information there would be an armed guard or two-person integrity meaning that two people would always be with that information and both people would know everything about that information. Top secret information had security measures that were unmatched. Any copies of top secret information or any top secret electronics and any and everything that dealt with top secret information had to be accounted for at all times with such measures as everything having to have an individual serial number and logged into the headquarters of the Marine Corps top secret inventory database. The only place to view classified information in somewhere that can be used to prevent any unauthorized persons from getting to the information. And if for some reason that an unauthorized person is allowed in that space where the classified information is being worked with or discussed or whatever, you must make sure that all information is put away and stored in a DOD allowed security space or a vault or a safe with guards on it depending on the level of classification of the information until that unauthorized person leaves the area. Security checks are conducted when the work day is finished to ensure that no one has thrown away any classified information in waste cans, also to ensure that all burn bags are stored properly, and to ensure that no one is mistakenly taking home any classified information. To destroy classified information there are certain steps that need to be taken to destroy classified information like burning it is one of a few ways. In conclusion, we discussed how information flows in the Marine Corps, who can read and have access to this information, different levels of information, security clearances, classified information facilities, and how to properly destroy classified information. Now you should have a better understanding on how everything goes.

References
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&ved=0CEkQFjAF&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hqmc.marines.mil%2FPortals%2F137%2FHQMC-IPSP-SOP.pdf&ei=qncNVPLWAYmkigL3o4HICw&usg=AFQjCNH7kahNhDWCEUjZDzsE5jY9Vn1dJQ&sig2=Hdq9EKZpX-YLfbAKPy2pIg