Markings and clearances

Some deployments classify their conversations. If yours does, you will see a marking across the top of a marked conversation — something like SECRET // NOFORN — and your own clearance in Settings.

What a marking is

A marking is two things: a level on this deployment's ladder, and a set of caveats beside it. The level is a rank: a higher one is more restricted. The caveats are handling instructions and compartments — NOFORN, ORCON, PERSONAL-DATA, LEGAL-PRIVILEGE — and they are not ranked. You either hold one or you do not.

Written out, the level comes first, then a double slash, then the caveats:

RESTRICTED // PROCUREMENT / LEGAL-PRIVILEGE

What a clearance is

The same two things, held by you rather than by a conversation: a rank, and a set of caveats. You may read a marked conversation when your rank is at least its level's rank and your caveats include all of its.

Everyone starts at rank 0 with no caveats. A clearance is granted by somebody with the permission to grant one, it says who granted it and why, and it can carry an expiry. An expired clearance is rank 0 again — which Settings says in those words, because "expired" and "never had one" are different situations and the second one is not yours to fix.

The one thing to understand about it

A marking is carried by the conversation, not by the message.

The conversation's marking is set by people, and what this server enforces from it is who may be in the conversation: who may join, who may be invited, and who may be sent its sealed bytes. That is a real boundary and it is enforced on the server, so a modified app gains nothing by it.

What it is not is a check on what you wrote. This server cannot read a message — that is the whole design — so it cannot look at a paragraph and decide whether it is SECRET. Nothing here can, and nothing here claims to.

Which means the thing that actually keeps a marked conversation marked is the people in it. If you paste a paragraph out of a SECRET room into an unmarked one, the server has no way to know and no way to stop you. The marking tells you what you are handling; it cannot enforce your judgment about it.

Portion marking

The app can put a short marking on a single paragraph — (S//NF) — for the same reason paper does: so that a piece quoted somewhere else carries its own marking with it. It is text you are writing, exactly like the rest of the message, and it is sealed with it.

What you see when you may not read something

You are told the marking and your own clearance:

This conversation is marked SECRET // NOFORN. Your clearance is CONFIDENTIAL.

That is deliberate, and it is the opposite of what happens with an information barrier. A classification is printed on the thing: it is not a secret from the person being kept out of it, it is the reason. Being told which level and which caveats is what lets you ask for the right thing.

Last changed 2026-10-06