Keyvan Nayyeri

In the recent years of my life I experienced something new that I never had any feeling about it and that is dealing with classified stuff especially confidential stuff.  I can divide this experience into two sides: confidential stuff in my business life and confidential stuff in my military life.

There aren't many things to say about confidential stuff at military service because according to rules, it's explicitly demonstrated that we shouldn't have access to this stuff and they just teach us about this stuff.  The reason is obvious, since we're forced to pass the service and this is required, no one can guarantee that we don't spread this stuff with others.

But the business side of this is very nice.  Suddenly I noticed that I've signed many agreements to work on confidential stuff for several companies just in less than 2-3 years!

One nice point about the classified stuff is the way that companies classify their stuff.  Doing a comparison between different kinds of confidential stuff, I noticed that the importance of two confidential things may vary based on their nature.  For example, Stuff 1 is very critical for the company but is marked as confidential while Stuff 2 isn't as critical as Stuff 1 but of course shouldn't be spread easily so just to avoid spreading it by anyone, it's marked as confidential.

Although there are many guides on how to classify stuff in the companies but still confidential, private and important mean the same for many guys and they don't know how to choose between them.  I've seen many guys who simply mark a letter or agreement as confidential because they don't want to let some special guys to see them.

In my opinion there should be a general guide for classified stuff in each industry that all companies follow.  For example, in software industry some specified stuff should be marked as confidential and in car industry some other specified stuff.  I don't think such a guide exists though.

On the other hand, I worked on the many confidential projects that really had to be confidential but I don't think that companies got enough confirmations about me outside the company (and even worse, outside the country) to let me get access to their classified stuff, data and ...  So if I had published the confidential stuff for anyone then they might get in big troubles.

The other interesting point (well, at least for myself) is about the way that very very big companies trust on individuals outside.  I've experienced that internal companies are very sensitive to work with individuals and don't let them to have access to classified stuff while these companies are nothing (well, here everything is almost nothing!).  Despite this, I've worked with many big companies that just trusted on my face and what they had seen from me!