Confidential Information Poisoning

James Comey, head of the FBI, has made much of the fact that Hillary Clinton's e-mails contained "classified" information. Of course, since it's "classified" (yet another last refuge of a scoundrel), he can't tell us what that information was. But we do have some clues.

The e-mails messages were not marked as classified in the same fashion as other classified e-mails, that would have a line as part of the To/From settings.

The messages were all sent from unclassified networks. Ms. Clinton would not have had access from her server to a classified network. So any messages sent or received would not have been from a classified to a non-classified network. If this were the case, then the problems related to that security failure would overwhelm the question of Ms. Clinton's e-mails.

We do know that various branches of Federal agencies have different rules for declaring messages classified or no. We can surmise that one agency's secret might be another's top secret.

We also don't know what it means to say that a message contains "classified information." Is it a sentence? A paragraph? A single word. Here's a case in point.

Assume there is a top secret campaign that is code-named "59Balloons." The document describing this mission is classified Top Secret. Now, in an email sent on a non-classified network, there is the sentence: "Remember that we have that 59Balloons meeting at 10am tomorrow."

Is the use of the word "59Balloons" sufficient to declare that this message "contains classified information"?

I don't know. If someone can tell me, I'd appreciate it