The year is 2010.

For decades, the U.S. government handled its sprawling archive of sensitive-but-unclassified (SBU) data like a particularly ambitious hoarder organizing their garage. Sure, everything technically had a place — but no one knew where, or why, or what half the labels even meant.

We're not talking about top-secret nuclear launch codes or the names of deep-cover agents here. No, this was the other stuff: sensitive but not classified — information like:

• Proprietary designs from defense contractors.

• Internal agency emails about procurement.

• The location of a particularly grumpy badger underneath the Pentagon's most secure server rack.

Stuff you definitely didn’t want leaked to Reddit, but (probably) wouldn’t trigger a global thermonuclear war. 

The problem? Every single agency, department, and sub-office had its own brilliant idea for labeling this data. You had FOUO, SBU, LES, NOFORN, SFW, and roughly 100 other unique, agency-specific hieroglyphs.

The result? Confusion reigned supreme. 

Even the acronyms were confused. Some overlapped in purpose. Some were redundant. Some were made up on the spot by a sleepy records manager trying to finish their cyber awareness training before lunch. 

👨‍💼"Is this FOUO or SBU?" 

👩‍💼"Yes!" 

This created a paradox: important data that needed to be shared wasn’t, because no one wanted to risk mishandling it. And data that shouldn’t have been shared? Well... it probably was. Because no one could keep track of which marking meant what, or which policy governed it.

It wasn’t so much information security as it was information guess-and-check.

The writing was on the wall. Cyber incidents were ramping up. 

The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) had issued multiple reports highlighting weak federal information security. The infamous 📄 2009 OMB memo and the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) audits pointed fingers at systemic failures to track, protect, and classify sensitive-but-unclassified data. 

The decentralized mess meant:

• Contractors didn't know what markings to follow.

• Agencies didn’t trust each other’s labels.

• There was no universal standard for what needed to be protected or how.

Enter November 4, 2010, a beacon of hope.

📄Executive Order 13556: Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is just signed by President Obama.

The goal? To create “an open and uniform program for managing information that requires safeguarding or dissemination controls.”

In layman’s terms:
“We’re finally standardizing this mess.”

No more one agency waving around “For Official Use Only” while another stubbornly clings to “Sensitive But Unclassified” like a secret club password. This Executive Order declared a unified framework to rule them all.

It was designed to force federal agencies to inventory and categorize their sensitive information under one shiny, new, government-approved banner: Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI).

This meant every piece of data that needed some kind of protection — from privacy records, to critical infrastructure details, to the Pentagon’s favorite grumpy badger’s whereabouts — would eventually get wrapped up in this neat, standardized package. Federal agencies, contractors, and partners could finally speak the same language. The alphabet soup got reduced to a single, official acronym: CUI — pronounced “Cooey” by the more sophisticated IT professionals who definitely didn’t just make that up on the spot.

The idea was simple: make sharing easier and protect sensitive data more effectively. Fewer labels, clearer rules. Chaos disappeared. Information flowed securely. The world and the government became truly efficient. Everything worked perfectly.