Item #: SCP-711
Laconic Containment Procedures: Do not use this thing. We mean it. If anybody tries to use it, punish them as horribly as you possibly can.
In the meantime, disassemble it, bury each separate part in concrete, and stash it in a really secure vault. If there's an emergency big enough that it might destroy big chunks of the Foundation and/or human civilization, destroy SCP-711 immediately. Make sure to rebuild it once the crisis is over.
Nobody who knows how to use it is allowed to know anything about the 17th message we got from it.
Laconic Description: It's a machine that can send plain-text messages to the past and receive messages from the future. That means once you get a message from it, somebody has to send it someday.
We've gotten 17 messages from this thing. 16 of them were just test patterns that started out clear but gradually got terribly staticky. The 16th was almost unrecognizable. We've also gotten 4 messages that we never sent and never will: the machine was just picking up random static.
We haven't sent the 17th message yet. Its first part has enough ID codes that it must have been sent by a real Foundation agent. We take that to mean that the Foundation has to survive until the 17th message is sent (otherwise it's a nasty little time paradox), so we're guaranteed to survive for as long as we can keep from sending it.
Additional Context: The redactions in this article cover up a key piece of information: the Foundation doesn't actually know that its agent sent the 17th message. Overuse has made the machine so unreliable that the last message is barely readable through the static. In fact, it might just be static, with the bits of "ID code" just coming by chance from the random noise. The O5s don't want anyone to know that, though, because guaranteed survival is good for morale.