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US Military 'Banned' From Viewing Wikileaks
Following up on its risible demand that Wikileaks return the Afghanistan documents, the Pentagon has banned military members from viewing the documents. The Washington Times obtained copies of Navy and Marine Corps messages to their troops saying that accessing the documents even from a personal computer is "willingly committing a security violation." Wired notes that terrorists everywhere are under no such restriction. Reader carp3_noct3m writes "I am personally left almost speechless at this disconnect from reality demonstrated by the military. I am a USMC Iraq war vet, and find these policies completely ridiculous. They show the inability of our supposedly technologically knowledgeable military to fuse this knowledge with policy, mostly due to the political pressure that has erupted to 'take care of' the Wikileaks problem."
The fact that the documents have been leaked did not immediately and magically change their status, thus they are still considered 'SECRET' by the military. Likely the military will eventually change this classification, but that won't happen overnight (there 90,000 freaking documents). Until that does happen, it's a security violation for a military member to access documents for which they are not cleared.
Yes, it would be against such policies. In fact, that is the exact rationale for instructing military members and associated civilian employees to avoid it.
The military services (both service members and associated civilian agencies) all have a strict policy about accessing classified material. If you do so on an unclassified machine, it's called "spillage", and BY LONG-STANDING POLICY the machine MUST be disconnected from the network and carefully scrubbed of all traces.
And if the access is intentional and made with full awareness of the law, that's punishable by all kinds of nasty penalties.
And no, it doesn't matter that it already exists on thousands of other machines around the world. Until it's officially declassified, it's still classified, and rules and policies still apply.
So this is NOT an attempt to muzzle the information - it's simply following long-standing rules and making sure everyone knows exactly what those rules are.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
It's been a few years since my TS clearance went away, but ISTR that publication of a secret document immediately renders it declassified.
Unless they have changed the rules recently, this is incorrect.
Classified information is not automatically declassified by public disclosure, accidental or otherwise.
Tom Clancy tells the story about security review of "Hunt for Red October" (published by Naval Institute Press, they routinely send stuff to the Navy just to be sure.) The review came back, "Can't publish, contains classified information." "Well tell me what that is, I'll remove it, and we'll be good to go." "No, sir. You don't have the clearance for that information."
After a couple back-and-forth, apparently Clancy went over his book, line-by-line, justifying everything in there as derived from open source (in the Intel sense, i.e. freely available from the press, unclassified technical reports, etc.). Eventually the Navy had to admit that, if there was something classified in there, it was derived from stuff that anyone could read and deduce on his/her own.
Yossarian is alive and well, it appears... (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22)
No. Here's the latest executive order:
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526
And I'm not sure that was ever true. Even if it is made public, it has to be declassified under proper authority to legally be declassified. And if it still has valid security implications, it can remain classified. Which means certain people can't legally discuss it, much less process it on their non-classified machinery, while others will openly discuss it. The idea being at the least that discussing one secret can lead to exposure of another, and mixing secrets and non-secrets in improper ways can confuse what is and isn't secret.
There are a number of issues of invalid classification that were raised in wikileaks' self-justification for publishing this information that should legally force the authorities to declassify those particular items; but clearly that does not apply to the entirety of what they released, and certainly not to the un-analyzed, un-redacted form in which they were released. Leaving in the names of people who are still in danger is a clear violation of law even when properly declassifying information.
At any rate, none of this information has been declassified by the proper authority, so all of it is still legally considered classified, and anyone accessing it is liable to be charged with a crime.
The only unsettled issue here is the scope of the release. It's not merely a few copies of documents that need to be collected and secured, and a few civilians to brief and warn about further disclosure. It's potentially millions of unauthorized computers infected that legally may be seized, an entire society led to misunderstand the role and importance of secrets, and our security apparatus put in a position of looking like fools for trying to follow the law and maybe save a few lives out of the dozens or hundreds that the insecurity apparatus put in danger.
Which brings up the simple question of moral relativism. This started with a few people being killed in a form of collateral damage, and may end up with hundreds being killed in retribution murders. People talk about who has blood on their hands. Well, we all do, in the end, but for some of us the blood comes with moral authority and a lack of criminal guilt.
we no longer have any claim on being a moral nation
Haha! If facts would have stopped that particular US canard, then they would have stopped preaching about their moral superiority long ago.
Never underestimate the power of delusion.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right