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."

Comments

wow...

[Zak3056]

Words fail me. About the only thing I can imagine is that there is something in there that will utterly cripple morale when someone recognizes it for what it is and spreads the word. Of course, all this does it raise a giant banner up in the air saying, "PLEASE DO NOT LOOK AT THIS, THERE IS SOMETHING THAT WOULD EMBARRASS US!"

Well, either that, or this whole thing is designed to intensely focus analysis on something known to be benign.

Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways?

[frist]

Yes it is. Anyone who works with classified material knows this. Just because someone else "leaks" the documents does not change their classification, and viewing them is still a security violation if the viewer does not have the appropriate clearance and a need to know. The reminder to servicemen is appropriate. As usual, the slashdot crowd is clueless yet feels free to mock and ridicule.

At long last, logic!

[hyades1]

Forbidding ordinary soldiers, sailors, airmen and such from reading the documents actually makes a lot of sense. Terrorists already know how utterly witless the US military brass are, so it doesn't matter if they visit Wikileaks and engage in an orgy of downloading. The brass, however, are scared to death that the lower ranks in their own commands might figure out how stupid, cruel and ineffective they are.