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US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked
Jake writes "The US government's 11-page document on how to get various US government agencies to prevent future leaks has been leaked. It doesn't get any more ironic than that. After the various leaks made by WikiLeaks, the US government understandably wants to limit the number of potential leaks, but their strategy apparently isn't implemented yet. It's clear that the Obama administration is telling federal agencies to take aggressive steps to prevent further leaks. According to the document, these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have."
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/OMB_Wiki_memo.pdf
If anything, it bothers me a little that techspot is treating this as a coup (it's not even on MSNBC's front page), since there's no reason this document should be kept secret, and thus it should not be, since the policy may affect many people and should therefore be a matter of public discussion. The default in government should be openness, not secrecy.
the policy is marked top and bottom with "Unclassified." It's not classified
I'm not sure about the US system, but in the UK unclassified and not classified are not the same thing at all. I believe this is the same on both sides of the pond.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This document is CLEARLY marked UNCLASSIFIED.
Not FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY (not for public consumption).
Not SECRET ( would cause "serious damage" to national security)
Not TOP SECRET ( would cause "exceptionally grave damage" to national security)
This is a non story.
Can't the armed forces make rules that subcontracted work cannot be exported out of the country? It's the same effect with less insanity. Hell, even if something like this needed congressional approval or a law of some sort, it's not as though it would be difficult to get it passed.
I would go a little farther. The voters of the United States has been promised transparency in government. If the USG kept the promise, there would be nothing to leak. Furthermore, with the sheer amount of information that such transparency would generate, we would instantly be in information overload, so the risk of people actually seeing something embarrassing would be reduced.
Remember the movie Class Action? "We ask for a couple of things, and the other side sends the Library of Congress. There must be something there they don't want us to find."
the policy is marked top and bottom with "Unclassified." It's not classified
I'm not sure about the US system, but in the UK unclassified and not classified are not the same thing at all. I believe this is the same on both sides of the pond.
You would be wrong. Unclassified and not classified mean the same thing in both countries. The US , UK and most of the EU aligned their classification categories quite some time back to facilitate information sharing. Although the UK uses slightly different terms for some things, the categories are the same. Also note that the terms "Restricted" or "For-Official-Use-Only" are not classification levels, they are caveats (ie an additional handling restriction).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classified_information
A colleague who used to work for defense contractors once told me this interesting trick : If you have a boring document that you need every employee to read, instead of just handling it to them, make it secret and give them clearance. That will make them more curious and everybody will read it.
Your colleague was a liar. Anyone with a clearance knows that 99.999% of classified documents are snore-inducing borefests. To someone with a clearance, getting yet another classified document is just more hassle and is to be avoided if at all possible.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
How was communism the vehicle that allowed Hitler to gain power? By being an opposition he could use to sway his people to Fascism? I also doubt the US communist party would want to install a Mussolini, as Mussolini was a fascist and fought communism just as Hitler fought communism. (Communists was executed together with Jews and political opponents in the fascist regimes) But Hitler was a great threat, and he would no doubt take USA if he could.
01 REDEFINE REALITY.