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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."
I think next they should try reverse psychology. Works well with me 5 year old.
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/OMB_Wiki_memo.pdf
Encryption algorithms are also public, that doesn't mean they won't work.
I'm sure that if anyone were falsely accused of being a leaker, they would no doubt have swift access to just recourse. This is the West, after all.
If someone ends up in a such a situation and reports the contrary, their testimony is likely tainted because they are a dirty rotten leaker.
Ultimately, we are all safer somehow.
These stories are free but worth money.
...to stop the leaks after the first leaks, have just been sacked. The leaks will now be stopped in a new, and completely different fashion.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
I love knowing how America keeps creeping to become more and more like the Soviet Union with a similar kind of loss of privileges.
Where the debate really needs to be centered is on two things:
By far and away too much is classified material. I don't mind having things like the locations of military units and certain other generally time-sensitive information being classified, but there certainly is a whole bunch of stuff being labeled as classified material mainly because it would be embarrassing if the information was disclosed. That stuff should not be protected under an official secrets act and I wish that a harder evaluation would result in trying to decide what exactly should be considered classified material in the first place.
Speculating that the King of Saudi Arabia is an ass should not be considered an official secret.
Isn't irony ("Situational irony" as Wikipedia calls it seems to be what most folks mean when they say it) when the opposite of what you expect to happen happens? For example, if I implemented a set of policies to prevent leaks and then those policies caused a leak - very ironic. That's not what happened here, what is the irony in this situation?
I do some work for a military contractor and the sheer amount of classified information that's flying around is simply beyond astounding... A lot of things that are banal and boring are marked Top Secret in order to prevent sub-contractors from hiring foreign workers... It's not that the information itself is or needs to be Top Secret but marking it so is a way to keep jobs local...
not doing things that would hang heavy on the conscience of people, causing them to leak stuff ? not betraying them ? not misusing their trust ?
.... basically, they are being deceived with shallow excuses and justifications.
then the need for finding 'trustworthy' people who would have to go through security audits, psychiatrists, sociologists, would be at a minimum.
we are not the age of empires in which dumb lackeys blindly do whatever they are ordered to. people of this age, have conscience compared to the dark ages. you wont be able to make them do evil shit, and then keep their mouth shut, if there is a way for them to blow the whistle.
but maybe the problem in the recruitment strategy. touting being a democracy that protects freedom, you recruit people to that cause, with patriotic lines. then, they discover that, what they do actually go against what they had had joined the force for
only dumb enough people would buy bullshit. the rest, will leak, regardless of whether you employ armies of psychiatrists, or not.
Read radical news here
From Wikipedia (which agrees with my military background)
Unclassified
Technically not a classification level, but is used for government documents that do not have a classification listed above. Such documents can sometimes be viewed by those without security clearance.
This document is at the same level as a menu from the kitchen of the White House. Show me documents with Noforn or better and then I'll be concerned.
...post-WikiLeaks environment.
Because this sort of thing never happened before WikiLeaks? This just shows that all their security responses are purely reactive and never pro-active, just like the TSA. The threats have always existed, it just goes to show that whoever has been doing risk analysis for these agencies have been completely clueless and still doesn't get it. Although, if anything, by trying to fix the causes and just blaming Wikileaks there is the benefit of at least getting a stronger system which is why I agree with what Wikileaks did.
From the summary...
"...these steps include figuring out which employees might be most inclined to leak classified documents, by using psychiatrists and sociologists to assess their trustworthiness. "
McCarthy, Stalin, and Mao would all be proud. Those who do not, fundamentally, "think right", will be treated... differently. Never mind the fact that screening of the type were talking about here has a dismal record at predicting behavior. It was designed to predict pathology. The two are, believe it or not, rather different things.
or perhaps the number one thing the government could do to prevent leaks in future would be to... i don't know... *NOT DO ILLEGAL SHIT* or, and i know i'm way off base, *NOT SUBVERT ITS OWN IDEALS OF FREEDOM AND EQUALITY*
But, sadly James Earl Jones already played the US Government:
Whistler: "I want peace on earth and goodwill toward men."
Bernard Abbott: "We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing."
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
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.
Mod parent up, please. Why is this glaringly obvious solution NEVER discussed?
.nosig
You don't have to lie in those scenarios.
Then you just say "Hi, how are you doing?" Still a perfectly polite greeting, and you've told no lies.
If they're asking me, they apparently want my opinion. Why would I not then give it? If they want something different, I'll usually go along with it, but you shouldn't ask questions you don't want the answer for.
No. If they need picked up a little, I'll give them a real one. I've never known a person with no good qualities at all. And really, people do tend to know when you're shitting them around like that. If you want to give them a compliment, pick a genuinely good quality they possess, or something they've recently done well, and compliment them for that.
I would tend to expect the same of our diplomats. They need to be candid, sure. But they can do that by, say, dispassionately reporting the facts and leaving the high school type jabs out oft it entirely. And if what you really are doing would embarrass you if it came to light, there's an easy solution to that—don't do those things. The government could well learn from that. If the actions they're undertaking in our name wouldn't be supported by us if we knew about them, and would be embarrassing because they're unacceptable, why are they doing those things in the first place?
The problem here is not that certain inappropriate actions of the government came to light. The problem is that they ever took place at all.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
The memo also suggests that agencies require all their employees to report any contacts with members of the news media they may have.
But they've been telling us all along that the wikileaks folks don't qualify as "journalists" and don't deserve the legal protections that most democracies give to "news media". Employees in contact with such online information sources can easily think that such requirements don't apply, since they've been specifically told that such organizations aren't news media.
Maybe they should think of a better way of expressing what they want their employees to do. Or stop the pretense that, since there are no printing presses involved, people working on informing the public online don't qualify for legal protections such as the US's First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Because fascists and other authoritarians believe that bad (and illegal) things must be done by the government to keep society functioning well.
Interestingly, in the USA, both Democrats and Republicans fit this description, as well as most of the people who vote for them.
like covering up the apache killings of the journalists in Iraq when all the government really had to do was admit that a mistake had been made in a war zone?
i guarantee you that if our government's actions were less continually ignoble there would be many fewer leaks across the board.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
is that the person who thought they were being clever by labeling this a "leak" didn't notice it was an unclassified memo sent to the heads of public agencies.