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."

Comments

Whats next

[Drivintin]

I think next they should try reverse psychology. Works well with me 5 year old.

Re:Whats next

[Anonymous Coward]

fine, DON'T try reverse psychology.

The PDf of the document

[Ndkchk]

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/OMB_Wiki_memo.pdf

Ironic?

[hardtofindanick]

Encryption algorithms are also public, that doesn't mean they won't work.

Re:Ironic?

[timeOday]

It's not ironic. If you look at the PDF of the document itself, every page of the policy is marked top and bottom with "Unclassified." It's not classified, it's not even Official Use Only, from scanning the document I didn't see anything indicating anybody was supposed to restrict its circulation.

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.

I Wouldn't Worry

[CheeseburgerBrown]

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.

The people hired...

[gstrickler]

...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.

Perhaps they should study the KGB?

[Teancum]

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:

• What items ought to be kept secret?
• Does the federal bureaucracy really need to be so big in the first place?

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.

the amount of classified information is astounding

[nblender]

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...

elephant in the room

[conspirator57]

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."

Re:elephant in the room

[satch89450]

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."

Re:elephant in the room -- MOD PARENT UP!

[conspirator57]

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.