State Dept. Employee Investigated For Linking To WikiLeaks

New submitter Jimme Blue writes "An employee of the State Department is under investigation and may be fired for 'disclosing classified information.' Or, as others might call it, posting a link to WikiLeaks. 'His crime, he said, was a link he posted on August 25 in a blog post discussing the hypocrisy of recent U.S. actions against Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi. The link went to a 2009 cable about the sale of U.S. military spare parts to Qadaffi through a Portuguese middleman. ... The State Department investigators, he said, demanded to know who had helped him with his blog and told him that every blog post, Facebook post, and tweet by State Department employees had to be pre-cleared by the Department prior to publication."

Comments

Prepublication Review

[Anonymous Coward]

People may not like it, but anyone with a US security clearance has a requirement for "prepublication review". That usually applies to talking about your job or things you learned during your job. Since this guy worked for State, and he posted information about state, I think they have a good point. For all any of us know he knew about that Cable from seeing it at work. Just because it has been publicly disclosed does *not* mean it is not still classified. https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v41i3a01p.htm http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/prepub/index.shtml

Re:Whats the problem

[HBI]

Moreover, we were all instructed not to search for, read or refer to the Wikileaks data, as it would be treated as disclosing or misusing classified data. Apparently, this guy can't take a warning seriously.