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

What classified information?

[WiglyWorm]

Can anyone honestly pretend that information which has been leaked and posted on the internet still qualifies as classified?

Also, hasn't the Govt. ever heard of the streisand effect?

Re:What classified information?

[rtfa-troll]

The label applies to the document in the state department. It does not apply to the identical but different document in Wikileaks. Imagine, for example, the state department gets a copy of a Chinese military document (e.g. specifications of a newly coming fighter plane). The document will be classified by the state department. Now imagine the Chinese publish the document (e.g. because they want to market the plane). If you take the Chinese document and publish it; tell everyone about it and say whatever you want, the state department can do nothing. Although the information is identical to the classified information this copy is not classified. If, on the other hand, a person from the state department says "oh; we already had that document" then they may well have put a secret source at considerable risk because that person was the only person who could have leaked the document earlier. This is true, whatever the current status of the information in the document.

In other words; the crime is not linking to Wikileaks. There are two potential crimes; the first is transferring information from the government system to Wikileaks. The second and more easily verifiable crime is saying that linking to Wikileaks is a crime because you are thereby admitting that the documents are real State Department documents. The investigators and other people who are claiming to know that this information is classified are the most likely criminals here.

Re:What classified information?

[slackbheep]

I'm just going to submit that there is a certain expectation by the public that their government not behave in a manner best described as... fucking silly?

Re:What classified information?

[onyxruby]

Your logic is akin to saying that just because your health, financial, academic or other private records are magically now everyone's business just because they have been posted online.

Your financial records are still your /private/ financial records and should stay that way regardless of the fact that your financial records may have been sold on the black market. Just because someone has leaked a piece of data does not magically change the nature of that data.

Somehow I think you would be singing a different tune if it was your private data that had been posted for the world to see. I really hope you don't work in finance, academia, health or other similar industries.

Do you americans tolerate that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why aren't you doing sth. to stop your governemnt from all those wars, killings, rapes, child-tradings and other cruelties?

If you don't stand up right now, you're no better than all those 'clueless' Nazis!

Re:Prepublication Review

[Reservoir Penguin]

So basically he is being punished for shouting that the king is naked.

Re:Drone Attack!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a funny post, but don't for a second think that this isn't the direction we're heading.