Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Army Block Access To The Guardian's Website Over NSA Leaks
New submitter crashcy writes "According to a spokesman for the U.S. Army, the military organization is 'blocking all access to The Guardian newspaper's reports about the National Security Agency's sweeping collection of data about Americans' email and phone communications.' The spokesman goes on to state that it is routine to block access where classified materials may be distributed. The term used was 'network hygiene.' 'Campos wrote if an employee accidentally downloaded classified information, it would result in "labor intensive" work, such as the wipe or destruction of the computer's hard drive. He wrote that an employee who downloads classified information could face disciplinary action if found to have knowingly downloaded the material on an unclassified computer.'"
The answer to your question is yes. Classified information remains classified until declassified.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
As in: we wish the problem would just go away. Wish wish, shoo shoo, go away problem!
The source of this madness comes from the regulations that were intended to be applied in an entirely different scenario. An unclassified computer could be used to store classified data that wasn't leaked yet, so the rule was there to protect the information from leaking out in the first place. Of course the geniuses who wrote the rules didn't think of massive leaks where tens or even hundreds of thousands of pages of classified documents can be read on a newspaper's website. Heck, when the rules were put into place, there were no websites. That's the problem here: applying rules that simply don't make any sense whatsoever in a given scenario. According to the rules, they really need to nuke all of the Guardian's servers from the orbit, and drop incendiary bombs on the homes of all of the poor saps who accessed this stuff.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
What they're referring to is blocking of site access on NIPRNet, which is the "unclass" side of US military network operations, but is still subject to additional scrutiny and a strict requirement that no information that has been classified be stored on connected systems. This is standard protocol bordering on the boring for office communications in the military, and is absolute non-news.
Nobody is actively working (well, okay, not openly working) to restrict communications viewed by active duty DoD personnel on their personal computers while utilizing Internet connections not-uplinked-in-the-barracks-or-other-stupid-places-where-you-know-your-traffic-is-being-logged-shipmate. Military personnel are keenly aware that they face serious legal penalties for improperly accessing and or disseminating classified materials. This is not difficult to understand.
It's worth noting that in this particular case, I firmly believe Snowden acted as a patriot and is absolutely not the traitor he's being painted as by the administration and various members of Congress. I say this as a former service member myself (Navy) who also held a TS/SCI clearance. This young man exposed wholesale disregard for our Constitution on a massive scale, and it's been happening at an increasing pace for about twenty years. I ardently hope he finds asylum somewhere safe.
Write failed: Broken pipe
No surprise here, they did the same thing on the documents that Manning stole and leaked to Wikileaks. There were also stories like this:
Will reading WikiLeaks cost students jobs with the federal government?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
To see the knee-jerk comments on this story in the tech news. I honestly thought that the collective inteligence level of the people who read tech news was a little higher.
The DoD is not trying to censor what service men and women see. No one is saying that they cannot go look at these websites from their own personal omputers. What is going on, is that the DoD is trying to prevent CLASSIFIED data from being loaded onto, looked at, and stored in the caches of UNCLASSIFIED government owned computers, something refered to as spillage. I'm staying out of the argument on legal precendet about classified data in the public domain, the government says the data is still classified, so if it ends up on an unclas system, that system has to be wiped, sometimes a great expense.
No one could care less if military members looked at whatever they want to at home, but the computers that they use at work belong to the government and thus the government can dictate what can and cannot be viewed on those computers. Just like the comouter and network at a civilian place of employment, your employer can dictate what you can and cannot use your company owned computer to do.
Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".
That's not what they're trying to do at all. It's a bureaucratic measure because they don't want any classified material -- regardless of how it was obtained -- stored on unclassified DoD computers. That avoids the problem of people finding it later and having to go through the whole procedure of figuring out how it got there. It's easier to take reasonable measures to keep classified material off the computers in the first place. (It's still kind of stupid, but at least it has a reason.)
Classification is carried out under the instructions in a series of executive orders, dating back to the early part of the 20th century, as well as the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Espionage_Act_of_1917.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13526
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12958
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13292
"...can't stop the signal, Mal."
It's amazing how science fiction is so indicative of the real world sometimes.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?