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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.'"
Are they going turn off the TV for them, too?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Not only did NSA chief General Keith Alexander lie to the people, he lied to Congress, he lied to the President, and of course they don't want the foot soldier knowing the lie.
Push comes to shove, everyone of your foot soldiers should remember that you swore an oath to defend the constitution, not the crook at the top.
We get it, that it's routine. We understand why you do it. Yes, we know the law has that technicality.
It's still stupid, anyway, and it makes you look stupid. It's how you know something is wrong, and the wrongness is with you, army.
General: That's a load of Commie bull and an obvious Commie trick.
President: It's absolute madness.
Russian Ambassador: There were those of us who fought against this. But in the end, we could not keep up with the expense involved in the arms race, the space race, and the peace race. And at the same time, our people grumbled for more nylons and washing machines. Our Doomsday scheme cost us just a small fraction of what we'd been spending on defense in a single year. But the deciding factor was when we learned that your country was working along similar lines, and we were afraid of a Doomsday gap.
President: This is preposterous! I've never approved of anything like that!
Russian Ambassador: Our source was the New York Times.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Although admittedly, we've had the ignorance bit down for quite a while.
"Collection and analysis of content is NSA's traditional way of reporting SIGINT. Content generally refers to words spoken during a telephone conversation or the written text of an email message. NSA collection of the content of telephony and Internet communications under the PSP improved its ability to produce intelligence on terrorist-related activity. For example, by allowing NSA access to links carrying communications with one end in the United States, NSA significantly increased its access to transiting foreign communications, ie, with both communicants outside the United States. General Hayden described this as "the real gold of the Program"..."
Taken from one of the leaked documents. But yeah, it's only metadata we promise.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How about the Washington Post? Is the Army also blocking access to 'the newspaper of record for the Federal government"?
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.
I worked for a military contractor once and was told that there was a good reason not to talk about classified material even after it appeared in the press. Our enemies couldn't be sure that the press reports were right, not without confirmation from classified sources.
The military has now done what I was told not to, confirming the authenticity of the Guardian report.
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
Ah, I see... So this is an action that tries to illustrate blocking, destruction, and punishment are completely common actions when it comes to "classified" data.
I guess that means that any actions taken against people and/or organizations in the *future* can be treated as, "Hey, this is what happens all the time. You didn't know that?"
Nice move, government. Very childish and hackneyed, but still... Bravo.
I suppose the NSA could classify the fact that Clorox bleach plus ammonia makes POISON GAS. Just about every man, woman and child on the planet already knows it, but I am not aware of any limit to what they can arbitrarily classify.
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.
An organization with any sanity would have its rules set up so it does not need to block any publicly accessible point in the internet just to satisfy some stupid rule.
There is stupid, then there is "Army stupid". Now, "DoD stupid needs to be even better.
The US military stance is that the documents are _still_ classified. Yes, they've been leaked - but were never actually declassified.
So if you hit a website that posts photos/scans/whatever of any of the leaked stuff (complete with classification markings), you are viewing classified material on an unclassified computer.
Which by definition, is "spillage." Unnatural acts are then required to sanitize your machine.
"'Campos wrote if an employee accidentally downloaded classified information, it would result in "labor intensive" work..."
Or, you know, they could just 'de-classify' the information... since it's already out there. Problem solved. Nobody needs to face disciplinary action.
If it appears on The Guardian, I think any classification is rather moot at this point isn't it? This is more about restraint of a news outlet than protecting classified information.
This would make a great DoS attack against the military:
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
All a hacker needs to do is hack some website commonly used by the military (army.mil?) and post some leaked classified information on it, or send an email blast to army.mil email addresses with the classified information, and the Army will be forced to wipe thousands of computers, and maybe discipline soldiers for having classified information on their insecure computer (rules, are rules, right?)
... But the government blocking a newspaper because they don't agree with what it published? That's fucking totalitarian, military or no.
Monitoring all communications
Locking people up without a trial
Blocking journalism
Disappearing dissidents
Murdering civilians.
Not too long before that Second Amendment for a well-regulated Militia is needed. Good luck America. You gave the world dreams and put a man on the moon. You were awesome.
Of course the army is going to block access to the guardian. There have been several stories published there that prove the US government is listening to the private phone calls of the troops, including tape recording their phone sex and passing it around the office as entertainment.
Army officials are then quoted in the same articles as saying that the troops should know that their phone calls are not private.
I mean really, who wants the troops to know this and be all demoralized and shit, we need to spy on their sex lives in SECRET god damn you Glenn Greenwald.
Liberty.
Any question over the legitimacy of these documents has long since been resolved. The information is out there, and at least some of it (the official documents at least if not Snowden's commentary) is confirmed to be accurate. You can't put that cat back in the bag, so the military is not revealing anything by blocking those sites - especially since the block is broad and doesn't shed any light on whether specific portions of what was said is accurate.
The other (and arguably more important) purpose for continuing to treat classified information as classified until it is officially declassified is to prevent disclosure of even more secrets. Without doing a carefull study of exactly what has been released, what has become widely spread and confirmed or not, and how it impacts the mission at a high level, you are highly likely to inadvertantly reveal (or confirm, or draw associations between) other sensitive information.
There are lots of ways this can become complicated really fast. Someone working on some portion of a project may not realize why some information about another part is sensitive since it is harmless information for their part of the project. The leak itself may result in a change in what is classified. For example if X and Y are completely non-sensitive on their own but combined allow you to infer Z which is classified, it is customary to pick one of them to treat as classifed to protect Z, while the other remains FOUO. If X was being treated as classified and is now leaked, but Y and Z are still secret, then it may be prudent to start treating Y as classified going forward. It is also possible that even though a specific detail has been leaked, the enemy didn't understand it's significance or what it meant at all due to lack of context, so it does make sense to continue treating it as classified, even though it is already in the "public".
So until someone has carefully considered all these factors, developed a new classification guide, trained everyone on the new guide, and resolved any ambiguities that come up while implementing the new guidelines, it really does make sense to continue treating the leaked information as classified. Even if "common sense" might make you think it is a pointless exercise.
PS: This is a justification of the rules regarding legitimately classified information. I am not justifying the fact that these surveilence programs existed, or that their existance was classified in violation of the 4th ammendment.
The full story is posted at the Monterey Co. Herald's website: http://www.montereyherald.com/local/ci_23554739/restricted-web-access-guardian-is-army-wide-officials The article says:
Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."
He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative "network hygiene" measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
"We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security," he wrote, "however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information."
So what happens if activists start mass-emailing the Guardian article to @mil email addresses -- will NETCOM's "strict policies" require that they disable the DoD's email servers?
I work at a bank and we cannot use Facebook, gmail, or any networking app. Haven't for the past decade. Also, we have all I/O ports (USB, etc) disabled. In fact, our [crappy] Windows instance is not even local (it is a blade at a remote DC). We just have a lite client under our desks running CITRIX. A skilled engineer might find a way of getting sensitive data thru, but Manning/Snowden type users could not. The only thing I find alarming is the Army has taken so long to implement any sort of hygiene???
How is anything in the public domain classified?
It's not in the public domain. It is leaked classified information. It won't be in the public domain until 75 years after the death of its author, or the heat death of the universe less a day, whichever comes later.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Of all the things I have seen the US do to its own people,this is one of the most appalling! The United States cannot function without the oversight of its people. The people who did this should be arrested and charged with treason, but that is indeed the problem in the first place. Those few people who systematically worked to undermine the spirit of the US Constitution and The Bill of Rights, are now scared. They know that they must try to fight not to lose their power over us.They know that if they lose, they might go to prison, and I hope with every fiber of my being that the do lose their power, that they do go to prison. No citizen is safe, no freedom cannot exist in the climate they dare to make for us. Please stop them. Please help do something if it is only what each one of you can. Help in your own way, but please help.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
In China you would still be able to get the news.
The good news in the Guardian is getting as worrisome to the USA as the Bible was to the Soviet Union?
I wonder if any of the ex Stasi have told their new US employers how hard it is to ban books, news and ideas?
China seems to understand some books, news and outside ideas are good for trade and their officer class.
The US vs Soviet or East German as in ideas, words, text has real power?
In 1969 the East German Communist Youth movment published a magazine with a cartoon FDJ leader on the cover - with long hair.
Every copy had to be tracked by the post office, found and destroyed.
In 1981 the cover talked of price-fixing and food. Same result.
I really hope the US is just using bans to track mil people reading the UK news....
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I just read this article again and realized that I overlooked the fact that THE MILITARY CAN CONTROL WEB ACCESS.
I'm not sure which is more uncomfortable -
1. the fact that the ARMY (the fucking ARMY) can control the INTERNET as they see fit, or
2. the fact that I read it and just soft of overlooked it as being a problem due to the flood of control issues since the early 2000s.
Conundrum.
Bureaucracy. Even if the entire fucking world knows something, even if the information is completely fucking obvious, if it was classified, it remains classified until and unless it is explicitly declassified.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
General! General! Someone left the barn door open!
We have seen the enemy, and he is us.
No cigar.
However, the US government might like to consider the fact that the reason why so many other nations think of the US as an enemy is because it behaves like one.
Spying on your own citizens is merely oppressive, but spying on citizens of other sovereign nations is the action of an enemy.
The problem is that government rules aren't really set up to handle major leaks like this. The whole sanitization process assumes that the information is still on government controlled computers handled by people with some level of clearance, even though they don't have 'need to know'. So you tell them to shut up about it, and it normally works because a random piece of classified material isn't normally worth all that much.
There are supposed to be processes in place to, when possible, 'neither confirm nor deny; then ignore', but the problem here is that the source is credible and the NSA failed to discredit him(rightly or wrongly). So now it's confirmed. One of the rules for classifying information is that it can't be public; available on free news sites counts as 'public', but the way the rules are written, only the classification authority(or people over it) can declare the information no longer classified due to compromise. In this case the CA would be the NSA; which is currently running around like a chicken without a head trying to get Snowden without really dealing with the actual leak.
I don't read AC A human right
Anything paid for by taxes is by definition, public domain.
By definition, classified means it's only available to authorized personal or secret. By definition, public knowledge cannot be classified. If it can be, then the word carries no meaning and is pointless.
If you want a different meaning, then use a different word. I cannot think of any word that currently describes the current situation, so a new word may need to be created.
The only reason classified information should appear on an unclassified machine is if there's a security breach.
While I understand your argument there is one fatal, logical flaw in it. This would logically require that they block ALL media coverage of the classified material, not just the Guardian.
...I guess by "they" I mean our own government.
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
1. If the material is on the interwebs via the Guardian (a freakin newspaper) THEN IT IS NO LONGER SECRET.
2. It may still be classified, but that is only because you dumb fucks can't keep up with the world, which is why you're always bombing the crap out of people instead of serving them tea and crumpets like anyone with a civil bone in them would do.
3. As a consequence, all this little episode proves is that you're a bunch of violent incompetent hacks.
4. Fuck you. Assholes.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
And that contrasts so starkly with your presumably more intelligent belief that the "politicians and spooks" have anything but their own interests at heart. No, wait, it doesn't.
What is in the national interest at this point would be alloying the citizens which make up the nation to know what shady garbage their representatives up in the high castle are shovelling down their throats daily.
Some operative words there in case your fox news filter hasn't added them as talking points yet:
Citizens make a nation
Politicians are supposed to represent those citizens
What is in the national interest is EXACTLY what is of interest to the citizens
Your government officials are not acting as representatives, but as babysitters. Babysitters who are minding functionally retarded children.
In your case they might be on the right track.
King Kong Died For Your Sins
If, for example, the classified leaks make it clear that a war was for oil, I imagine it would be very damaging to morale no matter what the source of the information.
They should block the whole internet by now. Or rather, nuke it from orbit.
Unfortunately for the U.S., the TCP/IP network, which had been designed by DARPA to withstand huge infrastructure damage of exactly the type the U.S. was inflicting on Iraq and continue to function ... did so, keeping communication up in Iraq.
I'm not sure if it would though I want to make it clear I have zero experience with the military, so this is 1100% complete and utter conjecture.
Seems possible to me that troops might not be fighting for whatever the official justification for the war was "To bring democracy to Iraq" or "Keep Saddam from launching WMDs." Seems to me their fighting to defend their fellow servicemen and women, and because they follow orders. Seems to me that the "We're spreading democracy" doesn't hold up for most people when you get shot at.
Again, just guessing. The Army command may have a better idea of what affects morale better, so maybe that is it, but I suspect it's actually just following idiotic procedures idiotically.
This is like putting on a condom. Not just after the deed but after birth, when the kid starts school.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Next they'll be blocking access to sites that discuss news articles like thi_________5%#@___________ NO CARRIER
Your ad here.
Yes, the thing you don't understand, or perhaps can't, is that the job of the security services is to steal secrets. They've been making use of signals intelligence ever since people started sending signals to each other. That this has come as a shock to you is something I find quite bemusing.
People are looking for conspiracy when the truth is sadly nothing more than a bureaucratic process. This has absolutely nothing to do with censorship: if the government was truly trying to block any access to Snowden or the reports, they would black out any website that had his name or even block out all news sites and blogs. No, this is purely bureaucratic procedure. Let's think of this:
1. Government regulations say you can't have classified materials on an unclassified machine.
2. If classified materials get onto an unclassified computer, then bureaucratic policy requires you to go through a whole process of scrubbing it, involving lots of man-hours and stacks of paperwork.
3. The material leaked is, from a bureaucratic perspective, still classified because it never went through the declassifying process.
4. Therefore, if the actual classified material posted by the Guardian gets onto an unclassified computer, bureaucratic policy dictates you go through and scrub the machine.
5. Mid-level bureaucrat is unhappy because he loses his machine for a few hours when IT whisks it away; IT bureaucrat unhappy because of the paperwork he has to do.
This is not about censorship; a government employee can simply go to CNN, BBC or al-Jazeera. No, this is about a bureaucrat who doesn't want to go and scrub a thousand machines that may have accidentally downloaded a file that is considered "contaminated" by the bureaucratic machinery.
I am not shocked, nor do I believe this is anything new. That has nothing to do with the original comment or my reply to your comment. Shall we try to stay on topic?
Your claim was that the 'poiliticians and spooks' are better equipped to decide what is of national interest than a citizen. I disagree strongly. It should be obvious with very little research to see that I am not alone in thinking that those same politicians and spooks are not working for you, but against you.
King Kong Died For Your Sins
...when the whole world has access to it.
Military Intelligence, oxymoron, yes?
Be seeing you...
No, I don't think they are "working against me". That's just paranoid drivel.
So.... there is a bunch of information now available, that anyone can see, but that the government does not want the members of military to see. Our military is therefore expected to blindly kill and destroy without having access to what is now public information on the regime they are supporting. Seems like every new step that my government takes lately raises more red flags and sets off new alarms.
--- wad
Exactly who? (Answer : a proportion of American populace and American military personnel ; for sure, not the Grauniad. You cannot buy publicity like this!)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Any civilization which has similar conflicts of interest in their history is going to have a similar history. They might be peaceful enough to avoid a body count, but they will have relatively stupid decisions made because it was in someone's particular interest to make those decisions.
Ah. The tyranny of the discontinuous mind...