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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.
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Although admittedly, we've had the ignorance bit down for quite a while.
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
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.
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.
There is stupid, then there is "Army stupid". Now, "DoD stupid needs to be even better.
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.
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.
"Activists"? You mean the kind of people who want to give succour to regimes like those of Russia and China? The kind of people who resent the fact that their world view was decisively destroyed when the Berlin Wall came down? They aren't "activists"; they're bloody fools.
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
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