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.'"

Comments

network ignorance

[alphatel]

Are they going turn off the TV for them, too?

Re:network ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.

Re:network ignorance

[CanHasDIY]

This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.

By blocking a publicly accessible journalism website?

Oh, right this is the Army, where Process A Requires Solution B, So Do C Instead is command's modus operandi.

Re:network ignorance

[crashcy]

Why target the Guardian then, except spite that they broke the story and had (or have) direct contact with Snowden? The information has already spread all over the internet, they can't block access to it all.
I don't know what the process is for officially declassifying the information, but I don't see how you can really call something that's public knowledge classified anymore.

Re:network ignorance

[philip.paradis]

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.

Re:network ignorance

[TWiTfan]

I can see the Pentagon briefing now: "Clearly, the only obvious answer is to destroy the internet. Men, you have your orders! America...America...God shed his grace on thee..."

Re:network ignorance

[cold fjord]

It is unlikely to just be the Guardian, at least in the future if not now. If other sites have the stolen documents available they'll probably be blocked too.

Classified information remains classified until declassified. It may sound silly, but there are some practical reasons to do that.

Re:network ignorance

[hawguy]

Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public! It still carries whatever classification was originally assigned to it until its classification is formally changed. If you work in an industry where classified information is present (ANY industry in the US, not just the military) and you access leaked classified information on an unclassified network (your phone, your home computer, etc.) then you are in violation of the rules. End of story. The Army isn't being stupid or trying to hide things, they are trying to protect their own people.

Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions." 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".

Re:network ignorance

[blueg3]

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.)

Re:network ignorance

[hawguy]

The Army doesn't have the authority to say that.

Then whoever classified the information and had such little control over it that a low level analyst contractor could walk out the door with thousands of pages of classified information should be saying it.

Re:network ignorance

[Penguinisto]

"...can't stop the signal, Mal."

It's amazing how science fiction is so indicative of the real world sometimes.

Re:network ignorance

[khallow]

This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.

By blocking a publicly accessible journalism website?

Yes. What's so hard to understand here? There are a bunch of federal employees and contractors who simply aren't allowed to have access to various sorts of classified information, no matter where that information comes from or how public it is.

Re: network ignorance

[mark_wilkins]

One good reason would be because not all disclosure of classified information is equally broad, and rather than defining some complex standard to determine whether the information is truly and completely out of the bag, they simply require evaluation according to a set process to declassify it.

Re:network ignorance

[Anonymous Coward]

By blocking a publicly accessible journalism website?

Oh, right this is the Army, where Process A Requires Solution B, So Do C Instead is command's modus operandi.

No, it actually makes sense.

Suppose your objective is to prevent malware from appearing on your PC. (or secure a server.) This isn't a Windows-vs-Unix thing, the answer is the same for what happens when a server gets rooted.

What's the best thing to do when your PC has malware on it? When a server is rooted? You wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from a known good image. It's the only way to be sure that not a single byte of malware/rootkit remains on the disk.

That's the objective. Not one byte of bad stuff on the disk. A single NOP in the wrong place could open a back door.

You could spend a few hours editing registry keys, burning a CD of the contents of /bin from a known good workstation and copying the files over, doing a byte-by-byte comparison of /bin/cp and /bin/ls, and so on, but you'd never be completely sure the system wasn't compromised. If you got rid of the malware and any back doors left by whoever rooted the system, you're fine.

That's what the .mil folks are trying to do with their networks, except that instead of "malware", it's "classified information on computers used for unclassified work."

And it's not as silly as it sounds. You want to know that if malware exists on your system, there's something wrong. In PC terms, there's no harm done by users downloading dancing-bunnies.exe as long as they never actually run it. (Maybe it's a false positive -- the user was merely going to spend a lunch break disassembling it to understand how the exploit was written... Maybe they're downloading a Linux rootkit for analysis on a PC, or vice versa. But how can you tell the difference between that and someone downloading a Linux rootkit with the intention of maliciously installing it on a Linux server that can only be accessed through the compromised PC...)

If you only have one user, you could ask them, but if you have 100,000 users, you can't. You just don't have enough sysadmins to nicely ask everyone on the network if their copy of the rootkit was downloaded deliberately with no intent of using it to harm the network, or if there's something seriously wrong. So you say "Sorry, no dancing-bunnies.exe on this part of the LAN. If you want to do virus research, do it at home, or, if we think you're smart enough, we'll give you a PC on the portion of the network that we've separated from the company LAN, and you can do research there without any risk of the dancing bunnies spreading to other users..."

And then you wipe the disk and reinstall the OS from a known good image.

The only reason classified information should appear on an unclassified machine is if there's a security breach. If every innocent download of dancing-bunnies.exe results in a nuke-and-reinstall on sight, your security researchers will stop doing it on the company LAN, eliminating the false positives.

Re:network ignorance

[AHuxley]

Re Such as? (I'm really curious)
It stops a keyword tracking feedback loops forming that drags in more casual at 'work' readers. Now if your home or at a rented house off base and start reading more and more about the subject ... thats more interesting to the US gov.
Thats the neat trick the USA has over the internet - they can watch people of interest ie with a real security clearance and see how they use the net/react over time.
If ~100 contractors and other base staff read the Guardian at home long term - something is different. Testing should have found people like that and never advanced them.
There was a low point in the GCHQ due to very low wages, useless military supervision and home sickness that allowed the Soviets to gain a few useful people just due to basic pay and conditions.
The US wants to find the same "people", making reading the documents 'wrong' could make traits to become clear.
If everyone is allowed to read the documents it gets hard - who is just following the news and who is of interest long term.
It is the same for .mil education - who uses the base or mil/edu university computers to search wikileaks when using such texts is 'not' good.
The other reason is the cross clearances of the leak hunters vs the staff just looking at work.
A person at work might be cleared for lets say project FARM but the surveillance staff and their admins might only be cleared for lower level work/side projects.
So more people have to be called in to talk to the surveillance staff and their interest in project FARM...
Best just to say no reading and let the tracking teams go to work.

Re:network ignorance

[interkin3tic]

That doesn't justify anything. That's basically "The army responded idiotically in the past, so they should respond idiotically now." Classification should depend on how you got it for reasons that should be obvious. If it's printed in a newspaper worldwide, how the hell are you supposed to know it's classified information? And then there is the obvious "It's not secret at this point so the damage has been done."

Re:network ignorance

[gerardrj]

If it is available from a public web site then the information is no longer "classified", but public knowledge. You can not put the genie back in the bottle.
The internet has no delete button and the Army has no neuralizers.

The thinking and the process here is flawed. Once information is leaked it should be "de-classified", since that's what it is. To continue trying to operate as though the leaked information is still somehow magically top-secret is insanity.

Re:network ignorance

[Bengie]

By common sense, what is public knowledge cannot not be classified. Otherwise the government could classify the color of the sky and tell workers to not look up.

It is nothing more than a state of denial.

A real distinction, which they're bungling

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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.

Same as Wikileaks

[cold fjord]

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?

Re:They lied, even to their own people

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why I chose to not re-enlist. Granted, my re-enlistment window was over a year ago (before this all came out), but what I saw our elected officials doing made me realize they were a greater threat to our freedom and constitution than any terrorist would ever be... I couldn't in good conscience swear an oath to defend the constitution from both enemies both foreign and DOMESTIC, and sleep well at night knowing I was breaking that oath every day I marched in step to the idiots that are leading our country into the "dustbin of history." I know Ronald Reagan isn't the most popular president here on Slashdot, but here is a very cogent remark he made:

“Someone once said that every form of government has one characteristic peculiar to it and if that characteristic is lost, the government will fall. In a monarchy, it is affection and respect for the royal family. If that is lost the monarch is lost. In a dictatorship, it is fear. If the people stop fearing the dictator he'll lose power. In a representative government such as ours, it is virtue. If virtue goes, the government fails. Are we choosing paths that are politically expedient and morally questionable? Are we in truth losing our virtue? . . . If so, we may be nearer the dustbin of history than we realize.”

Re:They lied, even to their own people

[TWiTfan]

I seriously doubt NSA lied to the President. And they only lied to Congress because they knew that the Congressmen didn't really give a shit and were just putting on a nice show for the cameras. If they had thought for a second that Congress might actually follow up on their answers (or that the press even had the ABILITY to follow up), they would have parsed their language much more carefully.

Re:I hear a Sousa march in the background -

[fnj]

How about slashdot?

Classified leaks...

[Firethorn]

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.