Air Force Blocks NY Times, WaPo, Other Media 372
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Air Force, not content with blocking WikiLeaks and its mirrors, has begun blocking media sites carrying WL documents. "Air Force users who try to view the websites of the New York Times, Britain's Guardian, Spain's El Pais, France's Le Monde or German magazine Der Spiegel instead get a page that says, 'ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored'... The Air Force says it has blocked more than 25 websites that contain WikiLeaks documents, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems. ... The move was ordered by the 24th Air Force... The Army, Navy, and Marines aren't blocking the sites, and the Defense Department hasn't told the services to do so, according to spokespeople for the services and the Pentagon."
Wow, that's so stupid and pointless! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yet considering what I saw when I was in the military I'm not that surprised. A plane buff I knew on base wrote to the Library of Congress (as a normal civilian using his civilian address) asking for info on the SR71 Blackbird. They sent him some cool media materials which included a poster sized drawing of the plane, all standard and unclassified press packet stuff. During an inspection of the barracks a stupid officer saw it and wanted him arrested for spying and stealing classified material.
Because of things like that, do I get surprised when some military moron goes off half-cocked and without bullets? No, I've become convinced that most of them don't even understand the security rules or pretty much anything else that exists outside their egocentric imaginations. (And I'm pretty sure that 3 of the 5 generals I actually met were senile at the time. 4 of them were also complete assholes, but that's a different issue.)
Re:Blind obedience to authority without morals... (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
The first dissident of English speaking world (Score:4, Interesting)
Julian Assange is the first true dissident, prisoners of conscience of the English civilization.
I remember how the similar phenomena appeared in the former Soviet Union from the blue sky. Any structured society is based on certain set of generally accepted lies. And it is not always bad. For example, we say to each other "you look great", even in cases when it is not so.
These people however want to bring the truth come hell or water high. But the truth is often destructive. No matter what state did to frighten them, to silence them, it did not work. These were Anatoliy Scheranskiy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natan_Sharansky [wikipedia.org] , Elena Bonner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elena_Bonner [wikipedia.org] , Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Solzhenitsyn [wikipedia.org] and some others.
These people had no fear of death, some aberration of nature. For the state based on organized violence it was a major glitch, which finally brought it down.
The Air Force is in a way right, that it recognized the potential danger of such seemingly soft spoken people. Julian Assange is a thing which may bring down the whole state. He may be stronger than all the ministries, army, fleet, police, etc. taken together. That is exactly what happened with the USSR. It is not possible to scare such people, not possible to execute them, and even less possible to silence them.