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."
Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't want the stable-hands still inside to see that the horses are gone.
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There may be good reasons to do this, such as legal reasons. Just because they are public knowledge and everyone in the world has access to them, it doesn't mean all these documents are suddenly unclassified.
Therefore, looking at classified material and leaving them up in a web browser might be a legal breach.
Congress needs to pass a law stating that any publicly available document is automatically unclassified for this to be OK!
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Agreed. My knee-jerk reaction is the same as others, but from someone in the military's perspective, it's better they not read something they aren't supposed to.
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:4, Funny)
You to are about to get to know each other quite well I think.
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Air Force, meet Streisand Effect. You to are about to get to know each other quite well I think.
I doubt their intent was to keep this thing under more wraps. I would guess this is someone who is just trying to cover their ass. The "in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems" sounds like something that, despite being completely idiotic in this case, is still someone's job. I could definitely imagine a general or congressman getting upset because airmen were viewing wikileaks and, I don't know "getting demoralized" or something, and someone's ass being on the line as a scapegoat for that technicality.
The fact that it will do nothing in terms of the information getting out doesn't matter to the people doing it: their jobs are still safer. It seems to me that extremely few people in the military or government ever got in trouble for erring on the side of "censor it."
SF 312 NDA (Score:3, Informative)
People cleared sign the SF-312 non-disclosure agreement:
http://www.archives.gov/isoo/security-forms/sf312.pdf [archives.gov]
The FAQ provided has a relevant Q and A:
Question 19: If information that a signer of the SF 312 knows to have been classified appears in a public source, for example, in a newspaper article, may the signer assume that the information has been declassified and disseminate it elsewhere?
Answer: No. Information remains classified until it has been officially declassified. Its disclosure in a public sourc
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On the contrary. These airmen are indeed being told explicitly that they are not allowed to read these newspapers at home. I've read the general memos and talked with people being impacted here, and that is precisely what they are being told.
As a matter of fact, if they read some of these Wikileaks documents, they have to go to a security officer and go through a debriefing process. Furthermore if their computer, their home computer, receives these "classfied" materials they are also being instructed tha
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Not supposed to my ass. They have the right to these documents, just not from Air Force computers. These are now public documents and the Air Force has no right to determine what Air Force personnel read on their own time.
However, if the Air Force allows reading other news sites from Air Force computers, this move is very petty and immature.
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
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It seems to me if everyone else in the world has it, that it should be automatically considered declassified.
I mean, hell you could run into the facts that anywhere!
btw, don't read below this line if you are in the airforce.
----V-------V-----V-----V-------V-------V-----V------V-------V--------V--------V--------V------V-----V
American and South Korean officials have discussed the prospects for a unified Korea, should the North's economic troubles and political transition lead the state to implode.
When one of
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
"...viewing leaked classified documents, even though it is on the public domain, on an unclassified DoD computer results in a security violation."
No, the policy makes no sense on its face and is worthy of laughter and ridicule.
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No. is not.
How does one determine classification? Only the originator or an uninterested third party is allowed to even VIEW the document, as need-to-know disallows even the highest information security officer (going by Army reg, at least) from even looking at the contents.
When a content or perimeter scanner catches a file based on SECRET markings, it doesnt automatically tell us what the file is and if its on WikiLeaks or not. it needs to go through a formal identification, classification, and possible ne
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, so when the Taliban do read them and the US forces don't, it will put the Americans at an advantage?
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Perhaps so, but that is a *really* bad technicality.
Anything in the public domain can't really be classified, let alone when its distributed in such a massive way like how Wikileaks does it.
I assume they arent arresting Air Force personnel for having a dead tree copy right?
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Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Except that the military isn't a closed ecosystem. That becomes useless when the answer to the question can be as simple as "My [wife, brother, friend, preacher, ...] told me in a phone conversation last week."
No, this has nothing to do with any of the altruistic purposes that folks have suggested. The reason is pure and simple. The government wants to punish the news media for its role in distributing the information. Expect other federal organizations to add similar blocks in the next few days. I'm actually surprised it didn't happen sooner. It's just like how the previous administration punished the media for being too critical of Bush by throwing their folks out of the White House press corps. The Obama administration likes to use the word "transparency", but in truth, like all governments, they only want transparency when it doesn't cast them or their cronies in a bad light.
If the federal government costs those news organizations enough eyes, they'll think twice before crossing them again, and more to the point, so will all the other news organizations. This is why freedom of the press must be near-absolute, and why the government should be disallowed from any direct action to block websites for any reason. (By "direct action", I'm leaving a loophole for K-12 public schools to pay a non-government vendor to maintain a block list.) The government has shown time and time again that it cannot be trusted to sit back and allow the free press to criticize it and air its dirty laundry---that it cannot be trusted to allow the free press to do its job as a watchdog and as a check and balance against government abuse. Because it cannot resist the temptation to interfere inappropriately, it must not be allowed to interfere at all.
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Funny)
At any rate, that's how I imagine people might come up with this kind of policy.
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Dude! Pizza! Path to world peace!
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Uh... sir, whoever you may be, the General ordered me to ask you to identify yourself, and whether you were the comedian who filled his sidearm with cheeze-whiz at the meeting, or whether you know (and remember) who did it.
Thanks in advance for your cooperation.
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You aren't so far off the mark. The idea is precisely to keep secrets from getting in.
The problem is that the security regime is designed for only two kinds of documents "classified" and "not classified" -- there is no concept of "classified but now public knowledge."
So their entire playbook is limited to one basic rule: "keep classified information off of unclassified systems." It doesn't matter how it gets there, but if it does get there they have massively annoying procedures they must follow to contai
Re:Quick, Close the Barn Door!!! (Score:5, Informative)
Forgot to mention that such rigid over-reactions are exactly the kind of jiu-jitsu that Assange is looking for. [slashdot.org]
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This is a good thing, as it protects service members and civilian employees. The problem is, it is a really _bad_ thing for these folks to end up with classified documents on their computers. Just becuase WL went and released a bunch of classsified docments does not mean that they are now unclassified. They are still confidential, secret, or top secret. An employee with this sort of material on his/her hard disk could be in a lot of trouble, not to mention that the computer in question would have to be
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I don't even think it's that complicated. The sites are a time waster, just like Facebook. You want to read the cables, do it on your own time. There's no reason to be sifting through these on the job. The people that need to view them already have access on the appropriate network.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Horses?
Don't even look at the barn door.
Actually, just don't even look in the direction of the large red unnamed building.
We know everyone else in the world has seen it, probably including you, but don't look now. It's classified.
Millitary inteligence (Score:5, Insightful)
So the ONLY people willfully kept in the dark are the soldiers meant to protect us? Are the very people who are the most likely to know the dirt anyway?
F$%^ing brilliant. Next up, weapons ban limited to the army.
Hey soldier, this dam is broke, please fix it... here's a spoon
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They have weird rules in the military, and this may just be the guy in charge of keeping classified material off of classified computers covering his ass by following the letter of the rules.
Shoot they had us fly with our weapons a few times, but they still took away our lighters.. go figure.
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off of unclassified computers
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Possibly a dumb question, but is information published in the NYT still 'classified'?
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How could the NYT un-classify something? They don't work for the US Government, and certainly they can't make fully informed judgments on how the information can damage the National Security of the US. They might make some guesses, even good guesses, but that is far from the same thing.
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The point is, once it's actually been published in the NYT, what's the point of considering it classified anymore? What damage could possibly be done that hasn't already?
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Doesn't matter if its tattooed on everyone's arm. If the pencil pusher is told.. Keep clasified material off this computer, and the pencil pusher knows that classified material is on these webpages. Hes going to block it. Heck he might even think its stupid, but its better to follow the rules, then to risk getting in trouble for not following the rules.
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Publishing in the NYT or anywhere else does not automagically 'unclassify' it.
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Yes. Unless some government agency allowed to unclassify something, it is classified. If they classify the information that the night is dark this info must not be circulated by people who signed agreements granting them access to classified information. Whether it is common knowledge does not matter. That's the funny part about it: If you're not supposed to know it, you may talk about it.
As soon as you sign a paper informing you about just how horrendous a crime you would commit if you ever talked about so
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Actually, I believe Julian Assange is also being kept in the dark. On the ABC (Australian radio) at lunchtime I heard they're keeping him in solitary confinement; that they gave him a copy of Time magazine to read, but removed the cover because it featured him.
The fact that he's being held like this is a much bigger indictment of American policy than any unguarded opinions of the diplomats would be.
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Nah. I'd imagine they have him in solitary because of what happens to accused rapists in prison.... They have a tendency to end up dead. That would be particularly awkward in this case because everybody would immediately accuse the British government of being behind it.
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I don't think that is right, or at least hasn't been right in a while. Soldier means someone who maintains a separate contract with the social body and as such has various natural rights removed from their person.
It is arranged along the same lines as citizenship. A citizen is in a neutral position with regards to the give and take of society - rights are bestowed so long as the social contract is observed. A soldier is in a positive position, in that they are supposed to follow the direction of the soci
Definitely !! Surely !! (Score:2)
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most of them are dumb as bricks
And they tent to have egos larger than their multi-ton planes
tent huh... lol
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How many pilots is that? I just thought the military in general are just told what to think. Hence they can't be expected to develop a sense of criticism we, non military people, need to survive. Otherwise we'd be sucked-in by the next big scam.
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Sounds like the military version of the TSA incident:
"What??? You're limiting what publicly-available classified material I can see, when I could already defect with an Air Force plane if I wanted ... [/court-martial]"
Unclassified (Score:3)
Perhaps the need to realize that material on a major newspaper's web site cannot by any stretch of the imagination still be considered to be "classified". Or is this just some pencil pusher trying to follow the rules are written?
Re:Unclassified (Score:4, Informative)
Information is remains classified until someone with the proper authority de-classifies it. Just because it is released into the wild does not de-classify something. No more than if a thief sells your property to a third party it is no longer your property. You may not have physical possession or control of it, but you certainly would assume you still owned it.
Re:Unclassified (Score:4, Informative)
1. done, made, or conducted without the knowledge of others
2. kept from the knowledge of any but the initiated or privileged
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/secret [reference.com]
If everybody knows it because it's plastered over the front page of the New York Times it is no longer a secret. Your thief analogy is inaccurate. Regardless of the legitimacy of how it got there, you can not reasonably believe that it is, any more, 'secret'. To look at it another way: a thief stole your vase and smashed it. It is now a broken vase. Just because they had no right to do so doesn't unbreak the vase.
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It is probably viewed as a reasonable safeguard for preventing more secrets leaking, including secrets within the force, and not as censorship.
Technically, of course, it is meaningless to keep the pretense the Wikileaks are secrets anymore. If you are in a simple situation and only have access to one, or very few secrets, this is so.
Typical commercial NDAs are usually drafted in this fashion -- I haven't signed a single one that doesn't provide a clause that renders it void if the matters it covers become p
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The thief cannot smash the information and destroy it.
Correct. However, the trait about information that makes it impossible to destroy also makes it impossible to unclassify.
You can argue all you want about how something being secret is a classification problem that has nothing to do with who knows that information, but it doesn't change the fact that the purpose of the classification has been rendered nil: to prevent to distribution of said information to unauthorized people. It is exactly a problem of closing the barn after the horses are gone.
They are about the degree to which that knowledge can harm the National Security of the United States AND keeping that knowledge away from people that would use it to harm the United States.
Classic logic
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The point being made that any official "declassification" is, to use the barn-door analogy, like saying "ok, open the door and let the horses out" 30 years after the horses bolted. Pointless bureacracy - it's one thing to keep something classified when there has been a leak to a limited audience, such as might occur through espionage, but when it is so public the only sensible thing to do would be to declassify documents (or parts thereof) as they are made available publically. To blanket ban the NY Times b
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You're very good at following rules. But not very good at understanding consequences.
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Well, you can classify it any way you want, but it is still common public knowledge. RIAA et al aside, you cant "own" knowledge. Cost of reproduction is zero. Once you display any information it is owned by us all.
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Just because something is easy to steal does not give you rights to take it.
Do you you own everything you see just because you can pick the locks? Does someone else own all of your possessions because they can easily take them from you? That is a pretty muddy moral world you're living in. If the only barrier to ownership is in how difficult it is to get it from the guy that has it, how is that different from Brute-force World? If the victim was willing to give it up, or deserved to be copied from becaus
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You inherently can't steal knowledge. Therefore your entire argument is moot. This isn't about stolen physical goods (where the original is lost). This isn't even about exact copies of documents (which can be protected by copyright). This is in large part about paraphrased descriptions of documents that contain information of historical relevance. The only reasonable comparison would be with corporate trade secrets, and even that is a stretch given the compelling argument that the public has an inheren
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So, if someone creates and compiles knowledge into a new collection never before seen, then leaves it on a computer that you happen to have access to, you just automatically assume you may freely read and copy it, and that you can and should share it with anyone you happen to think of. And none of this has any negative moral implication because "You inherently can't steal knowledge." Wow.
Notice that at no point does the intent or even desire of the person that created
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You're not stealing the knowledge, as you are not depriving them of it.
What you might be doing is depriving them of the benefits of having a monopoly of that data collection. What you are not depriving them of is the data collection itself.
Copying without permission is not theft of the item being copied. That doesn't mean it's automatically morally or legally ok, just that it differs from theft in substantial ways.
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Terrible analogy. The material is still classified but there is no longer anything secret or confidential about that information.
To say it is like a thief selling physical property is a tenuous analogy. If a thief steals your property you can get it back, information and ideas are not like property in any way.
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Classified is what I was discussing. Secret or confidential in the colloquial sense was not part of the discussion.
And I don't intend to get into your articles of faith at all.
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To make the intellectual leap of considering information and ideas as property is your article of faith friend.
It sounds like you're trying to justify the banning of these websites on the grounds of protecting some sort of imagined property. That the situation is absurd given that the information is no longer secret seems to have passed you completely. What warped perception of reality could lead to this is beyond my imagining.
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BAD METAPHOR (Score:2)
So bad, that someone should arrest you and put you out of our collective misery. Classified makes no sense if the information is widely available-- you might as well classify the value of pi.
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Suppose a copy of Playboy gets classified so it can be taken into a classified area.
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Who knows? It could be a form of white mutiny [wikipedia.org] - after all, blocking military members' access to popular news sites is a really stupid thing to do, but if the regulations say you have to do it then maybe everyone gets blocked, including the people who are in a position to change the regulations.
Blind obedience to authority without morals... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Keep in mind... (Score:3, Insightful)
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Most of the guys at the top making these decisions are old and don't understand how the internet works.
These decisions are made by Congress. Not everyone in Congress is old, and not all of them are guys.
Look, the military is just following the law. Which is what they should do, even when the law is stupid. They don't make the law.
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These decisions are made by Congress.
Did you even bother reading the summary? Specifically, the part that says "The move was ordered by the 24th Air Force."
I've been guilty of not RTFA, but jesus christ dude, the summary?
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They made the decision as a result of policies set by POTUS and laws passed by Congress. Trust me, many of the people in the food chain know how the Internet works, but they run smack up against politicians and lawyers and sometimes have to make inane choices.
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I'll be around to explain any other jokes that fly over your head, just hollar.
Hmm. What part don't they get? (Score:3)
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press
The military is, of course, under control of the Executive branch, which is bound to enforcing the law, not creating or ignoring it (even the little bit of autonomy, such as treaties and appointments, is subject to Congressional approval).
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That's abridging the freedom of the readership, not of the press. The wikileaks still get published, it is just forbidden to read them.
Come to think of it, it will be a constitutional way to cut you off information when, in a few years, all press comes to your Eyepad.
/ says my tinfoil hat.
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.)
so the USAF is unsecured? (Score:2)
FTA, "...websites that contain WikiLeaks documents, in order to keep classified material off unclassified computer systems..."
IOW, computer systems that host WL docs are classified and USAF computers are not?
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Right. Think about it. If a government system was serving up classified documents to anyone that asked, it would be a major scandal. People would rightly want it shut down or disconnected. You certainly would not want classified stuff leaking out into the world, or crossing into systems it doesn't belong in.
OK, so now we have WL serving up classified documents. So what does the government do? Disconnect from the systems doing the leaking. Can't shut down WL itself, legally, but you can minimize the l
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Your analogy falls flat because it's not about the jelly beans, but rather the workers. Ensuring that the military never leak secrets obtained through other means is relatively straightforward. You tell them not to talk about it. Ensuring that the military never consumes secrets obtained through other means, however, is infeasible.
It would be like mandating that your workers cannot have any trace of red jelly beans in their bloodstream (*), and insisting on a blood test every week to make certain of it,
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But, he point of classification is to keep information from getting out into the public or the wrong hands. If it's already everywhere then there's not really much point in continuing to maintain the facade that it's actually secure...
Restrictions on classified materials (Score:5, Informative)
Speaking as a federal employee, we've already been told that we are not to access the classified documents leaked on Wikileaks unless we already have clearance and authority to view such documents (which I don't, of course). On the other hand, we were also told that we're not restricted from viewing independent reporting about the leaked documents; that is, if the NYT talks about what's in a classified diplomatic cable, we can read the article no problem, but if they serve up a copy of the document, we're supposed to avoid it.
This applies extra in cases where we're using government computers, because it creates a problem having classified documents on a system not authorized to have classified documents on it. I don't know whether they'd press charges if someone did this anyway, but at the very least it could cost someone their job, so I'm happy to steer clear.
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Technically that's probably what the rules say (Score:2)
Of course it's a special kind of stupid that cares about following the letter that closely.
Balance? (Score:3, Informative)
Ah, so you block the New York Times and Washington Post for posting 'traitorous' documents, but are they still rebroadcasting 'patriotic' Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity in Iraq for the troops?
The military has a special TV and radio service called AFRTS that replays shows for troops overseas, but there's been accusations of bias for years (eg all conservative shows but no liberal ones)
Executive Order 13526 Section 1.1(4)(c) (Score:3, Insightful)
posting anon on purpose
Executive Order 13526 Section 1.1(4)(c) is why you can't read wikileaks as a government contractor or a Government employee and why its being blocked by some AF networks (not all). We would lose our jobs and possibly be fined and/or prison time.
Section 1.1. Classification Standards. (a) Information may be originally classified under the terms of this order only if all of the following conditions are met:
(1) an original classification authority is classifying the information;
(2) the information is owned by, produced by or for, or is under the control of the United States Government;
(3) the information falls within one or more of the categories of information listed in section 1.4 of this order; and
(4) the original classification authority determines that the unauthorized disclosure of the information reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security, which includes defense against transnational terrorism, and the original classification authority is able to identify or describe the damage.
(b) If there is significant doubt about the need to classify information, it shall not be classified. This provision does not:
(1) amplify or modify the substantive criteria or procedures for classification; or
(2) create any substantive or procedural rights subject to judicial review.
(c) Classified information shall not be declassified automatically as a result of any unauthorized disclosure of identical or similar information.
(d) The unauthorized disclosure of foreign government information is presumed to cause damage to the national security.
Re:Executive Order 13526 Section 1.1(4)(c) (Score:5, Informative)
Oxymoron (Score:2)
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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.
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Julian Assange is the first true dissident, prisoners of conscience of the English civilization.
This just demonstrates your ignorance of Western history and its figures. What about Bertrand Russel? Marie Equi? Eugene Debs? All them were imprisoned for their views which they none the less advocated their whole lives. Every civilization has its dissidents in all eras. Quite frankly imprisonment is about the best treatment a hardline dissident is likely to receive, given how many were historically executed.
Typical authoritarian reaction. (Score:2)
Why does this suprise?
People in positions of authority, more often than not, got there because they have skills at manipulating people, and asserting control. NOT because they have some innate understanding of what they are actually in control over, or some special vocational talent other than essentially bullying and mind control techniques. (No, not the tinfoil hat kind-- the 'guilt trip, and glowing smile charisma' kind.)
As such, when the reality of the complete absence of a foundation for that authority
English language needs an equivalent of "dolboyob" (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of the things that would be properly identified and probably even avoided if English language had an equivalent of the Russian word "dolboyob".
It's a word that describes this very combination of stupidity, blind adherence to the rules in situations when it causes nothing but harm, and being a massive asshole about it.
I sincerely hope ALL US authortities do the same.. (Score:3)
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Shit! Only 10 more years backwards and we'll get back to 1984! Somebody blow up the flux capacitor!
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*facepalm*
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Close enough for government work.
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http://www.afpc.randolph.af.mil/library/airforcepersonnelstatistics.asp [af.mil]
Average age of enlisted Airmen is 29, officers are 35
Average age of the United States military is 28, Army and those would be your soldiers is 29 and the Marines are younger, 25.
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Tech savvy enough to, I don't know, just view it at home? There's no reason these need to be viewed at work and can be considered a simple time waster like Facebook (which is also blocked or at least was on my networks).
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The critical point you're missing, at least for deployed military personnel, is that even though they are not on duty 24x7, all of their network access is likely to go through the military. It's like if your company mandated that you could only get home Internet service through them and then blocked sites not relevant to your work from being reachable from your home.
It's also particularly problematic because the government has a fundamental responsibility to not interfere with the freedom of the press that