Military Prefers To Keep Its Head In The Sand: Bans All Employees From Visiting The Intercept

from the because-that'll-work dept

“Even though I have a top secret security clearance, I am still forbidden to read anything on the website,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject. “I find this very disturbing that they are threatening us and telling us what websites and news publishers we are allowed to read or not.”

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Not this again. A few years ago, the US military blocked access to a bunch of news sites, including the NY Times and The Guardian, in an attempt to block military members frombecause some of the news included the leaked State Department cables that Wikileaks had released in conjunction with those news sites. Last year, the Defense Department blocked all access to the Guardian after it started reporting on the Ed Snowden leaks. And now, The Intercept reports, the military has also banned access to The Intercept . Of course, no one in the military will know that the public knows about this, because they're apparently not allowed to read about it.Oddly, this time around, rather than just putting in a filter to block such browsing (though that's there too), the military has distributed the ridiculous memo above, telling people to avoid visiting the website. I guess that's so they know "not" to visit the site from a personal computer or device as well. A (not surprisingly) confidential source toldjust how nutty this directive is:As we've said in the past, this is just silly. And, yes, I know the rationale that defenders of this kind of ridiculous argument will make. There are rules about how classified material is handled, and if a classified document gets on a computer when it's not supposed to be there, it's a massive horrible emergency and creates a huge mess for the IT folks. But let's take a step back from that and deal with reality. As we've noted, when it comes to things like non-disclosure agreements in corporate settings, there's always a clause that says if the same information becomes public through other means (i.e., not the signing party releasing it), the information is no longer considered confidential and subject to the agreement.is a sensible, reality-based policy.If classified documents are being reported on in the press, they're publicly available. Continuing to pretend that they're still classified is just ridiculous. It means that those in the military are suddenlyabout issues that they often need to know about. I can't see how that makes any sense at all.

Filed Under: classified, journalism, leaks, military, snowden

Companies: the intercept