Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks website, and download detailed information about how the U.S. military waged war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents. "Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks," according to one directive issued by the armed forces.

That cry you hear? It's common sense, writhing in pain.

There was a time, just a few months ago, when the Pentagon appeared to be growing comfortable with the emerging digital media landscape. Troops were free to blog and tweet, as long as they used their heads and didn't disclose secrets. Thumb drives and DVDs could be employed, as long as they didn't carry viruses or classified information. But the WikiLeaks disclosures – tens of thousands of classified documents – seem to have reversed that trajectory.

Now, the Marine Corps is telling troops and civilian employees in a memo:

[W]illingly accessing the WIKILEAKS website for the purpose of viewing the posted classified material [constitutes] the unauthorized processing, disclosure, viewing, and downloading of classified information onto an UNAUTHORIZED computer system not approved to store classified information. Meaning they have WILLINGLY committed a SECURITY VIOLATION.

The other branches of the armed services have put out similar notices. The memos were initially reported in the Washington Times. But the story has been removed from the paper's website.

Sumit Agarwal, the former Google manager now serving as the Defense Department's social media czar, explained the Pentagon's logic in an e-mail to Danger Room.

"I think of it as being analogous to MP3s or a copyrighted novel online – widespread publication doesn't strip away laws governing use of those," he writes. "If Avatar were suddenly available online, would be legal to download it? As a practical matter, many people would download it, but also as a practical matter, James Cameron would probably go after people who were found to be nodes who facilitated distribution. It would still be illegal for people to make Avatar available even if it were posted on a torrent site or the equivalent."

"With minor changes to what is legal/illegal re: classified material vs a copyrighted movie, doesn't the analogy hold?" Argawal asks. "One person making it available doesn't change the laws re: classified material. Our position is simply that servicemembers ought not to use government computers to do something which is still completely illegal (traffic in classified material)."

But it's an imperfect analogy, at best. Cameron might plausibly argue that each pirated version of* Avatar* reduces his customer base for legitimate versions of the movie (even if the opposite has proven to be true). Banning troops from reading the WikiLeaks war logs won't in any way impact how potentially nefarious consumers of that information behave. This is the equivalent of Cameron banning his own staff from watching Avatar – even after it's been posted online.

Meanwhile, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell demanded Thursday that WikiLeaks "return all versions of all of these documents to the U.S. government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records."

But he quickly added: "I don't know that we're very confident they'll have a change of heart. They've shown no indication thus far that they appreciate the gravity, the seriousness of the situation they have caused, the lives they have endangered, the operations they have potentially undermined, the innocent people who have potentially been put in harm's way as a result. So I don't know that we have a high degree of confidence that this – that this request, this demand, unto itself, will prevail upon them."

Every officer in the military – and many of the enlisted men, too – have a basic, "secret," clearance. That's hundreds of thousands of potential sources to WikiLeaks. Seems to me that the only plausible explanation for the Pentagon's arm-waving is to remind troops not to spill secrets. The question is: Does clinging to military regulations at the expense of basic logic encourage people to respect classification policy – or only make the secrecy regime seem more absurd?

Update: "Take 'wikileaks' out of your headlines," one Army contractor e-mails Danger Room. The web filter "has been updated to block anything with wikileaks in the URL."

"So, yeah, common sense out the window," the contractor adds.

Photo: USAF

See Also: