White House forbids feds from reading WikiLeaked cables The epic collection of classified US documents exposed by WikiLeaks over the past several weeks offer little more than good gossip. But watching the response to Julian Assange and his whistle-blowing website is wonderfully entertaining. The latest act in the worldwide WikiLeaks comedy: on Friday, the White House told federal …
Where are the documents about the aliens? They should have published the documents about the aliens first. We're only putting up with Wikileaks to hear about the aliens. Nobody really cares what one diplomat thinks about another. And now they're getting themselves excommunicated, we'll never know the truth.
I had an account, had problems the first time I tried to use it. Google showed I was not alone, cancelled account. Paypal has all the bad features of a bank, without any of the controls that an actual bank has.
If Paypal was food it would be a Double Bacon Cheese Burger that tastes like Brussels Sprouts and cod liver oil.
The malware that is responsible for the DDoS attack is actually on the wikileaks site so if you go there you stand to get infected with the same nasty dose that's trying to keep the site down.
I am sitting with my popcorn enjoying the show, can't wait for that tool Assange to go to Sweden.
I think we should make some things clear here, its not about how this ended up in the media, its not about govenments slagging each other off, its about a media portal wanting to drive income.
Personally, i couldnt give two s**ts what they publish, what is bugging me is the media as a whole feel its "in our intrests" to know everthing about everything, this is blatent horse sh**, the media in general has a vested intrest in making money, end of story. They will publish anything that will attract the attention of the public to make money THAT is what i have a problem with, the media has no right to poke their noses in to other peoples lives.
For example, take young Maddy that was "taken" a few years back, the media went mental, why? becaue it was a sellable story, the girl had the right face and the parents had the right background, it would always sell. now let me tell you that that happens every single day, where is the media for all of those? poor kids and families? they wont touch it because it doesnt fit a template to make money.
This Wikileaks business is the same, its coursed him some bother but the guy has instantly become a household name, for good or bad that would have inccreased his value no end. Its not in our intrest to know this, its not in our instrest to know which A list celeb has got pished last night and its not in our intrest to know who our politicians sleep with.
The media needs its wings cliped, OR at the very least some agreed guide lines. Im not talking censorship, im talking a moral understanding between the media corps and the public, they need to stop promoting shock headlines that in reality have no significance to us and instead report real world events that do mean something.
rant over!
but in the end, the reason this sort of journalism makes the money is that their market laps it up. The only way I can see the media changing without some sort of censorship (whether by force or agreement) is for people to loose interest in the guff. I don't see that happening, I'm afraid.
I’m a Washington-based U.S. Fed.
The prohibition, at least in my agency, is that one is not allowed to read or save the classified Wikileaks cables using one’s UNCLASSIFIED government-owned PC. In fact, our IT security folks specifically noted that anyone wishing to view the data should do it from their own home computer. There’s no ban on doing that. That said, everyone where I work has at least a fairly high level clearance.
What I don’t understand is how the Army PFC who originally downloaded the 250K cables was able to do it without setting off some sort alarm. I mean, that’s got to be something like 10 GBs at least. Where I work, we have two separate systems, an unclassified one, and a thin-client classified one. The “class” system has no internal hard drive, or floppy/CD drives, and no USB ports. According to the IT security office, those limitations were specifically designed in to prevent the mass downloading of classified info. I have access to the same DOD SIPRNET network that the all the Wilileaks cables came from; I can view them one at time or download to the classified network share, but I can’t walk out of the office with any other than hard-copies printed out one-at-a –time.
Yes, some other sites have mentioned that if an unclassified computer gets infected with classified data, it is a big problem because then the whole hard drive has to be shredded, as a standard security procedure. Imagine that happening to the mail server because somebody sent an e-mail about a cable he just read...
So, because nobody is willing to either declassify the lot, or create an exception to the security procedure, official unclassified computers must be kept clean by staying away from the bad stuff... This is actually a fairly valid explanation for a bureaucracy with many layers of rules.
However, this does not explain why university students have been warned to not talk of the cables on social networks, in case they ever want to work for the government. This may be paranoia, but it is fairly bone-chilling.
Remember the town of little people, Laputa? They employed flappers, whose job it was to flap the lips of the officials with a bladder on a stick. They could not speak in public unless their flappers did their job.
It seems that the Flappers have a union, and they *really* don't want to be circumvented here. If the sky was blue, it wouldn't be officially so unless they reported it.
It's the sort of thing we'd expect from the goverrnment of Laputa; after all, they were fictional. There wouldn't be any such behaviour in real life, would there?
DemocracyNow.org report this email from the State Dept Office of Career Services to Columbia University students at the School of International and Public Affairs:
"The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government"
"Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government" .....
Hmmm .... State Dept Office of Career Services might like to consider that smarter students, now mindful of the inability of the State Dept to deal with and hide from view their dirty laundry and dodgy tricks, will be tempted elsewhere and maybe even into the extremely lucrative fields which can make full and novel and disruptive use of the vulnerabilities and opportunities which cooked diplomatic channels and some right dodgy cabling, offers for free.
Thanks for that Uncle Sam. It is an interesting New Deal Start Methodology to out the Parasites that Suck the Vitality out of your Being for their own Selfish Satisfaction, or whatever it is that drivers them.
You'd think students at Columbia University would be smart enough to make their own decision. God, everyone is so coddled.
Wikileaks made a mistake by posting gossip. For the most part, the pundits were unable to really go after them with previous leaks because they were actually warranted.
If all these documents are nothing but gossip and reading them is a waste of time, then what about the time wasted writing them. At least one useful thing about the leaks is that they show how much money we waste to pay for super-rich ambassadors and their staff only to have them write gossip and things that anyone already knows unless you are completely detached from reality (admittedly a common problem for people in government).
Does the US need an ambassador in Italy to realise that Berlusconi and Putin are buddies? Really? Oh I see... the foreign press is written in funny languages so the US needs high rank diplomats to translate it into English.
Common sense and idiotism do not mix.
The common sense reaction to this would have been to just release the whole lot. On a federal website.
This way the Ass(ange) can no longer play his favourite routine of being the media favourite attention w**re. Further to this, this kills the entire spiel of "drip-feeding the "juicy bits". The sole reason the scandal is so big and and so prolonged is that specific "interesting bits" are announced on a daily basis so it becomes a never ending story.
If it was released in one bulk it would have become a non-story in 24h so Mr Assange will have to go media attention wh**e somewhere else. However common sense and working in a TLA named institution do not mix.
People, this is simply a clarification of government policy on classified files. Just because you can access it, does NOT mean it is not still classified. IOW, if you don;t have access to these normally, reading them online is legally no different from reading them internally.
There's a LOT of stuff people can get to, and even open, that is still an "eyes only" document. It doesn't change whether or not you LEGALLY can, even if you physically can.
This was a reminder that reading them, talking about them at the water cooler, sharing insight on them, et al, is still all just as illegal as they are still classified (out in the open or not).
Technically anyone accessing these leaks is breaking the law, but the punishment applies a bit differently if you are contracted under the government and secret clearance rights vs a layman who has made no direct contract with the government.
"I think you'll also find that the assumption by americans that their laws apply everywhere in the world is one of the things that people most dislike about them."
"americans" Really, all Americans think the same? I think your assumptions are broad and missing the mark. I think you're confusing law, jursidiction, extradition, diplomacy and a few other concepts.
Show your support for wikileaks by cancelling your paypal account, letting them know that you will renew when they stop rolling over to threats from individuals. The US is still a nation of laws and threats from people like Lieberman must not be enough to affect any company's policies.
The day after I cancelled my paypal account I actually was on ebay and could not buy something because the merchant only accepted paypal.
Small price to pay.
As for Amazon, there are lots of other places that sell books. Perhaps not as convenient, but again small price to pay.
It's not really so much 'comedy' or 'closing the barn door after the horse has gone' even though it looks ridiculous to the casual observer.
Instead, it's really more red tape. When you gain a security clearance, you sign what amounts to a general-purpose NDA saying, in essence, keep your eyes and hands where they belong.
The fact that those who are cleared cannot then access classified information that leaks into the public domain is more a side-effect than anything else; the White House's statement is merely a clarification of that.
Part of the reason for this is to prevent accidental disclosure--if you're cleared for certain related projects, for instance, to one which was leaked, you might find out information that should have been compartmentalized and which, combined with what you know, would give you insight into things you aren't cleared for; this presents a security risk as, if you're not cleared for that level, you're not judged to be quite trustworthy enough to handle it.
So yes, out of context, it's absurd and frankly rather funny. In-context, it's just more dreary bureaucracy.
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