US Military 'Banned' From Viewing Wikileaks 390
Following up on its risible demand that Wikileaks return the Afghanistan documents, the Pentagon has banned military members from viewing the documents. The Washington Times obtained copies of Navy and Marine Corps messages to their troops saying that accessing the documents even from a personal computer is "willingly committing a security violation." Wired notes that terrorists everywhere are under no such restriction. Reader carp3_noct3m writes "I am personally left almost speechless at this disconnect from reality demonstrated by the military. I am a USMC Iraq war vet, and find these policies completely ridiculous. They show the inability of our supposedly technologically knowledgeable military to fuse this knowledge with policy, mostly due to the political pressure that has erupted to 'take care of' the Wikileaks problem."
Morale issue perhaps? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
Really are you surprised? (Score:1, Insightful)
This is coming from the people that buy an OS that they can't secure. Make note of the fact that they can't use USB drives, but they can transfer files via write once media like CDs/DVDs Look at the farce that is NMCI. The Navy doesn't even own its computers. They can't install anything that's not already approved.
Yes, they are very much disconnected from reality. The inmates are running the asylum and they have 1 -5 stars or go by the title Assistant Deputy Sec/Deputy Sec/Secretary of Defense/Army/Navy and Marine Corps. They really don't have a fucking clue.
Authenticity (Score:5, Insightful)
Attacking the symptom instead of the cause (Score:1, Insightful)
Is it me, or is everyone attacking the fact that these documents, which are apparently so horrible that they need to be banned, were leaked, and not the fact that the events that happened in the documents shouldn't have happened to begin with?
It's all CYA (Score:4, Insightful)
No, it doesn't make much sense. But there's very little of the genius cloak 'n' dagger stuff going on in the military these days compared to, say, back in WWII when we were trying to hide from the Axis that we had in fact broke their encryption.
Classified information is mostly just administrative nowadays... maybe more like a way to dish out "job security clearances" for work that only American citizens can perform so it won't be outsourced. For example, there are plenty of vehicle performance parameters listed in the Jane's guides. If that information comes from a cleared person, it's classified. But if the exact same information comes from an open access source, it's not. But even if data is out in the public, a cleared person is not able to confirm or deny that the public information matches the classified information.
So it's probably this kind of thinking that is driving the DoD to react this way. Like the BP oil spill, this set of leaks is being treated more like a PR disaster than a natural / national security disaster. So if the soldiers who were actually involved in any of the operations are not allowed to view the leaked documents, the press theoretically could not get any of those soldiers to confirm or deny their accuracy and authenticity. Probably the most boring form of administrative INFOOPS measures possible. But the military has entire divisions dedicated to winning the "war for hearts and minds" nowadays.
Re:Morale issue perhaps? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think a response that would be less destructive would be to take reverse-course on the approach they're taking now. Best description I've seen from Julian Assange [democracynow.org] himself:
However, there are countries, Western countries, even countries in NATO, that are strongly supportive of what we do politically. And, for example, the UK has announced--UK Parliament has announced two inquiries into Afghanistan, one on the civilian casualties and the other on what is the exit strategy and how to get out of it. The Dutch government just formally announced its exit from Afghanistan. And other governments around the world involved in the ISAF coalition have, in bigger and small ways, announced that they are trying to do something about the revelations in this material.
And all of them are taking note of what the United States' attitude is, which is, instead of immediately saying these relevations are a serious concern, we never wanted to harm Afghan civilians or to bribe the media, as an example of one of the revelations in there, and we intend to launch an immediate investigation to understand this and compensate those people accordingly and change our procedures--that's what the rest of the world wants to hear. That's what Afghanistan, the people of Afghanistan want to hear. But instead they heard a personal attack on me and on our organization and an announcement that they would be going after the whistleblower or whistleblowers involved in this. And now we see them living up to those words and stalking around Boston, spying and harassing MIT graduates, and trunking around the United Kingdom, where they raided Manning, the alleged whistleblower, for a video release called "Collateral Murder," in her home in Wales.
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's been a few years since my TS clearance went away, but ISTR that publication of a secret document immediately renders it declassified. In other words, once it's on wikileaks, it's not classified. Prohibiting someone from viewing it is just silly and I expect that the "security violation" charge would not stand up, even in military court.
Howerever, I suspect this would be handled as an Article 15, "Conduct unbecoming", rather than a full courts-martial sort of thing.
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
More to the point, once the compromise is massively widespread and definitely already in the hands of enemy forces, there is no way our own people seeing it will result in further compromise to the enemy, so the only effect left for non-enemy personnel is the possible negative morale effect. Even if the law technically supports it, isn't worrying so quickly about the possible morale implications from an inconvenient set of facts, a sign that the administration is refusing to face up to much more primary implications of those facts. I know that when, for just one example, when it was first learned secrets being compromised may have helped the USSR develop its own nuclear weapons program, the joint chiefs and Dept. of Defense didn't focus on how that news would dampen the morale of US troops, but on the strategic and tactical implications for the whole free world.
Re:I'm betting... (Score:5, Insightful)
From what I've read in the press, if they have the capacity to conduct those kinds of scans (and I honestly don't know if they do or don't) and they had audited their ACLs, the docs wouldn't have been leaked in the first place.
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, there's classified information that very few people have seen, and then there's classified information that several billion people have (potentially) seen, and that your battlefield enemies have very likely studied in some detail.
I keep picking up this implication that the US military is keeping valuable information from itself while it's enemies have access. I'm not sure if that is the intended implication. But if it is, I find it suspect. It seems to me that US soldiers who'd find tactical use of this material likely already had access to it (re: old news). Any tactical value to this information to be gathered from the leak is going to be gained by those who didn't have access; namely the US military's adversaries.
Restrictions on the US military is about something else. I seriously doubt those restrictions would have any negative impact. Or at least, not the impact being implied here.
Re:It makes perfect sense. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you knew how military officers work, it goes like this: Something is wrong, they do *SOMETHING*.
I was never an officer, just a senior noncom. And a technical one, to boot. As an enlisted tech, the general attitude is "get it as right as you can in the time you have, and if time isn't an object get it completely right." It took me a while to grok that the basic rule of officer leadership is "It's better to be decisive than right."
More powerpoints.
If you ask me, that's the problem. It definitely appeals to the "decision now" mindset by reducing the situation to bullet points (the management equivalent to sound bites). But a leader should be more situationally aware than can be instilled with PowerPoint. Snap decisions based on real on-the-ground knowledge has a significantly greater chance of being right than snap decisions based on bullet papers.
You're really that surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
I am personally left almost speechless at this disconnect from reality demonstrated by the military. I am a USMC Iraq war vet, and find these policies completely ridiculous.
Maybe I'm a little more jaded from my time in the Army, but I don't find this terribly surprising. I might have a little perspective I can offer.
If you're in a combat unit, especially deployed, you're facing the reality of actual people backed by a large network or foreign government trying to kill you. Bullshit has a short half-life in such a situation.
Unfortunately, the further removed you are from the hard rain, the less intrusion you have from reality. The sergeant doing paperwork just can't say, "fuck you sir, this could get someone killed!"
And the higher echelons have, much like corporate culture, a certain unreality built in. I've seen how it starts with a first sergeant, who is responsible for a company of troops. He knows he has to lead by example, so he forces himself to always appear motivated, even when it's socially inappropriate. Senior officers sometimes appear to be squarely in the uncanny valley.
Add to that the telephone game played by the insane rank structure. A senior officer puts out his intent, and it is then passed along from subordinate to subordinate, with each re-interpreting it every step of the way. Who knows where this originated, and how much it's changed along the way?
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:2, Insightful)
Any tactical value to this information to be gathered from the leak is going to be gained by those who didn't have access; namely the US military's adversaries.
Namely the US Military's adversaries? That's crazy. How about the benefit to the lawmakers that are funding the war, the civilians that support the troops, and the troops that are risking their lives yet not being given real information about whether the effort is turning out to be worth anything?
These aren't adversaries, they are the people that are in charge of moderating the increasingly private sector U.S. war machine through legislation & oversight, voting booths, and direct action (ie:leading and serving with honor). If the public reactions are to be believed these are also people that were not already in possession of these materials.
The military gets secrecy only until it threatens the future of our country.
Re:Tip of the iceberg? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm just waiting for Wikileaks to do something to tick off Israel. They'll deal with Julian Assange the same way they dealt with Gerald Bull.
I'm so glad you've seen the light of democracy and law shining equally for all men, and realized that sometimes we must extinguish that light to slit the throats of those who oppose us. But don't worry. After we're done slitting throats, we'll turn the light back on. We promise.
Welcome back to the fold, Comrade!
Sincerely,
Joseph V. Stalin
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be honest. The reason the military doesn't want their own people to see the wikileaks documents is because it doesn't want them to realize what a complete farce this war (and by extension the war in Iraq) is. They're probably worried that there would be a big drop in morale if the service people on the front line knew that they had been sent to war by an administration that just didn't care about success, as long as their friends at Haliburton and KBR got fat contracts.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan never had a thing to do with terrorism or 9/11 or national security. That's ultimately the secret our military doesn't want getting out.
When we have to keep our own forces from learning what the rest of the world can easily learn, we no longer have any claim on being a moral nation, or a force for good in the world, or some "shining city on the hill" spreading freedom throughout the world. The corporatists and rich elitists and Right-Wing ideologues that have run our government since at least 1980 are so cynical that they'd let young men and women and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians die just to protect their own profits and power while complaining that anyone who would seek to end these useless and meaningless conflicts is "an appeaser" or "un-American".
Re:It's all about (Score:3, Insightful)
The military could stop it. They have the weapons to do so if they choose.
Sure we could...
Let's see - we can go after Julian Assange, who is an Australian citizen. Apparently still in Australia. Attacking an ally's citizen, in that country? Yeah, that'd go over real good...
The servers? They're located around the world, as far as I can tell. Lots of bad press if we bomb those. Hacking them might work better, but I'm sure they have backups.
Lawsuit? Again, multiple countries, multiple jurisdictions, volunteer organization(limited funds at risk), 1st ammendment concerns.
Re:Tip of the iceberg? (Score:5, Insightful)
lot of behind-the-scenes scurrying.
Like cockroaches when you flip the light switch.
Devil's Advocate... (Score:5, Insightful)
From an OpSec perspective having a bunch of accesses to specific documents on the wikileaks server is a BAD IDEA. Anyone with access to the logs on the server will be able to correlate the IP addresses doing the accessing with the specific documents of interest. With 75,000+ documents, there are sure to be some really interesting needles in that haystack. The people most qualified to recognize those needles will be military personnel - so one guy finds something "surprising" related to his personal work and forwards the URL to all his buddies who also check it out because its "surprising" to them too and now wikileak's logs have a great big arrow pointing at the document that got an order of magnitude more hits than all the others. Someone decides to investigate and now whatever made that document "surprising" is well known to public and "the enemy" too.
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:2, Insightful)
So, we just need to instruct all of our military personnel to put their hands over their ears and yell "LA LA LA! I CAN'T HEAR YOU!" and all the bad stuff goes away.
Perhaps we could use your solution to cure cancer. If we could just prevent their doctors from doing tests for cancer and giving their patients the results, no more cancer! PROBLEM SOLVED!
I'm really hoping that someone's going to admonish me with a "woosh!" indicating that you were just being satiric or ironic or something and not serious, because if you really believe that the US military is capable of preventing hundreds of thousands of military personnel from learning about documents that have been leaked on the Internet just by telling them "don't look at any leaked documents on the Internet" then you might as well tell them to not think of elephants.
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:3, Insightful)
A much likelier situation is what this guy suggested [slashdot.org], the military is a bureaucracy after all. Gotta follow the rules. In fact they're more of a stickler on following rules than many organizations, and for good reasons (although in this case it doesn't really matter).
The corporatists and rich elitists and Right-Wing ideologues that have run our government since at least 1980
Are you saying Clinton was right-wing? And that the Obama-Pelosi time (Pelosi started earlier) has been right-wing? I think that says more about your own personal political leanings than it does about anyone else's.
it's everywhere (Score:4, Insightful)
Be careful not to read a newspaper. You might get exposed to some classified information. You might accidentally commit treason. You know those journalists. They investigate; they report; they cause all sorts of trouble.
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh....what do European politics have to do with whether a US president is liberal or not?
If you stick to intrinsic measurement systems, you're going to miss out on the whole story. See also Flatland.
I can say that compared to Ahmadinejad Bush was an absolute social liberal, but it is absolutely irrelevant.
Comparing a modern Western democracy with Ahmadinejad is not the same as comparing a modern Western democracy with a modern Western democracy.
Europe tends to be more liberal, but also more authoritarian.
As the old Eastern commentary goes, in the West you're free to denounce your government, and in the East you're free to denounce your boss. Although Assange has shown that the former doesn't really hold. But Americans do like redefining words to build their strawmen. Summary: On the left we have socialism and on the right we have capitalism. On the extreme left we have communism and on the extreme right we have fascism. Authoritarianism is a superimposed U. HTH.
Some countries still have fascist parties.
In what sense? Pretty much every Western country has a fascist party. Or do you mean seats in parliament/equivalent, particularly in countries with proportional representation? Is this a bad thing? Do you think it wouldn't happen in the US with PR?
Re:Wouldn't it be against the rules anyways? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me clarify some things. While I do not believe anyone is questioning the letter of the law in regards to such matters ;as all the documents I have seen are focused at warning those who hold S or above clearance not to access the documents, and those people have a responsibility to safeguard matters regarding national security; the issue seems to be about the public and the non clearance holding military who should, as citizens, have equal access to information that is public already. The threatening of non-clearance holding military is part of the key to this issue. What is the risk? The information is in the public domain, the enemy has it, everyone has it, there is no getting it "back". Regarding the documents themselves, they actually do not reveal anything that those of us informed on the issues didn't already know about, (which basically boils down to, yes, were funding the Pakis, who fund ISI who funds our enemies, that we pay money to warlords for convoy security while preaching about no tolerance to the Karzai government, that the war was and continues to go badly and that Pakistan is more of a problem than a help due to the sensitivity of its national security aka it's nukes) I have analyzed some of the documents, and have not managed to find one yet that contained a name. I know that the 10-15k documents withheld were kept because of Wikileaks clear intent on trying to sanitize the information. Wikileaks also contacted, through a third party, the White house and offered for them to sanitize it, who then of course would rather not take the hit to pride than see any deaths occur, at least that way they can demonize Wikileaks, right? As far as moral relativism goes, I will flatly call the bullshit card. To conjure this idea up that "truth or justification of moral judgments is not absolute, but relative to some group of persons" which translated in this context you mean that "as long as we continue to think we are right in all we do, and no one questions the status quo, then we are right." is simply an exercise in misdirection and shows how ill informed you are. Let me tell you, on the battlefield, blood hardly ever comes without guilt (and when it does, it is disguised in cognitive dissonance) , and moral authority likes to sit at his desk in the rear, and is rarely seen. If American moral authority did show up, I think the first thing noticed would be the unneeded deaths of American's in wars that have no benefit to the people of either nation involved (other than the rich elite), wars that have ostensibly caused our nation to be less secure, wars that are the direct result of our interventionism in the 80's and elsewhere, and the lack of our foresight to learn histories lessons. And it is the Americans who cheer this war machine on without having the slightest clue what the reality of war is, those are them that are no different from the radical imams to me. Bottom line, Iraq and Afghanistan are literally not only unwinnable (barring decades and more of perseverance) but were and are indeed mismanaged, misunderstood, unnecessary, and even morally questionable.