State Dept. Employee Investigated For Linking To WikiLeaks 172
New submitter Jimme Blue writes "An employee of the State Department is under investigation and may be fired for 'disclosing classified information.' Or, as others might call it, posting a link to WikiLeaks. 'His crime, he said, was a link he posted on August 25 in a blog post discussing the hypocrisy of recent U.S. actions against Libyan leader Muammar Qadaffi. The link went to a 2009 cable about the sale of U.S. military spare parts to Qadaffi through a Portuguese middleman. ... The State Department investigators, he said, demanded to know who had helped him with his blog and told him that every blog post, Facebook post, and tweet by State Department employees had to be pre-cleared by the Department prior to publication."
Not Declassified (Score:3, Interesting)
Just because a classified document is made public doesn't mean it automatically becomes declassified. If this person has a security clearance then he should know that. That is the rule. He had security awareness training on it updated yearly. He signed off on the training each time. It was impressed upon him when applying for his clearance. And if State is like the agency where I work we were given specific instructions about this exact scenario. The summary was "if you have a clearance, don't go there, don't link to it, don't read it, don't talk about it, just plain don't".
Considering he has 23 years in and this is really more of a case of being a sloppy idiot instead of espionage, they should just give him the option of retiring from Federal Service so he can keep his benefits and move on. A deal he can't refuse, so to speak.
Re:What classified information? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because something classified is leaked doesn't mean it automatically loses its classification.
The requirements for declassification are pretty strict, and few people (relatively) can authorize it. If leaking was all that was necessary, everyone would do it just to avoid the hassle of the classified computer systems.
The government knows you can't get the genie back into the bottle, the cat into the bag, or the National Geographic back into its paper sleeve. They aren't stupid.
At the very least, you are looking at losing your security clearance for looking at stuff beyond your scope of work or security clearance level. This could cost him his job.
As far as criminal prosecution goes, that would be stupid.
I know you guys like to think all info should be open and free but the REAL world doesn't work like that. Countries have secrets.
Why so many politicial stories here at Slashdot? (Score:0, Interesting)
Why the hell are there so many stories here at Slashdot that are almost purely political in nature, with virtually no relevance whatsoever to technology, or science, or computing, or math?
Sure, this story involves the Internet to some small degree, but it's about 1% of the total issue. The story before this is about some American drone killing some American citizen in some third-world country. Again, the science/technology/computing/math aspect of it is extremely minor.
Basically everyone in the world, even including many Americans, already know that American politics are rather fucked up. If we wanted to read about that sort of crap, we'd go to CNN's web site. We're here at Slashdot, however, because we're interested in discussing technical matters. Can't we go back to having at least some relevant discussion here, rather than politics all day long?
He violated his clearance agreement. (Score:5, Interesting)
Sometimes this is taken to ridiculous extremes - I once went to a public conference where we were informed that all US citizens had to treat a certain presentation as classified information - meanwhile, as a public conference with people attending from all over the world, those other people could do whatever they wanted with the information. It was clearly public knowledge, but US citizens present with clearances had to treat it as classified because the government said it was.
He may not go to jail, but he definitely violated the agreement he made with the government in exchange for his security clearance and will likely lose it. Unfortunately, that's something that will follow him around, and in many industries simply makes you unemployable.
Re:What classified information? (Score:4, Interesting)
Moreover, if you are an employee of the state department and you link to it you add credibility to it. AFAIU no official ever commented whether the wikileaks materials are correct and complete. Nobody guarantees that there was no deliberate misinformation introduced.
Re:Drone Attack! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Do you americans tolerate that? (Score:4, Interesting)
He probably means this:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/08/wikileaks-reveals-that-mi_n_793816.html [huffingtonpost.com]
This information about what your taxes are spent on was brought to you by Bradley Manning and wikileaks.
Qaddafi (Score:2, Interesting)
After seeing Qaddafi spelled 20 different ways in the news, I checked the wikipedia page for him and found this section [wikipedia.org]
I then wrote this dinky perl script. It generates a few illegal combinations, but it's still fun.
my @p1 = qw(Q G Gh K Kh);
my @p2 = qw(a e u);
my @p3 = qw(d dh dd ddh dhdh dth th zz);
my @p4 = qw(a);
my @p5 = qw(f ff);
my @p6 = qw(i y);
my @p = (\@p1,\@p2,\@p3,\@p4,\@p5,\@p6);
my $name = ""; .= $phen;
foreach my $arr (@p) {
my @a = @{$arr};
my $num = int(rand(scalar(@a)));
my $phen = $a[$num];
$name
}
print $name . "\n";
Re:What classified information? (Score:4, Interesting)
Crucial point from that document:
This is not a ban on accessing the data. This is a ban on accessing the data using systems you use for government work. The reason is that it could mess up an investigation into where data came from. Imagine, for example, someone accessed the data internally to confirm that it really was classified and then, when caught claimed they downloaded the copy from Wikileaks. This clause means that, even they got away with it, they would be guilty of a security breach.
More important point from that document:
In other words, the investigators are explicitly in breach of this document for giving a clear signal that the particular chosen link is in fact a classified document.