Apparently the federal government has given federal employees and students an ‘or else’ warning to avert their eyes to information on the Net.
I cannot be more succinct than this: Fuck that shit
I’m so fucking pissed off right now, I take back my early misgivings about Assange’s activities and now fully support him. This crap just proves how necessary freedom of information is.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, or even marks any kind of remarkable change for government employment. I imagine there’s a lot of things involved in qualifying for a security clearance that would seem draconian if applied to the larger populace. It seems inadvisable for these current and future government employees to view and discuss the documents in the same way it may be inadvisable for them to join the Communist Party, or the American Nazi Party, or have friends who are gang members, or whatever else might put a black mark on a background check. You’re free to join or associate those groups, but by the same token you’re free to kill your future career prospects with the federal government. It’s been that way for at least half a century.
I am not seeing the outrage here, at least with reguards to the students. No one told them they can’t look at it, they were warned by an alumnus in the State Department that people who are going to school specifically to get a degree that will get them a government position who blab about sensative documents on public social networking sites are going to be viewed by the State Department as untrustworthy with sensative documents and lose out on job opportunities in the State Department to canidates who have demonstrated the ability to keep thier traps shut.
Seems like common sense to me.
This was not even an official warning from the SD, it was an SD employee passing along helpful advice to students whose entire career goal is working for the SD in sensative areas. Best they know now not to blab on Facebook.
Like Koxinga and Death of Rats said, the link for the students doesn’t show an or-else command. Someone sent a message to a specific school, for students taking majors that funnel into federal employment, reminding them that if they make comments online about documents that are still considered by the federal government to be classified, that it would probably hurt their chances of working for the feds later in positions that require a security clearance.
Not an or-else at all. Not even a suggestion not to read them. And not from the government. Just a friendly piece of advice from an alum to his old school to think before posting.
Ok, rage subsiding, temperature cooling, vision clearing.
Still comes across as juvenile, you’d think the government would* want* employees that were interested in the government. Or not, lets just get hear/see/speak-no-evil monkeys.
Even the message to the Federal Employees is a warning that the documents themselves are still classified and the leak has not changed that so if you do not have the proper clearance to view them in the government network you do not have the security to view them on Wikileaks and the leak will not be a defense against violating your security clearance to view classified documents.
Not that strange. The leak did not change the security classification of the docuements and Federal workers are still bound by those classifications.
Sitnam, you’re a fucking idiot. Everyone with a security clearance knows that even if classified information is leaked, it DOES NOT become declassified. It is still therefore a crime to release or discuss classified information even if it’s on the front page of the paper.
Classified info gets leaked to the press all. the. damn. time. Every time it happens, we get internal warnings reminding us that we can’t talk about it, no matter what’s common knowledge already. Both of these links you’ve provided sound exactly like those cautionary emails. The students, especially, should be thankful that someone told them before they did something stupid.
You are entirely ignorant of the facts.
ETA: Can’t remember any times classified info was leaked into the news? Goooood. That’s the point. That’s why we can’t talk about it/them despite being on wikipedia. So don’t ask me for a cite or I’ll just give you a :rolleyes:
This Pitting would be much better if it actually involved sex with China. 1/10.
Don’t you think that a policy like that is little idiotic?
Not necessarily. It prevents people from leaking even more information, wrongly assuming that since X is being talked about, Y is as well. It also keeps down the number of ‘so-and-so at the _________ Dept. confirmed the veracity of the reports, according to a friend’ statements popping up in the press.
The trend has been toward over classification. At Assange’s first dump, most politicians, after getting over their faux anger, admitted the vast majority of the stuff was in the public already or not worth arguing about. The shock subsided and we went along with no harm.
I am not sure this is a big deal at all. Ron Paul thinks we need more info dumps because a government working in the dark tends to work for itself. The idea that the people are too stupid to handle the truth is insulting.
I expected the board Libertarians to back the dump. I am surprised they are not. I think very little should be hidden. The government does work for us after all.
Considering that most ‘board Libertarians’ aren’t all that rabidly libertarian, I’m not surprised.
Which is why we have a representational government system. The elected politicians work for us, and act as our proxies with regard to information that is sensitive or secret. I disagree that ‘very little should be hidden’…I don’t believe that the vast majority of what was released was information the public needed to know, not in light of the fact that our representatives surly knew it all.
Yeah, but Ron Paul is a nutter. It’s interesting that you seem to agree with him on this, however. I wouldn’t have pegged that.
It has nothing to do with people being too stupid to handle the information, so your taking insult boils down to being insulted by your own strawman.
-XT
deleted, blithering
Um- People are too stupid to handle the truth, sometimes.
I have fallen victim (and I have seen most of us here on this thread also fall victim) to the WTF am I gonna do mentality every so often.
I, as a mostly rabid libertarian with extremely leftist leanings (figure that one out)- just don’t trust my ‘rep’ to do anything I wouldn’t do. But I don’t always trust what I would do, as I am willing to be honest with myself…
Considering how much we owe them we should be fucking China.
And when they prove themeselves undeserving of that trust, what then?
If they knew it all then why haven’t they acted on it? Why hasn’t Hillary been taken to task for ordering the theft of credit card details and other information from UN officials?
Fire them? If their actions are criminal then put them in jail or impeach them? Is this a trick question (I’m not being sarcastic…I don’t get it)?
What was there to act on? What information has Wikileaks released that has not been acted on, or constitutes an attempt by our representative government to trick or fool us?
I don’t know the details. My guess would be because whatever it is she did doesn’t constitute a breach in what she is allowed to do given her position. If what she did was unauthorized or in some way illegal then I’m sure she will be ‘taken to task’…even if her own party would block such a thing (which I doubt), the opposition party would have a field day.
-XT
Agreed. Typical knee-jerk of someone here who doesn’t understand how classified procedures work. Yawn. Wake me up when the Chinese come in for their fucking!
I’m saying that they have proven that they will not police themselves, and so do not deserve the privilege of acting on our behalf without our oversight. Otherwise there is no reason to believe they won’t go back to their old habits the moment our backs are turned.
If she will be taken to task, it will only be because men like Assange removed the government’s ability to continue covering it up. The same can be said of Frago 242. If you do not support your government turning a blind eye to rape and torture being committed by the organisation it created, you should be thanking Assange for removing the government’s ability to hide its failure.