We (I’m a government employee) did get emails with guidelines about the wikileaks site. I don’t remember anything threatening me with evil if I look at the data there. Heck, we get emails with guidelines all the time.
A couple of things in play here I think:
Government employees work under some different rules from others. In general we aren’t supposed to be working for parties or campaigning, for example. In the case of the wikileaks I would say that we, as employees of this government, shouldn’t be working against the stated goals of the gov.
I don’t think I am prevented from viewing wikileaks in my own home, on my own time but I have, as part of my job, agreed to restrictions on the way I use certain data. If I have sworn to not reveal certain data then that limitation is not lifted just because someone else revealed it first. Also, my employer has a lot of restrictions on the websites I can visit during work. I am supposed to be doing work here, not browsing wikileaks for information I can use against my boss.
In the technical, legal sense? I don’t know. You’d have to ask a lawyer. In a practical sense? No, probably not. I don’t think anyone would actually have a problem with it. But just because it’s not a crime doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t look at it on my work computer, that’s for sure. if I looked it up at home, I wouldn’t discuss what I saw there, even with my coworkers. I wouldn’t want to have to cop to it on a polygraph either. That’s why I’m not going to look at the site.
And as was said earlier, if it’s against gov’t policy and you work for the gov’t, then you have to do as they say or you can get fired. It’s not much different than Best Buy demanding that you wear khakis. That’s hardly out of line, I think.
How do you find out the abuse in order to fire/prosecute the malfactor in the first place, if not through leaks? Further, suppose you’ve suffered at the hands of agents of the state (or another). You pursue your grievance through the court system, only to find your case is stopped in its tracks due to “national security concerns”. What then?
(The case of the German grocer kidnapped, tortured and held incommunicado by the CIA is especially relevant, as one of the latest leaks directly implicates the US in pressuring the German government to cancel the arrest warrants for the thirteen CIA agents involved.)
In addition, classified information tends to be compartmentalized. The reason for this is so that a single person acting alone cannot reveal too much. Government employees, especially those with a security clearance, should not knowingly break the compartmentalization.
Secondly, government employees who know the accuracy and veracity of the data should neither confirm nor refute any information. I help top secret codeword clearance while in the Air Force, and spent the bulk of my one tour in England. We were told to answer seemingly innocent questions about our jobs with “I cannot confirm nor deny that”. Also popular was “I just work in the kitchens. I don’t know anything going on there.”
[aside]We would watch a TV movie, whose name I’ve long forgot, in our secure facility. The movie focused on our specific job, except was based in a Japanese air base. We liked to laugh at the mistakes. I’ll give you one big reveal…the movie showed geisha roaming the secure, compartmentalized work area delivering tea. Those who had done time at the Japanese base readily confirmed what we all already knew - no geisha in secure areas (or on the base at all). Besides, our coffee urn ran 24/7, 365. It had so much caffeine baked into it that it could deliver the coffee itself. We didn’t need whatever the English equivalent would have been.[/aside]
I have not read whatever the State Department said, but I sort of understood it to be something like, “Want a job with us after graduation? You know we check FaceBook and stuff. It would be better is you were not distributing that WikiLeak stuff, we take security seriously.”
My take on the announcement is that the government is speaking as a government, but as employers and executives. The executive class pretty much runs the country, as demonstrated by today’s news on the Bush tax cuts. Both public and private employers apparently have considerable leeway to act against current or would-be employees for things they’ve said or done online. I don’t mean to suggest that the US is alone in this, but it does happen.
The various state bar character and fitness boards sure as hell look at your social media pages to see what you’ve been jabbering about, and to the best of my knowledge none of them are being pitted.
Okay, Ridley beat me, but I like the way I said it, so I’ll leave this.
We can’t. If they’re doing all this in secret, we have no way of policing them. We have no way of saying “Elect this guy because he handles secret information well.”
You might argue that we’d know if someone leaked, at least by the response of the others calling it a leak. Barring a wide conspiracy, hat’s true, but that’s not the only way to betray our trust. They could be keeping things secret that shouldn’t be secret*. Illegal, immoral things. And we will just keep on electing them, because we don’t know anything.
Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s the real reason so many people are upset.
I used to work – well, I was a student employee, I was a graduate student – at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. I had the clearance so I could go into the secure area of the lab. My actual work was not classified, and indeed I pretty much never came across actual classified information. But because I was in the area where classified info was created and discussed I had the whole briefing.
It was a long process to get the clearance. I think they interviewed everyone I ever knew well, plus lots of my neighbors, etc.
Only a few weeks after I left the lab I got a very stern letter telling me that I risked all kinds of punishment if I didn’t return my badge IMMEDIATELY.
Well, yes, but the first dump didn’t have a lot of dirt that showed politicians and diplomats backbiting and sniping at each other like cliquish high school students.