Kristina Wong reports:
«News and social media websites have been blocked on some Pentagon workstations Friday to prevent employees and contractors from accessing classified information that was leaked Thursday about a federal program that gathers Internet users’ personal data from the computer servers of Web service providers».
U.S. Cyber Command recommended the blocking, which began about 11:30 a.m. Friday, a Defense Department source said.
So once again, everyone else can read what our own government leaked, but government employees can’t. This is not the first time we’ve seen this approach to containing a leak of classified information – we saw this after WikiLeaks started publishing State Department cables leaked by Bradley Manning – but it still seems like futility personified.
Senior Analyst Nikolai Fedotov, InfoWatch comments:
«There is a part of data leak in the case, but also a part of propaganda.
There is no point to block access for a limited number of users. Pentagon has to block access either for everyone or for nobody in the situation. As long as there is no chance to block access for all users, without any exceptions, partial limitation will have no effect (or it will be even worse – it will cause a Streisand effect).
From the propaganda point of view, it makes sense to block as many users as possible. Of course it will be better than nothing if 10% of users can’t read a solicitation material. And it will be even better to block 40% of users. And blockage of 97% of users is the ultimate dream of any censor from propagandа».
