Saturday, June 15, 2013

And These Are the Guys Running Things

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it. --Mark Twain
If he were still alive, I'm pretty sure he'd have stopped wondering.
Senate employees and contractors who believe they may have inadvertently accessed or downloaded classified information via non-classified Senate systems, should contact the Office of Senate Security for assistance.
The Senate Security Office sent an email around the Hill Friday afternoon asking Senate employees and contractors to try to ignore the fact that top-secret, highly-classified documents are now floating around the Web freely [...] The email asks security managers to remind Senate employees and contractors that the documents are still technically classified and should be treated as if millions of people haven’t already read them.

[...]

Rules are rules — even if they make little sense in light of current circumstances and seem like a serious impediment for the staffers tasked with supporting senators who need to have a policy debate about the revelations in the leaks.

  Forbes
To say the least. Censorship run amok and making no sense whatsoever.
The Department of Defense sent around a similar email earlier this week, as reported by Wired. It appears to be standard — if inane — procedure after classified docs go viral. In 2010, U.S. agencies asked unauthorized employees not to access the classified material that came pouring out of Wikileaks in the form of videos and State Department cables.

No comments: