It's actually sound career advice. Comparably, when large portions of the Windows 2000 source code were released, a lot of OSS programmers were careful to avoid any contact with the code, and to suggest others do the same, to avoid the possibility of contaminating their current and future projects with a possible legal claim by Microsoft to copyright or trade secret infringement.There's common sense and there's ridiculous paranoia. Seeing something isn't going to legally contaminate your mind and cause anything you create to belong to microsoft.
This is blindingly obvious stuff and there is nothing shitter-related about it.It's not all that obvious. asking potential hires to avoid even reading stuff in the public domain is downright bizzare. And apparently the only reason this stuff remains classified is because of a policy change instituted by the Obama administration, prior, if anything was ever release, it was immidiately considered declassified -- at least that was my understanding.
DO NOT have any content, posted or linked, on the publicly visible portion of any social media accounts you have tied to your real name that would communicate to a potential employer that you are a model, upstanding citizen because that clearly indicates that you are hiding something horrible and sinister.it has nothing to do with what you post, they are going to polygraph you. If you read the documents -- even if you tell no one -- you could get in trouble either by being honest in your interview, or failing a polygraph.
Maybe you think that's not true, in which case all I can say is that I thank fucking god you weren't working, say, for any of the Allied governments between 1939 and 1945.posted by delmoi at 3:23 AM on December 4, 2010 [11 favorites]
Last I checked wwII wasn't exactly on at the moment.
(a) Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States any classified information—So, basically, exactly what Assange has done. Anyone who thinks the First Amendment is going to be any kind of defense here has no concept of how the First Amendment actually works.
(3) concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States or any foreign government;
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.
(b) As used in subsection (a) of this section—
The term “classified information” means information which, at the time of a violation of this section, is, for reasons of national security, specifically designated by a United States Government Agency for limited or restricted dissemination or distribution;
The more secretive or unjust an organization is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in its leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimization of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive “secrecy tax”) and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold onto power as the environment demands adaption.This insanity—pretending that what is read and discussed openly by engaged citizens around the world is still “classified” and if you are to work in the federal government you must eschew any and all open contact with this discussion—is a distressingly mad sign of precisely that secrecy tax. Governments do indeed need secrets; I don’t think that anyone is (okay, that most are) arguing that. But this is well beyond the pale, and has been in the United States since at least 1947.
It's actually sound career advice. Comparably, when large portions of the Windows 2000 source code were released, a lot of OSS programmers were careful to avoid any contact with the code, and to suggest others do the same, to avoid the possibility of contaminating their current and future projects with a possible legal claim by Microsoft to copyright or trade secret infringement.It's not an issue of a contaminated mind, it's that if you post an analysis of some section of the Windows 2000 code on Kuro5hin, and then your OSS project does something similar to what MS has done that was in the released code, it becomes much much harder for you to defend yourself in court. Or rather, it's much easier to defend yourself against an infringement claim by MS if they're unable to demonstrate that you had contact with the released source code, against your assertions that you deliberately avoided contact.
There's common sense and there's ridiculous paranoia. Seeing something isn't going to legally contaminate your mind and cause anything you create to belong to microsoft.
asking potential hires to avoid even reading stuff in the public domain is downright bizzare.They weren't told not to read it, they were told not to connect themselves to it if they want a state department career. And it's not in the public domain--all the material is still classified.
The number of new secrets designated as such by the U.S. government has risen 75%, from 105,163 in 1996 to 183,224 in 2009, according to the U.S. Information Security Oversight Office. At the same time, the number of documents and other communications created using those secrets has skyrocketed nearly 10 times, from 5,685,462 in 1996 to 54,651,765 in 2009. Not surprisingly, the number of people with access to that Everest of information has grown too. In 2008, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found, the Pentagon alone gave clearances to some 630,000 people.It won't work. It can't work. The overclassification of material makes Wikileaks possible.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.posted by ryoshu at 2:06 PM on December 4, 2010 [4 favorites]
Guideline K
Handling Protected Information
(a) This section applies with respect to--Facts, they can't be beat.
(1) any disclosure of information by an employee, former employee, or applicant for employment which the employee, former
employee, or applicant reasonably believes evidences--
(A) a violation of any law, rule, or regulation; or
(B) gross mismanagement, a gross waste of funds, an abuse of authority, or a substantial and specific danger to public health or safety;
if such disclosure is not specifically prohibited by law and if such information is not specifically required by Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or the conduct of foreign affairs;
Looking into the matter further, he discovered that, over the last five years, in a program that itself has been a secret, U.S. military and intelligence agencies have reclassified 9,500 documents, constituting more than 55,000 pages, some of them dating back to World War II. And that's just so far. The program under which they've been doing this—which has never been authorized or funded by Congress—is scheduled to continue until at least March 2007.Specifically (in Cole's post) in the context of Amazon: when those documents were declassified by Clinton, books were written about them. Those books are now also considered classified thanks to this process, despite their public availability. (Amazon continues to sell at least some of them; an extra dollop of hypocrisy in their treatment of WikiLeaks.) —Anyway, this is the mentality at work; this is the mentality being fought; this is the absurdity in a nutshell.
"In a classic case of shutting the barn door after the horse has left, the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.MSNBC: Fed Workers Told: Stay Away from Those Leaked Cables -- "Directive notes the content 'remains classified'; Columbia U. also warns future diplomats."
'Classified information, whether or not already posted on public websites or disclosed to the media, remains classified, and must be treated as such by federal employees and contractors, until it is declassified by an appropriate U.S. Government authority,' said the notice sent on Friday afternoon by the Office of Management and Budget, which is part of the White House, to agency and department heads, urging them to distribute it to their staff.
The directive applies to both government computers and private devices that employees or contractors might have, as long as they are accessing the documents on nonclassified government networks. It does not advise agencies to block WikiLeaks or other websites on government computer systems, a White House official said Saturday. And it does not prohibit federal employees from reading news stories about the topic. But if they have 'accidentially' already downloaded any of these documents, they are being told to notify their 'information security offices.' [more]
"Career counselors at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs urged students not to post links to the documents or make comments on social media Web sites, including Facebook or Twitter.posted by ericb at 7:13 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]
'Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government,' said an e-mail the office said it sent to students on the advice of an alumnus who works for the State Department.
But the employee's warning, 'does not represent a formal policy position,' State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Saturday.
'This sounds like an overly-zealous employee,' Crowley said in an e-mail. 'Our focus is advising current employees not to download classified documents to an unclassified network. While we condemn what WikiLeaks has done, we cannot control what is done through private Internet accounts.'"
Wow. We're through the looking glass here.Do you know what this statement means as related to espionage?
Diplomatic cables like these exist on the computer systems of every government in the world, not just the US.Wait -- the whole world? Not just the US? Are you sure? Gosh, this changes everything! hamburger
Marla Singer, I think you're confusing the way the world works with they way you want it to work.
The way I think the world works is: international banks and corporations effectively rule the world. They own all of the property worth having and they use it to make sure the maximum amount of wealth created by the world's peons funnels upwards toward themselves. They own the media, which they use to misinform and guide public opinion to their own ends. They buy politicians with their campaign contributions, by which practice they effectively own the "free" governments of the world, since you can't run an effective political campaign without huge amounts of their money. They own the military industrial complex, which they keep profitable by waging endless wars (and increasingly, in the US, by militarizing the police).But this is the problem... of course banks and international corporations are powerful. They need to be in order to facilitate the lifestyle we live today. Do you think some entrepreneurial chap in his basement laboratory would come up with the medicines we have today? Do you think the Wright Brothers' grandsons would be able to build a 747 in their shed? Would the internet have been the success it was were it not possible to make money off it? You seem to advocate an end to everything you rely upon, and I do mean everything, and yet you have nothing yourself to put forward in its place. It's an empty philosophy perhaps informed by watching too many reruns of Fight Club? You also forget that while going on about this minority who control everything and have everything their way, you're there telling the majority of people they shouldn't be living as they are. Things need to change. Truth is, most people are happy this way and don't need nor want the changes you seem intent on forcing upon them.
“Hi – I work at Twitter on trends and other projects. Twitter hasn’t modified trends in any way to help or prevent wikileaks from trending. #cablegate was trending last weekend and various terms around this issue have trended in different regions over the past week. Trends isn’t just about volume of a term but also the diversity of people and tweets about a term and looking for organic volume increases above the norm. I hope this helps.”Call me a dunce, but I kinda trust Twitter on this, simply because they have nailed their brand to the 'uncensorable' post so often with Iran and so on. It would be brand-suicide with their core audience for Twitter to mess with their trending algorithm to keep WikiLeaks off it - and what would they hav e to gain by doing it? So I'm giving Twitter the benefit of the doubt.
Actually, that list isn't that useful if you want to commit acts of terrorism. It's probably useful if you want to commit acts of sabotage, but terrorists would prefer "softer" targets, which actually instill terror in people. Blowing up a mine will mostly make people angry.You're absolutely right, I apologise I was using the term terrorism in the broadest sense of the word rather than its specific meaning within the whole terrorism, sabotage, espionage, subversion quadri-something or other.
I know, right? Bill Moyers is such a cave-dwelling, uneducated moron.Argument from Authority Fail
Yeah, whilst she was not responding to me directly, it's a perfect example of "Look, person X shares my view and person X is important/well regarded/intellectual" - even though employed as a refutation of someone else's post, it was still a perfect example of argument from authority.No, wrong. I provided an example of someone so obviously well-read, well-traveled and experienced who did believe in a corrupt overclass in order to show just how laughable the assertion was that only an undertravelled naif could possibly hold those views. My example definitively disproved the assertion, and your reading of it as an argument from authority is even more laughable.
Your Wright Brothers example is piss-poor as even you acknowledge, and then you argue that Boeing couldn't make a 747 if they weren't a corporation (what does this even mean?). Yet Boeing is a prime example of the military-industrial complex which exerts an undue influence on American democracy and is one of the primary causes of our current political stasis. Why does Boeing have to get a bunch of fat military contracts to build bombers to dump fire on Muslims to sustain my lifestyle? Oh right, oil.Take off the tin foil hat. I didn't acknowledge that Wright Brothers example was piss-poor (where did you get that from?) and I still await Marla's explanation of what marvelous society we would have in place of the existing system when everyone has subscribed to her point of view.
dougrayrankin: Just because one objects to the status quo does not mean the only alternative is Animal Farm anarchic communism. False Dichotomy Fail. (I think we're done here.)It was my intention to highlight what happens when someone advocates revolution on the basis of grand ideas to oust the corrupt leaders (in this case the corporations and banks).
I'll take a try. It is because banks and corporations are imaginary. They are only groupings of humans and physical manifestation of dominant society in the form of technology (by technology I mean buildings and money and so forth..."Technology is society made durable"). Banks and corporations are currently destroying the world and creating the conditions necessary to create the changes that you are so upset that you think Marla is "forcing" upon people. Banks and Corporations should not exist because they are detrimental to the survival of humanity.I do not feel that convincing at all. Banks and corporations are very real, and not imaginary at all. You state that they are the manifestation of dominant society. Do you think that getting rid of them and taking away the benefits that come with them will change things? That all of a sudden no dominant societies will exist? This is the absolute crux of the matter which people seem unable to grasp. There has always been and always will be a source of power amongst human groups. Whether that be banks, a king, a president or a tribal elder... there will always be some figure which someone will accuse of being behind everything. That, simply put, is how society functions. Oh and I still haven't had a serious explanation from anyone as to what life will be like following the downfall of banks and international corporations.
What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.posted by adamvasco at 12:35 AM on December 7, 2010
Australia Post has announced on Friday that it would be closing the University of Melbourne Post Office on December 17, and, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, insisted that the closure "has nothing to do with the fact that Box 4080 is the Australian postal address for submissions to the whistleblower website." The post box has long been used by WikiLeaks for submissions and donations via postal mail. "Coincidence? Or has the ever-closing security net around WikiLeaks been tightened a notch further?", asks the Herald's Daniel Flitton. "The architecture and planning building, where the post office is located, is to be demolished soon. But plans are not yet fixed and insiders expressed 'surprise' Australia Post had decided to close so early."I really dont know what to make of this.
WikiLeaks is not the only publisher of the US embassy cables. Other media outlets, including Britain's The Guardian, The New York Times, El Pais in Spain and Der Spiegel in Germany have published the same redacted cables.
Yet it is WikiLeaks, as the co-ordinator of these other groups, that has copped the most vicious attacks and accusations from the US government and its acolytes.
[...]
In its landmark ruling in the Pentagon Papers case, the US Supreme Court said "only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government". The swirling storm around WikiLeaks today reinforces the need to defend the right of all media to reveal the truth.
There is some evidence that Wikileaks members recruited Manning and encouraged him to hack SIPRNet and steal the documents.First I've heard Very interesting! Got a source?
Cite 1: Lamo, who's cooperating with investigators, wouldn't name the person but said the man was among a group of people in the Boston area who work with WikiLeaks. He said the man told him "he actually helped Private Manning set up the encryption software he used."It is unclear the extent to which Manning was pushed by his friends in the Boston area and Assange himself to leak classified materials. I suspect that you will see a criminal probe of the Boston area hacker group that Manning and Assange seem to be associated with. Manning could roll over on them, they could roll over on Manning or Assange, its a prisoners dilemma problem. It is also possible that evidence will be gathered from computers and network traffic that will allow a prosecutor to make a case that puts a lot of these guys in jail regardless of their stories.
Cite 2: Manning explained he "developed a relationship" with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, but found him elusive. "I don't know much more than what he tells me, which is very little," he said. "It took me four months to confirm that the person I was communicating [with] was in fact Assange."
Lamo asked how he would get in touch with Assange and Manning told him simply "he would come to you", although when pressed he said he used an encrypted online chat programme.
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posted by fatbird at 11:52 PM on December 3, 2010 [18 favorites]