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Wikileaks Prompts New Security Procedures at State Department
An encrypted WikiLeaks file containing 251,000 unredacted US State Department cables is now widely available online, along with the passphrase to open it. The release of the documents in raw form, including the names of US informants around the globe, has raised concerns that dozens of people could now be in danger.The release has prompted new security procedures at State. The State Department has previously banned its staff from viewing the Wikileaks site, and has punished employees who view the leaked cables, or included links to them on blogs.
The new security measures take things a step further.
According to a Department Notice released today, all State Department employees are now required to take an oath of silence. Similar to monks, no one is allowed to actually speak within the building. To avoid further leaks, communication of an urgent nature will be done via gestures, mime and interpretive dance (PA only). The Department spokesperson, gesticulating wildly, fruitlessly engaged the media in an attempt to explain the new policy. She was saved from further frustration when one reporter produced a Pictionary game set.
Written communication remains a vulnerable point. In response, all reports from the field will be written on white board using dry erase markers, couriered back to Foggy Bottom by eunuchs and licked clean by interns and Entry Level Officers currently being trained for the task.
When a State Department employee now tries to access the Wikileaks site, s/he will find a “warning page” similar to those typically found on porno sites, with one button labeled ENTER and another labeled EXIT.
The Bureau of Diplomatic Security, formerly engaged full-time in witch hunts against Foreign Service Officers who glanced at the Wikileaks site, planned a new role for itself as enforcer of silence. Security personnel wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Shut the Barn Door After the Horse has Left” were deployed at strategic spots with roles of duct tape. “It’s for their own damn good,” mimed one uniformed officer.
“We’ve been deaf and blind for a long time,” said a diplomat moments before the new rules took place, “so adding dumb to the list seems a small price to pay for security.”
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Vindictive Prosecution
“It is impermissible,” the Judge told the courtroom, “for the U.S. Government to prosecute differently on the basis of the content of First Amendment speech.”
A Department of Justice memorandum from its procedure manual for DOJ attorneys describes the standard in court “to establish a prima facie case of vindictive prosecution,” stating, “[A] defendant must make a ‘showing that charges of increased severity were filed because the accused exercised a statutory, procedural, or constitutional right in circumstances that give rise to an appearance of vindictiveness.'”
Hmmm… could this apply to the way the State Department treats its bloggers? Stay tuned.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
State Department Censors Web Sites China Allows
If you’ve come over from TomDispatch after reading my article there, I am fairly certain of at least one thing (besides your good taste in blogs): You don’t work for the State Department.The State Department continues to block web sites within our offices such as Tom’s because they may contain content from Wikileaks, which although available all over the web, is still considered classified by the State Department. If you try to access a forbidden site, you get a message like this (click on the graphic below and it will enlarge so that your computer at home will look like a real US Government computer. Pretend you’re a real diplomat!):
The doesn’t-make-sense part is that the State firewall does not block mainstream web sites that have a lot more Wikileaks content than Tom’s. Examples include the Washington Post, The New York Times and the Guardian UK. All of these sites have and continue to include Wikileaks material that is otherwise still classified within Foggy Bottom.
Just to make sure our quotient of irony stays at Defcon 99, the State Department plans to spend $19 million on breaking Internet censorship overseas. State says it will give $19 million dollars to efforts to evade Internet controls in China, Iran and other authoritarian states which block online access to “politically sensitive material.” Michael Posner, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of human rights, said that the funding would support technology to identify what countries are trying to censor and “redirecting information back in that governments have initially blocked; this is a cat-and-mouse game. We’re trying to stay one step ahead of the cat through email or posting it on blogs or RSS feeds or websites that the government hasn’t figured out how to block.”
I emailed a colleague in Beijing, and yes, Tom Dispatch is available there to him, at home. In his US Embassy office however, the site is still blocked.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Diplopundit
A nice take on this blog and my book today on Diplopundit. The site is one of the best Foreign Service niche blogs, and often has news about our work first.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Bureaucratic Chlamydia: What to Wear to a War?
The first part of my book details the half-assed nature of preparing people like me to live and work in a war zone. State Department personnel are recruited for Iraq without much attention to their background, physical fitness or experience. This is not much of a problem for the majority who will serve at the World’s Largest Embassy in Baghdad, a $1 billion dollar complex constantly referred to as “bigger than the Vatican,” a really odd comparison until you remember the Vatican burned people at the stake for believing the earth was round.The Department, however, never told us headed to the field what to bring along. Foreign Service Officers were expected to pass this info around by word-of-mouth, a kind of bureaucratic chlamydia.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Book Review: Fiasco by Tom Ricks
Author Tom Ricks is a kind of patron saint of intelligent writing about the Iraq conflicts, first as a reporter for the Washington Post and now as a blogger and author for Foreign Policy. Ricks is known for his connections within the military, who, knowing he will handle information intelligently and better yet, understand its context, feed him inside baseball-like data on a regular basis. It is this understanding of how things work that informs Ricks’ two books on the war, making them as close to a contemporary history as you are going to get.
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq
takes you from pre-war planning through the initial mistakes, the early CPA days and up through the full-out civil war in Iraq of 2005 onward. It is factual, unsympathetic and written from the perspective of the military on the ground. That Fiasco has little tolerance for sloppy decision making in Washington and poor leadership on the ground (a younger Odierno is treated particularly harshly by Ricks) is not surprising.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Dinner with Bradley Manning
I probably had dinner with Bradley Manning. Manning, the soldier who allegedly handed over massive amounts of classified material to Wikileaks, was stationed at Forward Operating Base (FOB) Hammer at the same time I was. The office where he worked was right down the hall from mine and though I never knowingly met him, it is hard to believe that we never walked past each other in the corridor, or ended up in the single cafeteria at the same time. The food wasn’t that good, and it could have been Manning one of those days when an anonymous soldier muttered that the salt was not enough to overpower the grease on pot roast Wednesdays.One of the most striking things Manning alledgedly leaked was gun camera video from an Apache attack. The aircraft gunned down two journalists and may have also killed civilians. A new film, Incident in New Baghdad, revisits the leaked video and includes interviews with one of the soldiers involved. Take a look at a clip from the film.
You can see the original gun camera video as well, though YouTube requires you to sign in to prove you are mature enough to see what war is really about.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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