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The Defense Department Is Blocking the Army from Reading the Guardian

Lest employees be encouraged to pull a Snowden.
No embarrassing news reports in the Pentagon, please. Via

Terrified of another leak, the US Defense Department doesn't want members of the Army to read the Guardian's ongoing news coverage about how the NSA is spying on Americans online. So they've taken the ironic action of blocking access to the newspaper's website.

The Monterey Herald first reported the story yesterday when it learned employees at the Presidio army base in Monterey California couldn't access NSA-related stories on the Guardian's US news site.

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An Army spokesman later confirmed that the Defense Department was blocking the entire Army branch from accessing the news reports "in order to prevent an unauthorized disclosure of classified information."

The last thing the DoD wants is another whistleblower. It seems the government is worried that if employees are allowed to read about Edward Snowden's decision to leak classified information to the press, it could put ideas in their head.

According to the Army spokesman, it's a routine "network hygiene" practice to protect classified information. Employees were free to read other newspapers, and even get on the Guardian's homepage, but were specifically blocked from accessing stories about NSA surveillance.

Limited blocks to the site started as soon as the Glenn Greenwald broke the news on June 6 about the NSA's top secret PRISM surveillance program. The next day a memo was sent out to the Defense Department security officials reminding them that it's the  responsibility of every employee in the department "to protect classified information and to follow established procedures for accessing classified information."

The back-asswards rationale is that employees should be forbidden from reading the public stories because said stories contain information from already-leaked documents that were supposed to be classified.

The department ramped up the block Thursday after Greenwald published new documents illuminating the extent of the NSA's data collection over the last two years. This time it was to serve as a "preventative" measure, lest employees be encouraged to pull a Snowden.

Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM) spokesman Gordon Van Vleet told the Herald the Defense Department would certainly never block sites "from American public in general" because "to do so would violate our highest-held principle of upholding and defending the Constitution and respecting civil liberties and privacy."

Apparently America's armed forces don't get the same respect.