US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked | Hacker News Reader

US Government Strategy To Prevent Leaks Is Leaked

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105 pointsthedoctor22 comments

I'm not sure how big of a deal this is. I mean... the entire document is unclassified. It's not even at the "secret" level. Do we know if this is a leak, or if it was just.. published.

not every document which doesn't have SECRET stamp on it is intended for public eye...

I don't think this is a big deal at all. It is unclassified and also not marked with one of the Sensitive But Unclassified markings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_but_unclassified) meant to control distribution. You could request this document through a freedom of information act request.

The document says "UNCLASSIFIED" in the footer of every page. Has this really been "leaked?"

I wouldn't say so, no. The link title should clearly be changed to something less sensationalist.

Top and bottom in fact!

I worry that this will just encourage employees to wear fake smiles when they're having a rough day, and to conceal any skepticism about the direction of their program out of fear of what their co-workers might tell the psychiatrist. This sounds like a disturbingly unhealthy and counterproductive work environment.

I believe this is how space shuttles explode: reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roger...

It's not a leak if the government published it: http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/memoranda/...

We apologize for the fault in our secrecy. Those responsible have been sacked.

In fairness, they might not have implemented it yet.

If the disseminating body were to uniquely sort the list of bullet points for every recipient, one could perhaps determine the source of the leak.

Strangely, I don't see this mentioned as a suggestion in this document.

I suppose this could also work if one were to programmatically insert typos or synonyms to act as unique watermarks.

Does the government throttle document downloads? It seems like if there was a download limit and a mandatory wait between downloads, the whole cable fiasco could never have happened. I mean, you could still leak a few documents here and there if you wanted to, but nothing like the massive leaks that have been happening.

As I understand it, the Afghanistan War Diaries and the diplomatic cables from a trove of documents gathered by one Bradley Manning - a US Army Private First Class who had access to SIPRNet (the DoD classified network). He went into a secure area with CD-RWs and downloaded as much data as he could, and then ferried it out.

In this kind of scenario, where you have a trusted insider bridging an air-gap, no amount of throttling can really help you, and the limitations imposed by throttling might hinder legitimate network activities (e.g. building of search indices).

Limit people to two articles per hour, unless they have special requests signed by an officer (such as to build search queries) - it would take about 125 000 hours to download all the cables under this system.

Of course it is not airtight, but it would make the leak much smaller (and the amount of people who could leak them all reduced drastically to a few people whom you could keep an eye on) and presumably less harmful.

You don't need thousands of documents to leak interesting stuff.

I don't really see the issue here. If an anti-leaking policy loses utility if published, than it's not really effective to begin with.

You have to love the irony.

LOL, looks like we have nominee for "Irony of the Year 2011" already

This leak-protection system will turn all employees into brainwashed minions who will not act in the best interest of humanity, and instead act in the best interest of the person who controls the salary.

Good citizens should leak documents to the press when they believe that grave injustices are being committed. Whistle-blowers should be praised when they expose legitimate corruption, they should be praised by individuals higher up in that same organization. Instead of being praised for whistle blowing, they are seen as the source of the evil.

After this fails, maybe they will attempt to create loyalty implants for all employees to prevent them from thinking about doing something for the good of humanity over the internal interests of the group.

I see absolutely no way that forced loyalty in every way can go wrong.

Relevant: https://sites.google.com/site/pfcmanning/

I knew it. The government is run by idiots.

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