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Comment by Havoc | Hacker News Reader

First sign of a profession having a backbone in months.

Although the silent treatment the generals dished out at recent meeting wasn’t bad either

>First sign of a profession having a backbone in months

They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.

Now they suddenly grew a "backbone"?

They just see the signs of lack of long term legitimacy for this particular government and play pretend at safe courage.

Consider the power of this statement then: if they were ok with all of those things and now they draw a line that means that things have gotten much, much worse than they were before.

Well... maybe. If a company brings in new anti-sexual-assault training and a bunch of people quit around the same time that doesn't necessarily suggest the problem is the outrageous training.

I'd quite like to actually see what the rules are, but this is just a complex one. On the one hand, obviously the US military would probably have an easier time securing classified info if unreliable people aren't wandering through the building. On the other hand, the US people do benefit from random people wandering the building and would get more out of looser requirements on who can get in. Making it easy to keep information classified has always been a strategic error that has probably done a lot of damage to the US.

> would probably have an easier time securing

Hold up, that's starting to conflate two very different ideas of what's going on:

1. "We cannot tolerate any outside visitors because it could possibly give them an opportunity to commit espionage and other serious federal crimes.

2. "We cannot tolerate specific vetted reporters that haven't promised us control over what they write and how they write it."

We can tell this isn't a (#1) concern over actual security. If it were, this (#2) "deal" would never be offered at all.

This is about controlling messages and opinions, rather than securing specific facts.

This clearly has nothing to do with security, but do you really believe journalists are just "wandering" around the Pentagon and getting into classified materials?

Yeah. I don't know if you've ever played at office politics but information that isn't supposed to get around gets around like mad once people are in the same room for any length of time. There is no way they aren't finding out about classified info except if they, the journalist, are purposefully trying not to know. And we're dealing with a group of professionally chatty, snoopy people. They're not all going to be keeping their noses clean. Some of them probably will turn out to be full on spies.

there are separate issues

* whether you need to limit people learning something

* whether you need to limit people publishing something

"they might be spies" is an issue for the first, but the new rules infringe on the last one too.

1 has to do with secrecy levels, and those were already there, cause you don't want people to look at top secret files even if they are not journalists.

You do want journalists to raise issues on newspapers tho.

The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?

If that's the case, shouldn't we also ban the top brass from restaurants, bars, churches and golf courses lest they encounter strangers there?

Why bother? It hasn't caused a major problem so far. This isn't new, it is how the world has worked for all of military history.

I know classified US secrets, the leaks around the Snowden era were pretty interesting. Guarantee you the people in the building know more than me. The NOFORN stuff actually tends to be the spiciest if you feel an urge to go look at something.

> This isn't new

Strike packages being leaked before launch? Yes. Yes, that’s new. We spent a lot of time and money to get that access in WWII. It was what Turing built the Enigma to do.

You made the counter argument, there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personal outside of a building the handles secret documents.

I'm surprised they were let in the building in the first place. Should I be allowed to go if I have a press pass?

> there is nothing stopping a journalist from talking to military personnel outside of a building the handles secret documents

Under the new rules this would not have been allowed, either, unless the information was pre-approved messaging.

> The people dealing with classified military secrets are such Chatty Cathys they can't help but blab about upcoming airstrikes to random strangers, so we need to prevent them from talking to strangers?

I can think of one. Name ends on Hegseth.

And that same lying press and propaganda club that roenxi is arguing against here reported his gaffe pretty accurately, which if they had been who he claims they are they never would have.

National security has been the excuse of damn near every uncharacteristically authoritarian move our government has made, and the pentagon has unprecedented means to securely discuss and transfer information. The onus of controlling that information has always fallen on people with clearance, and the biggest sensitive information compromises in the past couple decades were perpetrated by national political figures. There are people a lot snoopier than reporters looking for information a lot more sensitive than they are who’ll leak it to foreign governments without us ever knowing — that’s who they really have to worry about. Controlling media is, and has always been about protecting themselves from embarrassment.

According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon. What materials they are getting, I don't know.

> According to NPR (National Public Radio), yes they are just "wandering" around the Pentagon

Source?

I was wrong. My source was Major Garret of CBS News. I was reminded of this as he is, as I type this, on KMOX Radio in St Louis discussing this very subject. You can probably listen to it online now and later, too.

The news outlets, by and large, are not upset at the idea they need to keep to more restrictive areas (though they've already had their access limited by this administration).

The concern is the "you can't report on anything we don't want you to" rule.

Or that they draw the line when it's about little hummiliations done to themselves, and not to lying and misreporting

You see what you want to see.

You're making the conclusions you want to see without anything to back them up.

There are countless reasons why they are acting now when they haven't before and most of them do not support what you are implying.

Journalists have a long and storied history of standing up for free and independent journalism, and they're right to!. However, they have a rather more spotty record (with highs and lows) of standing up for other fundamental requirements for a well-functioning liberal democracy.

So one possible (admittedly uncharitable) take is that they were OK with all those other things because those things didn't hurt them, and might've helped them. They're not OK with this change not because it makes things worse, but because it makes things worse /for them/.

>They've been towing the Pentagon/S.D. line, getting privileged official "leaks", going to wars as "embedded" shills, for decades.

It's difficult to see those on the same plane really. There's spineless and there's spineless. The official "leaks" as theatre as it was, occasionally functioned as soft checks and balances for revealing in-fighting amongst the different departments of goverment -- when the pentagon, white house, CIA were at odds with each other over strategy and tactics on some topic-- and often this was used as narrative fodder for both the left and right.

As for the embeds, at least they saw some shit and had skin in the game by being near the action. Some of them actually died on assignment. Lıke, what the fuck are we talking about here? And when you have Israel not letting any reporters into Gaza I have little confidence Trump won't take a page out of that playbook if he gets the US in some ground conflict either.

So you have administrations that allowed all that in the past, and you have this snowflake administration who's afraid of some questions being asked on a golf course in Florida.

Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time. Which is why many, except for quatari al jazeera djihadis refused to go.

Same as with the tulkarem incident where the west bank police lynched two israelis on camera and the mob noticed the filming reporters and smashed the cameras.

Yeah ok, that's why foreign reporters had to shoot footage clandestinely from foreign aid airplanes:

https://www.mediaite.com/media/tv/stain-on-humanity-journali...

Aand its repackaged al jazeera as evidence

Since your unsubstantiated comment did not reference the content of the sourced article in any way I can only conclude you're replying in bad faith and trolling.

For bystanders, some Israeli sources against this 3-day-old account's baseless claims:

- 2025 Jun 7 oped about why it's a good thing that Israel doesn't allow journalists into Gaza (https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/409591)

- 2025 Jul 9 article "Israel Blocks All Foreign Journalists From Gaza, High Court Delays Ruling on Appeal for Access" (https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-09/ty-article/.p...)

>Israel allows reporters into ghaza. Hamas kills journalist not following the brotherhoods storyline all the time.

Israel has killed dozens of journalists, officially marked as press, in targeted killings.

It's pretty hard to take someone who is pointing at journalists embedded in combat units as examples of a deficit of backbone in that industry seriously.

This might be what we need. SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised. Giving him less earned media may be a win.

>SecDef is, at best, an idiot. At worst, he’s compromised

He acts like every other person (myself included) that i know that had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed but still looks funny at his favorite drink. With a guy like this you literally never know what the clear liquid in the glass bottle is.

> had a serious alcohol problem and is now somewhat relapsed

I assume you meant lapsed - Freudian slip, maybe? ;)

The silent treatment is part of a long standard official directive. https://www.war.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/975910/dod...

Its good it stayed but just be aware it wasn't the same as a room of normal people being silent.

>First sign of a profession having a backbone in months.

Probably 25 years. Let's not forget that they haven't shown spine after 9/11

The silent treatment was basically required by law, when it became clear the event was really a political rally using them as props. They just didn’t break the law (unlike what other, hand-picked service members used as props at Trump rallies have done in the past)

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