Hacker News Reader

Comment by dljsjr | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure that this is completely tin-foil hat worthy.

I was working at a defense contractor in 2010 when the big leak of all the cables occurred, and was forced to learn a lot of things I wouldn't have otherwise, including something that maybe a lot of people don't fully grasp:

When stuff like this leaks, if any of the information is considered sensitive/classified/restricted in any manner, the act of it being leaked does not dissolve its restricted status. In other words, if you are a regular US citizen and you go to Wikileaks and look at something that is classified without having the proper security clearance, then you're now on the wrong side of the law.

I don't think there's any political shadiness going on here, I think Google is just trying to be on the correct side of the system. Whether or not that system is on the right side of some moral or ethical line is a different conversation entirely.

View on HN

> When stuff like this leaks, if any of the information is considered sensitive/classified/restricted in any manner, the act of it being leaked does not dissolve its restricted status. In other words, if you are a regular US citizen and you go to Wikileaks and look at something that is classified without having the proper security clearance, then you're now on the wrong side of the law.

I'm pretty sure this is wrong: regular citizens are not prohibited from viewing classified material without clearance.

OTOH, if you are in particular government or government-contract jobs (including, at least, all jobs that involve a security clearance), you are prohibited from any viewing classified material you aren't cleared for (and, I believe, also have all kinds of required reporting processes if you discover you have unintentionally been exposed to such information.)

There's a good chance this is true: I'm going off what I was told, which being that I was at a government contractor was probably largely FUD because they didn't want me doing anything that would jeopardize their business (I may not have ended up in jail but I would have cost them a lot of money and probably would have been fired).

Somebody much more knowledgeable than me can chime in on this.

Yeah, and if it was a defense contractor, its quite likely that a substantial number of people (maybe everyone) in the firm may have actually been subject to the kind of rules you describe, even when most citizens are not.

Classification is provided by the government, internal to the government ergo a citizen that is neither government nor contractually associated with said government can read anything they like.

There appears to be a large gulf between what the government advises its employees and citizens about handling classified information and what criminal charges and/or adverse administrative actions it can sustain in the face of legal scrutiny.

Correct. The press can report on whatever it wants and regular citizens can read it (I vaguely remember there being something like a clear and present danger exception for the former). Otherwise, it would be illegal for any news organization to write about drone strikes.

I was in the military when the initial leak by Chelsea Manning occurred, and had a TS clearance. The next day, we had a base wide meeting where OSI (The Air Force's FBI) said that although all the information is classified, we were not prevented from reading it. However, none of us were permitted to discuss specifics in non-secure areas, view it on military computers, or confirm any information regarding it.

I was active Army EOD (TS-SCI) when both Chelsea's and Snowden's leaks happened. We were the opposite. Forbidden from accessing WL at all, even on our personal computers. No real way to enforce it obviously, but the threat was the fact (specifically with Snowden) that you accessed TS-SCI material that was outside the 'scope' / compartment of your SCI access.

State Department appears to have said something conflicting with your account as it relates even to average citizens:

http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to-fe...

This, plus the fact that the DNC is not a government agency and thus classification is not a concern.

If you have secret clearance, you're not supposed to dig into other information outside your clearance, even if the information has been leaked public.

The reasoning behind this was illuminated for me by an ex-contractor recently: your given security-cleared work clears you for some subset of secured information (say, A). There is some other information that is meant to be kept very secret, call it "C". People who know "C" are the kind that can't go to the dentist without the dentist herself having security clearance and a nice person in a black suit standing nearby to make sure the C-knower doesn't blurt out something unfortunate while under anaesthetic.

When security divisons are made, the goal is to prevent someone from knowing A+B, not only because A and B are valuable, but because A+B could allow someone to derive C, which is the real issue. The government doesn't have enough people to follow the whole security-cleared body around to every dental appointment, etc., so they instead need to ask people who have clearances to not go fishing for information they aren't cleared for, even if that information is easily accessible due to Wikileaks.

It's not a philosophy that scales to the Information Age, but there's method to the madness.

So, regular citizens are not "prohibited" from viewing such information, but the prevention of access to it never really goes away.

Legal status does not change, but neither does the effort to preserve secrecy.

This has nothing to do with morality or ethics. This is an automated system that detected malware on the wikileaks site. There's no reason to think a human was even involved in the decision to apply this label.

The site may have been hacked (and just because it looks OK when you visit doesn't mean it hasn't been hacked). It could even be a state-sponsored attacker trying to exploit a zero day to monitor wikileaks visitors. Or, as someone points out below, it could be run-of-the-mill malware contained in attachments of some of the recently released email dumps.

This is probably an even better counterpoint.

This has nothing to do with morality or ethics.

Regardless of the means, any entity which performs some form of censorship --- especially if that entity is through which a nontrivial amount of the population gets their knowledge and can be influenced by, like Google --- automatically makes itself the subject of moral and ethical scrutiny.

There's no reason to think a human was even involved in the decision to apply this label.

The decision was made long ago when Google started to classify sites as "unsafe" or "safe", and that was definitely a human decision. IMHO Google should still be held accountable for whatever effects their automated systems have.

This reminds me of how cracks, keygens, and other... anti-authoritarian (for lack of a better term) tools will often be detected by antivirus as "unwanted" and/or "suspicious", despite not actually doing anything the user didn't want. It might just be heuristics that happen to cast such a wide net, but it also means the authors made that decision, that moral and ethical choice.

OK, sure, but that's a completely different ethical question than that suggested above. You are asking whether it's ethical to deploy automated malware scanners (clearly ethical in my view especially considering that the scanner is correct in this case; there is malware hosted on the site as pointed out above), while the original suggestion was that Google had consciously applied this label for some legal or moral reason unrelated to actual malware.

These are all good points, but I will make the claim that it is typically possible to edit the labels of classifiers manually if they are inaccurate. Whether it is the case here, I'm uncertain, but it's worth considering. If this tag was in effect just after their recent DNC leak, the timing is uncanny, particularly since we know that Google has political leanings.

Only if you have a clearance.

If you're not cleared you've made no such agreement with USG and you can freely look at leaked classified material as an American citizen.

but what's the clearance Clarence?

I'm curious if you have any credible source (not part of the government) for this. This sounds very much like something government actors want people to believe.

The good thing is I am an European citizen, so I do not have to take into account at all any American "classified" or "restricted" or whatever label. Or do I?

If you don't have a U.S. security clearance, all this nonsense is basically null and void for you.

>When stuff like this leaks, if any of the information is considered sensitive/classified/restricted in any manner, the act of it being leaked does not dissolve its restricted status.

This is correct.

>In other words, if you are a regular US citizen and you go to Wikileaks and look at something that is classified without having the proper security clearance, then you're now on the wrong side of the law.

This does not follow and is incorrect. You don't have to worry about appropriate handling of classified material unless you have (or had) a security clearance.

Your email where you got this information from was directed mostly to cleared employees.

Yea I was at a defense contractor at the time, I remember an email going around telling people not to go look at this stuff for that exact reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com