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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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.

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