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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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