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Comment by joelrunyon | Hacker News Reader

To me this is just as bad of an example (if not worse) of the leaks. How soon till we expand this firewall from "classified docs in the public domain" to "anything that we don't like" affecting "active duty soliders" to "anyone we don't want to have this information."

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And the US Government criticizes China (and Snowden's possible presence there) under exactly these terms.

While staying as far as humanly possible from defending the USG on any of this, there's a vast, vast difference between people who've volunteered for military service, or to work for the DoD, and people who had the (debatable) misfortune of being born Chinese.

The difference is that the volunteers get more money and is composed of a war hungry brainwashed culture that cant point the countries its at war with on the map. Unless there is an actual invasion there is little moral justification for murder, violence, threats. The road to wealth is peace, the road to peace is compassion and the strength of every individual in our society.

Yikes, the last part of what you said is certainly true, but the beginning is a grossly naive view of military service members.

When you join the Army etc you largely leave your free speech (and many other) rights at the door, so I fail to see the equivalence.

My guess is that that info is still classified, even though it's public, and accessing it might be a technical violation for those without clearances.

For the first part, I didn't say they were equivalent. I said it was the same criteria by which China and Snowden were criticized, not that the US was doing to all of its citizens all of the things that the US criticizes China for.

For the second, honest question: does published information actually retain its classification?

> My guess is that that info is still classified, even though it's public, and accessing it might be a technical violation for those without clearances.

What prevents people to use their 3G network to fetch up the article ? Public is public, it's too late for clearance.

DoD largely uses commercial firewalls and filters (Websense was the big one) to block a bunch of stuff, ranging from porn to malware to racist/violent things. It was super-lulz when they tried to apply the same filters to people responsible for monitoring local news and responding to it in places like Iraq.

This isn't that big a change.

Or how long until they expand to other departments?

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