Montery Herald: The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey, as reported in Thursday’s Herald, but Armywide.Seems kind of pointless, unless they’re also blocking cable and broadcast news. Kind of a case of locking the barn door after the horse got out. It’s like trying to patch a leak in cheesecloth. It really is quite futile. It’s not going to limit the spread of the info, it just makes the Army look pissy and like it’s punishing The Guardian by denying it web traffic.
Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since The Guardian broke stories on data collection by the National Security Agency.
Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering “some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks."
He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative “network hygiene" measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information.
“We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security," he wrote, “however, there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information."
In a later phone call, Van Vleet said the filter of classified information on public websites was “Armywide" and did not originate at the Presidio.
Presidio employees described how they could access the U.S. site, www.guardiannews.com, but were blocked from articles, such as those about the NSA, that redirected to the British site.
[image by IsaacMao]
