US blocks access to WikiLeaks for federal workers

US blocks access to WikiLeaks for federal workers

Employees unable to call up WikiLeaks on government computers as material is still formally classified, says US

WikiLeaks has been blocked from being accessed by federal employees of the US, because the files are still seen as classified. Photograph: Thomas Coex/AFP/Getty Images

The Obama administration is banning hundreds of thousands of federal employees from calling up the WikiLeaks site on government computers because the leaked material is still formally regarded as classified.

The Library of Congress tonight joined the education department, the commerce department and other government agencies in confirming that the ban is in place.

Although thousands of leaked cables are freely available on the Guardian, New York Times and other newspaper websites, as well as the WikiLeaks site, the Obama administration insists they are still classified and, as such, have to be protected.

The move comes at a time when civil rights and other liberal groups are becoming increasingly critical, inviting parallels with the kind of bans on information imposed by China and other oppressive governments.

The Library of Congress, one of the biggest libraries in the world, serving both Congress and the public, and essentially the library of record for the US, issued a statement tonight, which read: "The library decided to block WikiLeaks because applicable law obligates federal agencies to protect classified information. Unauthorised disclosures of classified documents do not alter the documents' classified status or automatically result in declassification of the documents."

Disclosure of the ban brought a flood of criticism from liberal bloggers, critical of the Library of Congress's behaviour.

News of the ban was first reported by the Washington Post.

The commerce department, in an email circulated to employees on Monday, said the WikiLeaks material remained classified and "is NOT authorised for downloading, viewing, printing, processing, copying or transmitting" on government computers or communication devices.

It warned anyone downloading the WikiLeaks material: "Accessing the WikiLeaks documents will lead to sanitisation of your PC to remove any potentially classified information from your system, and the result in possible data loss."

The education department said any employees who had already looked at the material should contact their internet technology department. An internal email said that IT staff "will work with you to remediate your device".

WikiLeaks cables: Barack Obama is a bigger danger

WikiLeaks harms the US. But the president's refusal to acknowledge the threats we face is a bigger danger

WikiLeaks has yet again flooded the internet with thousands of classified American documents, this time state department cables. More troubling than WikiLeaks' latest revelation of US secrets, however, is the Obama administration's weak, wrong-headed and erratic response. Unfortunately, the administration has acted consistently with its demonstrated unwillingness to assert and defend US interests across a wide range of threats, such as Iran and North Korea, which, ironically, the leaked cables amply document.

On 29 November, secretary of state Hillary Clinton lamented that this third document dump was "not just an attack on United States foreign policy and interests, [but] an attack on the international community". By contrast, on 1 December, the presidential press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the White House was "not scared of one guy with one keyboard and a laptop". Hours later, a Pentagon spokesman disdained the notion that the military should have prevented the WikiLeaks release: "The determination of those who are charged with such things, the decision was made not to proceed with any sort of aggressive action of that sort in this case."

Clinton is demonstrably incorrect in being preoccupied with defending the "international community", whatever that is. Her inability to understand WikiLeaks' obsession with causing harm to the US is a major reason why the Obama administration has done little or nothing in response – except talk, its usual foreign-policy default position.

At least Clinton saw it as an attack on someone. The White House/defence department view was that the leaks were no big deal. Obama's ideological predecessors welcomed publication of the Pentagon Papers, and suspected subsequent presidencies of nefarious clandestine dealings internationally, capped by Bush administration "intelligence cherry-picking" on Iraq. The prior WikiLeaks releases were largely military information, which made the Pentagon's earlier rhetoric more high-pitched, but the outcome for all three was the same: no response. What does it matter if half a million classified US documents become instantly unclassified and downloadable by friend and foe alike?

This sustained, collective inaction exemplifies the Obama administration's all-too-common attitude towards threats to America's international interests. The president, unlike the long line of his predecessors since Franklin Roosevelt, simply does not put national security at the centre of his political priorities. Thus, Europeans who welcomed Obama to the Oval Office should reflect on his Warren Harding-like interest in foreign policy. Europeans who believe they will never again face real security threats to their comfortable lifestyle should realise that if by chance one occurs during this administration, the president will be otherwise occupied. He will be continuing his efforts to restructure the US economy, and does not wish to be distracted by foreign affairs.

The more appropriate response is to prosecute everyone associated with these leaks to the fullest extent of US law, which the justice department at least appears to be considering. Next, we must stop oscillating between excessive stove-piping of information, as before 9/11, and excessive access, as demonstrated by WikiLeaks. There is no one final answer, but the balance must be under constant analysis. Finally, the Pentagon's cyber-warriors need target practice in this new form of combat, and they could long ago have practised by obliterating WikiLeaks' electrons. Had we acted after the first release in July, there might not have been subsequent leaks, and lives and critical interests would have been protected.

But that was not to be under Obama. His secretary of state does not comprehend that America is the subject of the attack, his department of defence is not interested in defending us, and the president himself seems utterly indifferent to the whole affair.

All of this underscores the real problem. It is not WikiLeaks that ultimately imperils our national security, but the failing Obama administration, which ignores the nature and extent of threats we face, and which is too often unwilling to act to thwart them. While our economic difficulties have dominated the national debate for two years, national security will inevitably again come to the fore, as Americans see the full extent of the devastation left by Obama's policies. That shift cannot come too soon.

WikiLeaks:

WikiLeaks: Internet backlash follows US pressure against whistleblowing site

Individuals redirecting parts of their own sites to Swedish internet host amid 'censorship'

WikiLeaks: American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting the WikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

American pressure to dissuade companies in the US from supporting theWikiLeaks website has led to an online backlash in which individuals are redirecting parts of their own sites to its Swedish internet host.

Since early on Friday morning, it has been impossible to reach WikiLeaks by typing wikileaks.org into a web browser because everyDNS, which would redirect queries for the string "wikileaks.org" to that machine address, removed its support for Wikileaks, claiming that it had broken its terms of service by being the target of a huge hacker attack. (See What is DNS?)

Without a DNS record, it is only possible to reach WikiLeaks by typing in the string of numbers which, for most web users, is too unmemorable to make it feasible.

That, campaigners say, points to the principal weakness in the internet's pyramidial DNS setup, where a limited number of site registrars can control whether a site is findable by name or not.

Website hosts are being encouraged to add a "/wikileaks" directory into their sites, redirecting to which redirects to http://88.80.13.160/, run by the Swedish hosting company Bahnhof.

At present, that location redirects users to a Wikleaks page athttp://213.251.145.96/, which is run by a French company, but ifpressure from the French government pushes Wikileaks off that host, it will still have the Swedish location.

At the same time, scores of sites "mirroring" WikiLeaks have sprung up – by lunchtime today, the list was 74-strong and contained sites that have the same content as WikiLeaks and – crucially – link to the downloads of its leaks of 250,000 US diplomatic cables.

The backlash has also gained its own tag on the microblogging service Twitter, where people who have linked to the main site are using the hashtag #imwikileaks.

The technical details of how to make a site's subdirectory point directly to the WikiLeaks site are described by Paul Carvill, a British developer, andJamie McClelland.

"I've done this as a simple gesture of my support for WikiLeaks and my opposition to arbitrary censorship of the web by governments and corporations," Carvill says on his page, while McLelland says that adding his support "seems like a good way for us all to really pitch in and share the risk that the folks at WikiLeaks are taking all by themselves".

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