Uncle Sam is mighty upset, and that’s not a good thing for American troops itching to read the news. The Pentagon has blocked access to The Guardian newspaper’s website for all soldiers stationed in the Middle East.
The Guardian confirmed on Monday that its website has been
blacklisted by a filtering system installed by the United States
Department of Defense on the computer system utilized by
thousands of service members deployed to the area covered by the
US Central Command, or CENTCOM. That “theater-wide” effort has
reportedly blocked access to the award-winning newspaper’s Web
edition for all soldiers in Afghanistan, the Middle East, South
Asia and even the command’s headquarters in Florida.
The decision to keep overseas troops from accessing the newspaper
comes three days after The Guardian learned that certain
pages of its website were inaccessible to soldiers stationed
within the US. The Defense Department initially restricted access
to Guardian articles containing classified material – such as the
leaked National Security Agency documents recently disclosed to
the paper by former contractor Edward Snowden – but the Pentagon
has since widened that ban, making the entire website off limits
for soldiers not just within America’s border, but those
stationed in locales like Afghanistan and Iraq.
Banning The Guardian in Afghanistan alone means the 62,000 troops
stationed in America’s longest running-war are unable to access
the website.
“US Central Command is among other DOD organizations that
routinely take preventative measures to safeguard the chance of
spillage of classified information on to unclassified computer
networks, even if the source of the information is itself
unclassified,” Army Lt Col Steve Wollman, a spokesman for
CENTCOM, told The Guardian. “One of the purposes for
preventing this spillage is to protect CENTCOM personnel from
inadvertently amplifying disclosed but classified
information.”
“Additionally, classified information is not automatically
declassified simply because of unauthorized disclosure,”
Wollman added. “Classified information is prohibited from
specific unclassified networks, even if the information has
already been published in unclassified media that are available
to the general public, such as online news organizations.”
Military computers have previously been blocked from accessing
the website for WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy organization that has
published hundreds of thousands of classified documents.
Blacklisting the entirety of The Guardian appears unprecedented
though, and is a direct response to the NSA documents that have
been sporadically released by the paper since early June.
The Guardian first published on June 6 a top-secret court order
revealing that the NSA routinely collects metadata pertaining to
the phone records of millions of Americans. After the paper
revealed evidence of the US tapping into Internet services
several days later, former Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward
Snowden identified himself as the source of the leaks. Snowden,
30, has since been charged with espionage and is reportedly in
Moscow awaiting potential asylum. Snowden has requested
assistance from upwards of 20 separate countries, but could face
decades in prison if those requests are ignored and he is
extradited to the US to stand trial.
Republished with permission from:: RT