Your Tax Dollars At Work: NSA Plays Ostrich with Wikileaks Keywords

I have heard rumors that the entire NSA facility is an “open classified facility.” This means that you simply can’t get in without a clearance, unless its to one of their unclassified conference rooms. It also means that it is permissible to leave documents labeled as classified out on the desktop. But this story came out today revealing that the NSA has a global “spam filter” in that they block all inbound email that contains the word “wikileaks” in it.

Now usually, this blocking of emails wouldn’t be much of a problem in Civilian agencies such as the FDA, USDA, DOI and others- facilities that aren’t cleared to view information pertaining to the classified State Department documents leaked by Bradley Manning to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks- those agencies would typically have to initiate a “classified spillage” drill to scrub information from the hard drives of affected systems that viewed such sensitive information, despite its wide availability online. In these Federal Civilian agencies cases, such precautions make a little bit of sense. But for the NSA? Despite the secret clearances of everyone employed there, they are still trying to “protect” their users from viewing what an adversary has released?

Anyways, its affected the ability of prosecutors to properly send Bradley Manning to his much deserved doom. From Politico here:

At a hearing last month, prosecutors in the case against Pfc. Bradley Manning noted that they didn’t receive the messages but could not explain why. Chief prosecutor Capt. Ashden Fein said at a hearing Thursday that the messages had been “blocked by a spam filter for security.”.

“Apparently, they were blocked because the word ‘WikiLeaks’ was somewhere in the e-mail,” Coombs said.

Fein said there is now a procedure in place to check the spam filter on a daily basis for errant e-mails. In addition, military Judge Col. Denise Lind said prosecutors had set up an alternate e-mail account that shouldn’t encounter the same problem.

So Eleven years after 9/11 we still have people trying to prevent our intelligence agencies from gathering intelligence. Pretty stupid.