Exercise in Futility: DoD Blocking Snowden News Articles

When I worked as a contractor for DoD, many security people were butthurt over the whole Wikileaks release of State Department cables. Anyone who looked at a Wikileaks site had their workstation treated as a classified spillage, which meant that the whole system was wiped of data, often leaving a user without a workstation for up to a week while a new image was installed. There were only sporadic cases that they knew of. Then I developed a methodology that detected access to all of the mirrored Wikileaks sites and the number jumped up so high that it was almost impossible- and futile- to locate and clean all of the workstations. The DoD was essentially creating a denial of service attack against themselves rather than declassify what was now public information.

Well, the DoD is at it again. They are using their extensive deployment of Bluecoat Proxies and similar web content filtering to attempt to block all news reports about Edward Snowden and the Prism program. Although the information is widely in the public, idiot admins at the DoD are treating news stories as classified spillages. The self DDoSing continues in a lulzy fashion.

From USNews here:

The Department of Defense is blocking online access to news reports about classified National Security Agency documents made public by Edward Snowden. The blackout affects all of the department’s computers and is part of a department-wide directive.

“Any website that runs information that the Department of Defense still considers classified” is affected, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart told U.S. News in a phone interview.

According to Pickart, news websites that re-report information first published by The Guardian or other primary sources are also affected.

“If that particular website runs an article that our filters determine has classified information… the particular content on that website will remain inaccessible,” he said.

Pickart said the blackout affects “millions” of computers on “all Department of Defense networks and systems.”

The spokesman told U.S. News that original reports about the leaks may be specifically targeted for the blackout. He admitted that “automated filters are never perfect,” and some reports may slip through the cyber blockade.

In case you didn’t know, every member of the armed forces has a basic secret clearance. But security administrators have to feel powerful, so blocking news sites on a massive basis must give a feeling of a nice rush. The obverse is also true. If you want to blind the Pentagon to the internet, just put Snowden’s name and codeword PRISM on every page.