You know a government has lost all credibility and is nothing more than a rotting carcass of corruption and criminality when it starts taking draconian steps to prevent its own employees from knowing the truth about what it is doing. Incredibly, an internal memo from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) last Friday to employees threatened them with “administrative or legal action from the Government” if they commit the heinous crime of clicking on a link from the Washington Post. Yes, the Washington Post. Click here to view a copy of the actual memo. TechDirt has some poignant thoughts on the matter:
We’ve talked about procedures within the Defense Department to block computers from accessing the website for The Guardian newspaper — along with similarly short-sighted moves to apply a sledgehammer approach to pretending that public information isn’t really public. I’ve heard from a few people within the Defense Department who defend this approach on basic procedural grounds of trying to “make sure” that classified info remains classified, but the real problem is considering any publicly revealed documents as still classified.
However, that’s not the way the government works. The latest is that Homeland Security sent around a memo warning employees that merely opening up a Washington Post article about some of the leaks might violate their non-disclosure agreement to “protect National Security Information,” and it even says that merely clicking on the story might make the reader “subject to any administrative or legal action from the Government.” Got that? Working for the government and merely reading the news about things the government is doing might subject you to legal action.
I suppose with Janet Napolitano taking over the University of California school system, pretty soon checking certain books out of the library will constitute a felony. We are one step away from burning books. Absolute desperate insanity.
More from Techdirt here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts, or other records, such as from a web site or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression that something never happened.[1][2] The concept was first popularized by George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_hole