Army reportedly blocking all access to Guardian coverage of NSA leaks

On Thursday afternoon, The Monterey County Herald reported that the US Army was restricting access to the UK version of The Guardian's website. The Heralddiscovered yesterday that the site was blocked for military employees at the California-based Presidio of Monterey installation and confirmed today that the block was Army-wide.

Employees at the Presidio installation reported to the Herald that they were able to access The Guardian's US site, guardiannews.com, but were blocked from clicking through to entire articles, which redirect to the UK site. This is not the first time the military has blocked access to a news organization; in 2010, the US Air Force blocked access to The New York Times and more than 25 other news organizations that were posting classified material made available by WikiLeaks.

In an e-mail to the Herald, Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), said that the Army is prohibiting "some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks." He continued in his letter:

The Department of Defense routinely takes preventative “network hygiene” measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information onto DoD unclassified networks.

We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security, however there are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information. Until declassified by appropriate officials, classified information—including information released through an unauthorized disclosure—must be treated accordingly by DoD personnel.

At Ars, some of our users took to the forums earlier this month to let us know that even viewing reproduced images of these documents can land a DoD employee afoul of the military's strict clearance rules. Since that came to our attention, Ars does not use images of top-secret documents on the front page of our website so that military employees without clearance can read the news with the reasonable assumption that they won't come across still-classified documents unless they click on an article about the leaks.

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