Military Bans Disks, Threatens Courts-Martial to Stop New Leaks
It's too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon's secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every …
Context & Ripple Effects
The ban is the latest step in a long retrenchment: troops were pushed off their own war blogs in 2006, MySpace and other social sites went off limits in 2007, and the Air Force blocked wide swaths of the blogosphere in 2008. Each round tightened what a soldier could reach from a military terminal; this one tightens what a soldier can carry out of one.
It also follows an August 2010 debate over whether a cyberattack against WikiLeaks could work at all — coverage that argued taking the site down would not retrieve the copies already loose. The Pentagon appears to have absorbed that lesson: rather than attacking the publisher, it is sealing the source, even though thousands more documents are already out of its hands. The story traveled fast the same week, picked up by Ars Technica, Boing Boing, The Atlantic's Net Effect and MediaMemo amid Anonymous's DDoS reprisals and Amazon's WikiLeaks hosting controversy.
First-order effects
- Troops lose the routine ability to move files between classified and unclassified machines on CDs, DVDs and thumb drives — the everyday workaround for air-gapped networks — under threat of courts-martial for violations.
- WikiLeaks loses nothing immediately: with thousands more cables already extracted from the Pentagon's secret network before the ban, publication continues regardless.
Second-order effects
- Commands must now fund and deploy network-side alternatives to sneakernet — audited transfer gateways and centralized file movement — shifting procurement toward insider-threat and data-loss-prevention tooling.
- Every branch faces the same choice the Air Force made in earlier rounds: restrict more of the network or accept the risk, making blanket access blocks the path of least resistance.
Third-order effects
- If each leak wave buys another layer of restriction, the military drifts toward treating every service member as an untrusted endpoint — the endpoint-security logic of the corporate world applied to a conscript-scale workforce.
- The episode hardens a doctrine in which controlling the physical medium, not the adversary's website, becomes the primary leak countermeasure — a posture other governments handling classified material can be expected to copy.
The trend: Military information control is escalating from blocking what troops can read online to locking down what they can physically remove, with WikiLeaks' cache as the forcing function.