Air Force Blocks Sites With Leaked Cables
The U.S. Air Force is blocking its personnel from using work computers to view the websites of the New York Times and other major publications that have posted secret material obtained by Wikileaks, people familiar with the matter say.
Context & Ripple Effects
This fits a long-running pattern at the Air Force rather than a one-off: it blocked troops from reading personal blogs back in February 2008 and helped put MySpace off limits in 2007, then reversed course with a February 2010 social media policy that reopened access. The new move lands four days after the Pentagon-wide ban on removable disks and courts-martial threats aimed at stopping fresh leaks.
What is different this time, per the Journal's sourcing, is the target: not blogs or social networks but the New York Times and other major papers that published material from the WikiLeaks cables. That reframes mainstream press coverage itself as a handling risk for classified information, and the claim rests on unnamed sources, so the Air Force has not confirmed it.
First-order effects
- Air Force personnel on work computers lose access to the New York Times and other outlets running cable coverage, meaning airmen can read about their own institution only off-duty or off-network.
- The block puts the February 2010 social media opening in direct tension with the December disk-ban crackdown, leaving commanders enforcing two opposite access philosophies within ten months.
Second-order effects
- Other services and Defense Department agencies face pressure to match the filter, since a patchwork would let classified-handling rules vary by which base an airman sits on.
- Major newspapers gain a concrete grievance: being filtered alongside the leak source rather than treated as legitimate press, sharpening the fight over whether publication by the Times differs legally or practically from publication by WikiLeaks.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the military's default response to any large disclosure becomes reader-side network filtering rather than prosecution alone, extending a tool built for blogs and social media to the institutional press.
- The episode feeds a structural argument inside the Pentagon about whether open internet access is compatible with clearance culture — a debate each leak cycle has pushed further toward lockdown since the 2006-2008 blog purges.
The trend: Military network policy keeps ratcheting between openness and lockdown, and WikiLeaks is tipping the Air Force toward treating even major newspapers' websites as a classified-material exposure.