The School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University has acknowledged that it sent an email to its students with a warning that students refrain from
making comments about the leaked diplomatic cables on social media sites like Facebook or via Twitter and from posting links to the documents if they ever hope to work for the State Department in the future. The email from an unnamed individual at the school’s Office of Career Services reportedly relayed a recommendation made by a school alumnus in a telephone call to the school. According to the email, the alumnus works for the State Department at the present time.
Following is a copy of the email:
From: Office of Career Services
Date: Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 3:26 PM
Subject: Wikileaks – Advice from an alum
To: “Office of Career Services (OCS)”
Hi students,
We received a call today from a SIPA alumnus who is working at the State Department. He asked us to pass along the following information to anyone who will be applying for jobs in the federal government, since all would require a background investigation and in some instances a security clearance.
The documents released during the past few months through Wikileaks are still considered classified documents. He recommends that you DO NOT post links to these documents nor make comments on social media sites such as Facebook or through Twitter. Engaging in these activities would call into question your ability to deal with confidential information, which is part of most positions with the federal government.
Regards,
Office of Career Services
Philip J. Crowley, a State Department spokeman, however, has denied any federal involvement in relaying any such message about Wikileaks to anyone outside the State Department. Crowley reportedly said: “This is not true. We have instructed State Department employees not to access the WikiLeaks site and download posted documents using an unclassified network since these documents are still classified. We condemn what Mr. Assange is doing, but have given no advice to anyone beyond the State Department to my knowledge.”
When questioned why Columbia would have sent the message to its students, Crowley replied: “If an employee of the State Department sent such an email, it does not represent a formal policy position.”
Updated to add the following link to a Huffington Post article dated 12/6/2010:
Columbia University Walks Back Anti-WikiLeaks Advice
(My thanks go to eniobob for that link.)
– Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
Jill,
I’m pretty sure all but the blind saw that coming for Assange. The only reason he wasn’t disappeared is his public profile and possibly fear of the poison pill. I wonder how long they can resist the temptation to use “enhanced interrogation” in an attempt to force him to reveal encryption keys.
While we learned yesterday that the U.S. is preparing its domestic response to a potential economic collapse, the bigger story might be that the U.S. has been playing such “war games” for almost two years.
“The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.” That’s how Politico reporter Eamon Javers (now with CNBC and who brought us Monday’s report) began an article dated April 9, 2009.
In that article, he describes how the U.S. first began preparing for an economic collapse. “Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data,” he writes. “Their efforts were carefully observed and recorded by uniformed military officers and members of the U.S. intelligence community.”
The Office of the Secretary of Defense hosted the two-day event March 17 and 18, 2009, at the Warfare Analysis Laboratory in Laurel, MD.
The “game” didn’t end well for the United States: “the savviest economic warrior proved to be China.”
“We were allowed to fight with financial weapons only (stocks, bonds, currencies, gold, reserves, etc.) and no kinetic weapons,” James Rickards, who participated in the game, told The Blaze in an e-mail.
“This was an example of the changing nature of conflict,” Paul Bracken, a professor and expert in private equity at the Yale School of Management who attended the sessions, told Javers. “The purpose of the game is not really to predict the future, but to discover the issues you need to be thinking about.”
‘Unified Quest 2011’: Pentagon ‘War Games’ U.S. Economic Meltdown
CNBC Video
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/unified-quest-2011-pentagon-war-games-u-s-economic-meltdown/
Assange has been denied bail and will be remanded into custody. Both this Swedish and UK atty. see the hand of the US at work.
http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/wikileaks-founder-julilan-assange-arrested-by-british-police/19749421
Don’t intend to overwhelm but, at a glance, some good info….
Elaine,
I started it yesterday, but was interrupted and didn’t get back to it. Thanks. I’ll read it now.
anon nurse,
Have you read Greenwald’s piece?
and some extra information about funding….
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/12/07/julian-assange-arrested-w_n_792956.html
AP’s earlier story is below.
LONDON (AP) – Visa says it has suspended all payments to WikiLeaks pending an investigation of the organization’s business.
Visa’s decision is a powerful blow to the loosely knit organization, which relies on online donations to fund its operations.
Popular online payment company PayPal, Inc. has already severed its links with WikiLeaks. Visa’s decision to pull the plug on WikiLeaks leaves the website with one fewer source of revenue.
Swiss authorities closed Assange’s new Swiss bank account Monday.
end AP story
From Glenn Greenwald (12/6/2010)
The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/12/06/wikileaks/index.html
Read somewhere Assange turned himself in….so I suppose the title is correct in a sense…..
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrested
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40544697/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/
Marnie, yep. Whoever was actually warning the college students about being careful regarding their blogging habits regarding the Wikileaks information and controversy was actually delivering a solid piece of career planning information. I read that researching the internet footprint of prospective employees id a tool increasingly being used by employers.
Kay, “Wiki” is the prefix for a variety of websites. Just type “wiki” into any search engine and a bunch of site names will come up. You are correct about Wikileaks, there is no commentary etc, it is an organized data dump situation. I run across various sites named Wiki* while I’m just tooling around the internets but I’v never searched them so I don’t know if there’s one for our specific interest.
Wild Things…You make my heart sing…..But I wanna know for sure….
Yep. Right on the mark, lottakatz…
But the recommendation from the unnamed State employee to pretty clearly implies that email and tiwtter etc documents are being collected, probably, from those sites by any and all Americans for future harassment and black mail. Also to be used a political “purity” test by future administrations.
lottakatz,
Sound reasoning exposes the lies … as usual your statement is right on target
lottakatz
Well I didn’t actually see the wikileaks website. I thought wikileaks was just a data dump. Is there a facility to upload documents? Do the pages look like wikipedia?
Do you know where there are similarly constructed websites that don’t involve international issues? I mean about say city planning?
Thank you
Holder: “National security of the United States has been put at risk,” Holder said. “The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk…”
——-
The government lies and people are stupid as their default.
If the information is being released slowly so it can be redacted and the safety of various un-named persons and organitations is paramount as Holder and the propaganda machine says, and putting Assange in harms way would insure a data dump that was un-redacted, then to do so would prove that the stated reasons for being opposed to the slow release are false.
It ain’t rocket science.
“A wiki ( ) is a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.”
Kay, to reiterate Gyges: There are many Wiki’s on the intertubes… they are not related to each other except in information aggregation format/method with some having more restrictions for editing than others.
puzzling said, “The dangerousness of the United States government is hard to overstate at this tipping point.”
Yep.