By Craig Considine
WikiLeaks better hurry up and move to the Icelandic truth zone. It looks like the Pentagon is gunning for them.
“Wikileaks.org, a publicly accessible Internet Web site, represents a potential force protection, counterintelligence, operational security (OPSEC), and information security (INFOSEC) threat to the US Army,” a secret report authored by the Army Counterintelligence Center and leaked by the notorious truth-seeking website explains.
The leakage of sensitive and classified DoD information also calls attention to the insider threat, when a person or persons motivated by a particular cause or issue wittingly provides information to domestic or foreign personnel or organizations to be published by the news media or on the Internet. Such information could be of value to foreign intelligence and security services (FISS), foreign military forces, foreign insurgents, and foreign terrorist groups for collecting information or for planning attacks against US force, both within the United States and abroad.
Or it could be of use to Americans interested in what their government and military are covertly doing (and often illegally) in their names.
As for “insurgents,” the Department of Homeland Security has made it clear that category includes a large number of Americans, especially “rightwing extremists” who value the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Pentagon and military intelligence — along with the FBI and the CIA — have targeted for several decades Americans opposed to illegal and immoral wars.
In order to stop WikiLeaks, it is suggested in the document the person (or persons) responsible for the leaks be hunted down and prosecuted.
Web sites such as Wikileaks.org have trust as their most important center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insider, leaker, or whistleblower. Successful identification, prosecution, termination of employment, and exposure of persons leaking the information by the governments and businesses affected by information posted to Wikileaks.org would damage and potentially destroy this center of gravity and deter others from taking similar actions.
Finally, it should be noted that the Pentagon considers “the internet as being equivalent to an enemy weapons system,” according a declassified document released to the National Security Archive at George Washington University under the Freedom of Information Act.
This article originally appeared on Craig Considine’s blog.