Civil Liberties

Leakers are Leaking Leaks About Our Fantasy Weapons From Past Wars! Stop the Presses, and Stop the Press!

|


Marines in Iraq ask for a special super laser weapon that can melt steel at 10,000 meters and burn clothes at 15,000 meters distance, among other supercool things. Wired magazine printed their request on its website in 2007.

Now the Naval Criminal Investigative Service wants Wired to reveal the leaker and take down the document, which apparantly reveals important national security secrets about the nutty non-existent things Marines wanted in a war that's supposedly over. 

Details at Wired, which has so far politely declined to reveal a source or take down the document. This request, Wired thinks, is part of a general war on leaks by the so-called "most transparent administration ever":

The NCIS' continued interest in an unclassified document posted over five years ago comes amid a new push by the Obama administration to crack down on leakers. The effort has been Kafka-esque from the start. It started when a pair of books revealed that the White House is intimately involved in approving drone attacks and cybersabotage operations against its foes. Days after the leaks, President Obama scolded the secret-spillers — even though the books' authors were granted officially access to the highest levels of the administration. Congress has also stepped in with its own legislation that would punish leakers of classified information. But the bill, recently passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, exempts from reprisal most senior White House and administration officials — and, of course, members of Congress, as well.

Reason's Ed Krayewski roundly exposes and mocks the lie of "most transparent administration".