The Wall Street Journal and MSNBC are reporting that "students considering diplomacy careers are being warned to avoid linking to or posting online comments about the leaked cables." The warning came from a Columbia University graduate who works for the State Department, who had been warned -- like other government employees -- not to access the WikiLeaks documents.
Update: As of Monday, both Columbia and the State Department are backtracking a little from the earlier warning. Only government employees are directed not to read the classified documents.
Writing Saturday in an online magazine called The Tech Herald, Steve Ragan said the Columbia University Office of Career Services has warned students in the School of International and Public Affairs about WikiLeaks. He quotes the Career Services email as follows:
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.I've thought about this: In class we're been discussing the way the media have handled the information made available by WikiLeaks to The Guardian and the other four newspapers, not the raw documents. So we're OK there. The same goes for comments you may have posted to this blog.
But if I were on Facebook, I wouldn't post anything about WikiLeaks. A lot of federal jobs, and they're not just with the state department, require security clearance, and I wouldn't want anything to turn up in an FBI background check.
Monday morning. Huffington Post, a blog with a liberal slant, has more detail from the State Department ... which denies that it's official policy. It quotes a spokesman, a PR guy, as saying , "If an employee of the State Department sent such an email, it does not represent a formal policy position." It's an important distinction. But staying away from the raw documents still looks like good advice.
Update: Monday afternoon Huffington Post obtained an email from John H. Coatsworth, SIPA's dean, saying, "Freedom of information and expression is a core value of our institution. Thus, SIPA's position is that students have a right to discuss and debate any information in the public arena that they deem relevant to their studies or to their roles as global citizens, and to do so without fear of adverse consequences."
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