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The Army admitted Thursday to not only restricting access to The Guardian news website at the Presidio of Monterey, as reported in Thursday’s Herald, but Army wide.

Presidio employees said the site had been blocked since The Guardian broke several stories on data collection by the National Security Agency.

Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email the Army is filtering “some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks.”

He wrote it is routine for the Department of Defense to take preventative “network hygiene” measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

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Army to troops: Ignorance is strength (correntewire.com)
US Army restricts access to Guardian website over secrets in NSA leak stories (rt.com)
The Guardian Blocked By The Army After NSA Stories (huffingtonpost.com)
U.S. Army Blocks Internet Access to The Guardian Newspaper (firedoglake.com)
U.S. Army Restricts Access To ‘The Guardian’ Website (npr.com)

Photo credit: United States Army Garrison Presidio of Monterey

Presidio of Monterey employees on the base’s network are blocked from accessing parts of the news website that recently broke several stories on the National Security Agency’s data collection.

Limited access to The Guardian started shortly after the articles were released, according to employees across several departments.

Some of the site was still unavailable Wednesday — although the server granted access to the Washington Post and other newspapers.

Employees could go to The Guardian’s U.S. home page, www.guardiannews.com, but were blocked from reading stories, such as NSA articles, that redirected to the British site, Presidio spokesman Dan Carpenter said.

Yet, why the website remained largely unaccessible is a mystery.

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