Presidio of Monterey employees are blocked on the base’s network from accessing parts of the news website that recently broke stories about the National Security Agency’s data collection.
Limited access to The Guardian started shortly after the articles were released, said employees across several departments.
Some of the site was 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, <a href=’http://www.guardiannews.com‘>www.guardiannews.com&lt;/a>, but were blocked from reading stories, such as NSA articles, that redirected to the British site, Presidio spokesman Dan Carpenter said.
Why the website remained mostly inaccessible is a mystery.
Carpenter could not comment on why the site is blocked, even if it was an accident, because the network is operated by a separate Army entity.
The Army’s Network Enterprise Technology Command, which took over local network control from the Presidio in 2010, was still checking to see what happened late Wednesday.
NETCOM spokesman Gordon Van Vleet said it was not blocking the site from its Arizona office. He did not rule out it could be an action that originated at the Presidio.
A June 7 memorandum from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense to Defense Department security directors instructed them to warn employees and contractors that classified information posted on public websites was still considered classified.
“Leadership must establish a vigilant command climate that underscores the critical importance of safeguarding classified material against compromise,” it read.
The letter from Director of Security Timothy A. Davis was sent to the Presidio and other military installations.
An attachment to the letter instructs employees how to delete classified information if they accidently download it and warns of sanctions if they “proliferate the information in any way.”
Van Vleet said the letter was meant to be a “heads-up” to be careful about releasing classified information.
“Everybody’s under the same agreement that (admitted leaker Edward) Snowden most likely signed,” he said.
The Guardian has published a series of articles since early June about the inner workings of the National Security Agency. The leak of classified documents revealed federal surveillance programs that collect vast amounts of data, much of which was information on American citizens.
A few articles contained attachments to classified files, such as an agency guide on targeting non-Americans for surveillance.
Snowden, a 29-year-old NSA contractor, later revealed himself (in The Guardian) as the source of the leaks and is on the run from U.S. authorities.
The Herald has published stories on Snowden in the past three weeks.
Employees and students on the network at the Naval Postgraduate School were not blocked from The Guardian, nor the NSA articles. Neither were Department of Defense employees at the department’s building in Seaside.
The Presidio of Monterey houses the Defense Language Institute, the Army garrison and other logistics employees.
Although the numbers of students at the school change weekly, there are about 1,450 Army students, 300 in the Marine Corps, 550 in the Navy and 1,300 in the Air Force. There are about 3,000 civilian employees at the Presidio.
Phillip Molnar can be reached at 646-4487 or <a href=’mailto:pmolnar@montereyherald.com‘>pmolnar@montereyherald.com&lt;/a>.
