I'm pretty sure this is wrong: regular citizens are not prohibited from viewing classified material without clearance.

OTOH, if you are in particular government or government-contract jobs (including, at least, all jobs that involve a security clearance), you are prohibited from any viewing classified material you aren't cleared for (and, I believe, also have all kinds of required reporting processes if you discover you have unintentionally been exposed to such information.)

The reasoning behind this was illuminated for me by an ex-contractor recently: your given security-cleared work clears you for some subset of secured information (say, A). There is some other information that is meant to be kept very secret, call it "C". People who know "C" are the kind that can't go to the dentist without the dentist herself having security clearance and a nice person in a black suit standing nearby to make sure the C-knower doesn't blurt out something unfortunate while under anaesthetic.

When security divisons are made, the goal is to prevent someone from knowing A+B, not only because A and B are valuable, but because A+B could allow someone to derive C, which is the real issue. The government doesn't have enough people to follow the whole security-cleared body around to every dental appointment, etc., so they instead need to ask people who have clearances to not go fishing for information they aren't cleared for, even if that information is easily accessible due to Wikileaks.

It's not a philosophy that scales to the Information Age, but there's method to the madness.

Somebody much more knowledgeable than me can chime in on this.

http://m.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2010/1207/US-to-fe...

Legal status does not change, but neither does the effort to preserve secrecy.

The site may have been hacked (and just because it looks OK when you visit doesn't mean it hasn't been hacked). It could even be a state-sponsored attacker trying to exploit a zero day to monitor wikileaks visitors. Or, as someone points out below, it could be run-of-the-mill malware contained in attachments of some of the recently released email dumps.

Regardless of the means, any entity which performs some form of censorship --- especially if that entity is through which a nontrivial amount of the population gets their knowledge and can be influenced by, like Google --- automatically makes itself the subject of moral and ethical scrutiny.

There's no reason to think a human was even involved in the decision to apply this label.

The decision was made long ago when Google started to classify sites as "unsafe" or "safe", and that was definitely a human decision. IMHO Google should still be held accountable for whatever effects their automated systems have.

This reminds me of how cracks, keygens, and other... anti-authoritarian (for lack of a better term) tools will often be detected by antivirus as "unwanted" and/or "suspicious", despite not actually doing anything the user didn't want. It might just be heuristics that happen to cast such a wide net, but it also means the authors made that decision, that moral and ethical choice.

If you're not cleared you've made no such agreement with USG and you can freely look at leaked classified material as an American citizen.

I'm curious if you have any credible source (not part of the government) for this. This sounds very much like something government actors want people to believe.

This is correct.

>In other words, if you are a regular US citizen and you go to Wikileaks and look at something that is classified without having the proper security clearance, then you're now on the wrong side of the law.

This does not follow and is incorrect. You don't have to worry about appropriate handling of classified material unless you have (or had) a security clearance.

Your email where you got this information from was directed mostly to cleared employees.