[blahedo]

Pursued to its logical conclusion, this means that the 800,000 or so US citizens with some level of security clearance have been forbidden from reading newspapers, watching the Daily Show, or discussing politics for the last week or so. Really? I mean, I know that reductio ad absurdum isn't a successful defence against dumb law, but this seems a bit excessive.

Especially considering that a big part of what's been released so far has been ho-hum stuff that just reinforces what a lot of people have speculated was true---"Eh, they don't really think that'll work."---and now making a comment like that means you're propagating classified information and thus ineligible for a State Department job?

I mean, it has shades of the old Khrushchev line ("3 years for insulting the premier, 20 years for revealing state secrets.") It's one thing to say that a leak that one person saw does not automatically declassify something (trade secret law works the same way), but when the leak is on this kind of scale and has been commented on so publicly, it seems hard to justify.