Another Blogger Bites the Dust

Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings,
which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified
intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined
in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation,
the war of ideas in the Middle East and — in her most popular post
— bad food in the CIA cafeteria.Buy This PhotoChristine Axsmith,
with her husband, Justin Benedict, says she was fired by BAE Systems
after she took a stand on the Geneva

But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries
with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won’t be joining
her ever again.

On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions,
her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday,
Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping
the CIA test software.

She said she apologized
right away and figured she would get reprimanded and her blog would
be eliminated. She never dreamed she would be fired. Now, Axsmith said, "I’m
scared, terrified really" of being criminally prosecuted for unauthorized
use of a government computer system, something one of the security
officers mentioned to her.

from the Washington Post

This is an increasingly sticky wicket in which many
bloggers are getting stuck – and screwed. After almost losing his own
precious job, the Dowbrigade voluntarily and of his own free will,
took a blood oath to never blog about his work, his employer, his colleagues,
o rhis students past, present or future.

And this on top of losing our second job as Webmaster
of a small media company for blogging a little known fact about a physical
disability of a certain South American dictator, which turned out to
be a leak of highly classified information which could have been traced
back to my ex-employer.

On the one hand, we feel more than justified, as we
were never told the information was classified or embargoed, the person
who divulged it to us regularly fed us juicy items to blog about, and
after all, it seems ingenious to tell a juicy secret to a blogger and
then be shocked when it appears in a blog.

On the other hand, in retrospect, not such a sharp career
move.

We wish Ms. Axsmith all the luck in the world in finding
a non-classified job.