A new policy from the Office of Director of National Intelligence prevents employees and contractors from citing news reports derived from leaks. “The Obama administration is clamping down on a technique that government officials have long used to join in public discussions of well-known but technically still-secret information: citing news reports based on unauthorized disclosures,” writes Charlie Savage for The New York Times, May 8, 2014.
The Office claimed that the media distorted the policy that was no more than a consolidation of two existing policies. “But that assertion is hard to understand, since the text of the revised policy appears significantly different from its predecessors in several respects,” argues Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News, May 12, 2014. Aftergood said the main difference was that the previous policies concerned protecting classified information whereas the revised policy was much broader.