If you have secret clearance, you're not supposed to dig into other information outside your clearance, even if the information has been leaked public.

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.

I was in the military when the initial leak by Chelsea Manning occurred, and had a TS clearance. The next day, we had a base wide meeting where OSI (The Air Force's FBI) said that although all the information is classified, we were not prevented from reading it. However, none of us were permitted to discuss specifics in non-secure areas, view it on military computers, or confirm any information regarding it.

I was active Army EOD (TS-SCI) when both Chelsea's and Snowden's leaks happened. We were the opposite. Forbidden from accessing WL at all, even on our personal computers. No real way to enforce it obviously, but the threat was the fact (specifically with Snowden) that you accessed TS-SCI material that was outside the 'scope' / compartment of your SCI access.

There's a good chance this is true: I'm going off what I was told, which being that I was at a government contractor was probably largely FUD because they didn't want me doing anything that would jeopardize their business (I may not have ended up in jail but I would have cost them a lot of money and probably would have been fired).

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

Yeah, and if it was a defense contractor, its quite likely that a substantial number of people (maybe everyone) in the firm may have actually been subject to the kind of rules you describe, even when most citizens are not.

There appears to be a large gulf between what the government advises its employees and citizens about handling classified information and what criminal charges and/or adverse administrative actions it can sustain in the face of legal scrutiny.

Classification is provided by the government, internal to the government ergo a citizen that is neither government nor contractually associated with said government can read anything they like.

This, plus the fact that the DNC is not a government agency and thus classification is not a concern.

State Department appears to have said something conflicting with your account as it relates even to average citizens:

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

Correct. The press can report on whatever it wants and regular citizens can read it (I vaguely remember there being something like a clear and present danger exception for the former). Otherwise, it would be illegal for any news organization to write about drone strikes.

So, regular citizens are not "prohibited" from viewing such information, but the prevention of access to it never really goes away.

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