If you have a clearance you should absolutely not be clicking on it (if you are also paranoid and don't want to possibly fail your polygraph test -- "have you accessed or downloaded classified documents on your personal computer...?" er...oops).
Otherwise if you don't hold a clearance, I don't think they can do anything to you (however, I am not a lawyer so don't take this as a legal advice etc etc...)
Do we have any story of people being harassed for simply reading leaked documents (genuine question) ?
I remember reading people with clearance were not allowed to access wikileaks, but I can remember any follow up "X got fired|trialed because accessing wikileaks". Not that I think it can't happen if we didn't know about it, of course.
It is complete pseudoscience. In the Penn and Teller's BS episode about it they have a guy who teaches people how to get whatever result they want by controlling their anal sphincter. Apparently it's not complicated.
It is, however, still a part of getting or maintaining clearance. A friend of mine wound up changing jobs simply because he failed the polygraph twice and didn't want to bother going in for a third.
It's not used to detect lies, it's used to measure how a person reacts under pressure. It's a low-level torture device meant to intimidate.
The fact that police services can use it to extract confessions is just a nice bonus, and it's really a really cheap alternative to conducting a complete and thorough investigation. Police policy has for a long time favored confessions over investigations.
Yap it is just an interrogation. However, knowing about how the polygraph is ineffective and letting the administrator know will often result in 'FAILURE'. They will specifically ask questions related to polygraph terminology (lingo, abbreviations) to see if you are familiar.
It effectively lets through psychopaths, very good liar or those that know how polygraphs work and presumably practiced passing it.
The example here is somebody who apparently needs to take one to access some confidential information - and clearly they take a pass/fail seriously, so it seems some (presumably US?) government agencies do take it seriously enough to make passing one a security requirement.
Good point. A quick Google search doesn't seem to bring up any laws that prevent employers from using polygraph results in determining whether to hire or fire someone.
You need to check out the Tails project (https://tails.boum.org/) which is a version of Debian I believe tailored to be completely anonymous. The browser uses TOR by default, I don't even know if you can disable it. Lots of other goodies too, including making browser fingerprints pretty meaningless.
Also, I know it's technically kind of bad form but if one wanted to run Tails easily you can use VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/) to easily fire up a throwaway instance of Tails quickly and easily.
When I tried Tails it had the noScript plugin disabled by default (actually in blacklist mode, I think, which allows javascript on 99% of websites). Even the plugin itself warns users not to leave it disabled. I wouldn't trust something with that big of a security hole. If anonymity was so important that I couldn't trust my own machine, I wouldn't trust a linux distro made for anonymity either.
The wikileaks cables exist in grey zone; it's they were never released by the US Government, but they are public. Generally speaking if you are not and do not plan on being an employee with a mandated security clearance, you have nothing to worry about. If however, you do have or want to acquire clearance you should not look at Wikileaks since you will be violating the terms under which clearance is granted.
Also, elements of the intelligence community have made statements that suggest that applicants to some government positions could be refused if they tweet or say anything about Wikileaks. [1]
"The collection published today has not been leaked. Assange said WikiLeaks had been working for the past year to analyse and assess a vast amount of data held at the U.S. national archives before releasing it in a searchable form."
If the materials were properly declassified and held for public browsing by the NARA then what Wikileaks is doing is fine. It would be the same as Google wrapping a much nicer search interface across an old dataset.
If the materials were still classified-but-leaked then I won't go near it until it is declassified. But I can't tell from this side of the window what's going on.
I have the same problem with these "cybercrime" laws. With most other laws, I can rely on intuition to guide my judgment ("if I hit this guy, I'll probably get in trouble"). But I have no way of knowing what kind of data is illegal to access, have in my possession, or release to the public.
And if you're working for the US government then you had better play along or you might end up causing your career harm.
Common sense is at odds with the law here (and in many other places as well), so 'what you know' and what some judge will decide may very well be in contradiction with each other.
