Classified

I was at the Orange school board meeting where the board voted to lay off classified employees and cut their benefits, and I was shocked by the complete disregard for our district's hard-working employees exhibited by the board. I was at the meeting for another reason, and the confrontation came as a big surprise to me. An even bigger surprise was the board's lack of interest in compromising with the men and women who have devoted their lives to the education of our children. One woman who has been working for the district since 1967 stood up and spoke.

GREENSBORO, N.C. - With his shaggy hair, bushy mustache and obstinate ways, Jeffrey Allen Wright was well known to sheriff's deputies in Santa Rosa County, Fla. Wright, 55, drove around with a phony license plate. When stopped, he refused to produce a driver's license. Once he threatened to sue a deputy who pulled him over. After he was fined for traffic offenses in September, Wright paid with counterfeit money orders. When deputies served warrants for felony counterfeiting March 8, Wright barricaded himself in his garage and declared that he would not be "a servant of the king.

WikiLeaks and us Re "A whistle-blower with global resonance," and "WikiLeaks wasn't wrong," Editorial, July 27 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian hacker, may end up being one of the best things to ever happen to our American democracy. It is not for politicians and bureaucrats to decide what American citizens and voters need to know. In the last 75 years, we have seen a sharp increase in the use of secrecy laws to cover up illegal activities, corruption and incompetence rather than to protect information that safeguards national security, as originally intended.

FT. MEADE, Md. - Army Pfc. Bradley Manning pleaded guilty Thursday to sending huge digital archives of secret U.S. military and diplomatic records to the WikiLeaks website, saying he was motivated by a U.S. foreign policy "obsessed with killing and capturing people. " Manning, 25, sat erect in dress blues beside his lawyers in a military courtroom and read aloud for more than an hour - slowly but sometimes stumbling over his words - from a 35-page, handwritten statement that described his personal angst over America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Paramount Unified School District Board of Education has unanimously approved a 6% pay raise for two years for 50 classified employees. The increase is for the 1989-90 and 1990-91 school years and will cost the district an additional $15,000 each year. The group of employees include noon duty aides and part-time personnel who are not members of the various unions in the 12,000-student system.

Predictably, this week's release of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks — which also provided them to the New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel and the Guardian in London — has fired up those who believe secrecy fosters national security and who shudder at the idea of journalists rummaging through classified material. Typical was the comment from tiresome Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). WikiLeaks, he maintained, is armed with "an ideological agenda implacably hostile to our military and the most basic requirements of our national security."

An Army intelligence analyst serving in Iraq has been charged with leaking classified information, including a controversial video shown on the website WikiLeaks of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack that killed 12 civilians in Baghdad. Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, 22, was charged with improperly downloading the video, 150,000 State Department cables and a classified PowerPoint presentation to his personal computer between November and May, according to a charge sheet released by the Army in Baghdad.

The most important lesson from the release of tens of thousands of pages of classified information about the war in Afghanistan seems to be getting lost: Far too much information is classified, often simply because it is embarrassing to the government. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that there "weren't any new revelations in the material,"and nothing has been identified that is likely to be damaging to national security. The question, then, must be why so much of this material was classified and kept from the public?

Though propelled to fame by its recent disclosures about the U.S. military, WikiLeaks has homed in on targets as wide-ranging as corruption in the family of a former Kenyan ruler, alleged illegal activities by a Swiss bank and Sarah Palin's private e-mail account. And in just 3 1/2 years, the secretive organization founded by a convicted Australian hacker has helped pioneer a new model for using the Internet to unearth classified government documents and private corporate memos.

In response to the article regarding Orange Unified School District classified employees ("Rejection of Pay Cuts to Hasten Layoffs," Sept. 12), I'd like to advise the reporter to get all of the facts first, unless her original intent was to write a biased article. The article stated that the classified employees turned down a proposed contract that would have reduced their salaries by 2.59%. After reading this, many uninformed Times readers probably asked themselves why the classified employees are rejecting a 2.59% pay cut when certified employees, such as teachers, have accepted it. The article failed to mention that by accepting the proposed contract, the pay cut, including a cut in benefits (as proposed)

Less than half of the 280 million metric tons of plastic produced each year ends up in the landfill.  A fair bit of the rest ends up littering the landscape, blown by the wind or washed down streams and rivers into the sea. So far Americans spend $520 million a year to clean up plastic litter washing up on West Coast beaches and shorelines. Efforts to clean up the oceans' enormous swirling gyres of garbage has an incalculable cost. Thus, much of the focus has been on how to stop the river of trash from entering the ocean.

WASHINGTON - President Obama issued an executive order Tuesday that seeks to shore up the nation's cyber-defenses by improving how classified information is shared between the government and the owners and operators of crucial infrastructure, including electric utilities, dams and mass transit. The long-expected order, which Obama announced in his State of the Union speech, is a stopgap measure that follows Congress' failure last year to pass legislation to create comprehensive standards for the private sector to help thwart digital attacks.

WASHINGTON -- There is no evidence that Mike Vickers, the Pentagon's undersecretary for intelligence, disclosed classified information when he spoke to the makers of the film "Zero Dark Thirty," the Pentagon's chief spokesman said Tuesday. “There is a pending inspector general investigation on the question of whether Mr. Vickers provided classified information in an interview with the filmmakers of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' ” Pentagon spokesman George Little said. When the Department of Defense reviewed a transcript of Vickers' conversation with the filmmakers after it was requested under the Freedom of Information Act, Little said, none of the material was deemed to be classified.

An experimental robotic space plane was launched into orbit atop an Atlas V rocket Tuesday for a classified Air Force mission that could last more than nine months. The 19-story Atlas V and the space plane, dubbed the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle, blasted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida just after 1 p.m. Eastern time. The unmanned X-37B, which resembles a miniature space shuttle, is 29 feet long with a wingspan of 15 feet. The spacecraft draws solar power for energy using unfolding panels.

FT. MEADE, Md. - Pfc. Bradley Manning swiveled in the witness chair, smiling and occasionally talking over his lawyer. In his Army dress-blue uniform, he appeared even younger than his 24 years. It was difficult to reconcile the bespectacled Manning's relaxed, almost chatty demeanor with the vast charges against him - perpetrating one of the biggest leaks of classified material in U.S. history. Manning is accused of providing the anti-secrecy Internet group WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and classified war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq while based in Baghdad as a military intelligence analyst in 2009 and 2010.

Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) placed a hold on the 2013 Intelligence Authorization Act, expressing legitimate concerns about provisions designed to plug leaks of classified information. Wyden rightly asked his colleagues to revisit provisions that "threaten to encroach upon the freedom of the press" and "reduce access to information that the public has a right to know. " Wyden objects to three provisions. The most troubling would drastically reduce the number of background briefings provided by intelligence officials to the media by authorizing only a few specific officials to engage in such off-the-record exchanges.

I understand Marc Wilson does not read the sports pages (for good reason). May I suggest another section of the Los Angeles Times: the classified ads. JUDY THOMPSON Westminster

Re "Mayor May Try to Ban Pit Bulls," June 6: With a known history for mauling and killing, why are pit bulls considered and classified as domestic animals? Terry Foley Norco

WASHINGTON — Seven Navy SEALs, including one involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, have been reprimanded for divulging classified information to the maker of a video game, Pentagon officials said Thursday. The seven received letters of reprimand and forfeited half of their pay for two months after a Navy investigation found they had served as paid consultants to the designers of "Medal of Honor Warfighter," one official said. All are members of Seal Team 6, the secretive commando unit based in Virginia.

WASHINGTON  - The Pentagon said Tuesday that a former Navy SEAL's account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden contains classified information, intensifying a dispute with the author over whether the book harmed national security. Defense Department spokesman George Little said that an examination of the book, “No Easy Day,” revealed “sensitive and classified information,” and he reiterated that author Matt Bissonnette, writing under the pen name Mark Owen, violated nondisclosure agreements by failing to submit it for government review before it went on sale this week.