My 2010 joke became all too serious in 2013

Back in 2010, I wrote a biometric post that included source material derived from the Wikileaks materials. After warning U.S. government employees that they might have to stop reading the post, I proceeded to say the following:

The feed linked to a Zeenews article that quoted from a Wikileaks cable marked as confidential (and available from the Guardian, which has not yet been classified as a terrorist organization).

Ha ha ha.

Fast forward to November 2013:

A senior Conservative politician has intensified pressure for the Guardian newspaper to be prosecuted over its role in disclosing secrets about Britain’s spying capabilities.

Dr Liam Fox has written to Alison Saunders, the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), urging her to set out whether the newspaper breached counter-terrorism laws by publishing secrets which were stolen by the former US spy contractor Edward Snowden.

The former defence secretary’s letter asks the DPP how a prosecution against the Guardian could be “initiated”, although Dr Fox has not yet indicated whether he would be prepared to trigger such action himself.

This is a very odd situation. As I've already noted, Senator Dianne Feinstein, who believes that Edward Snowden is guilty of treason, was relying on the information leaked by Snowden to criticize the NSA for monitoring Angela Merkel and others. This is called having your cake and eating it too; without Snowden's leaks, Feinstein - chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee - would not have known what her own government was doing.

Wait; it gets better.

Yonatan Zunger and Andreas Schou have shared a Bruce Schneier post in which he was telling a few people about what the NSA was doing.

The people were Members of Congress.

Wait; it gets better.

Surreal part of setting up this meeting: I suggested that we hold this meeting in a SCIF, because they wanted me to talk about top secret documents that had not been made public. The problem is that I, as someone without a clearance, would not be allowed into the SCIF. So we had to have the meeting in a regular room.

I hope they didn't discuss Chinese gait recognition advances in that regular room.