That's freaking hilarious. I remember when the Wikileaks cables broke, and the feds sent a letter to my university's public policy school saying that the MPA students should avoid reading the news if they wanted to have any chance of entering public service in the US after graduation.

I thought it was more about not polluting the classification ranks. It isn't that the government thinks it can actually shield employees from public information, but actually that when their job entails gathering and discussing information of a certain classification at work, they shouldn't be using or interacting with information (at work) that is still technically at a higher classification level.

Bureaucratic? Yes. Ignorant? Not in the way most people are portraying it.