Is this the beginning of something fundamentally new?

Raw Story has an article here about the US government telling its employees not to read the Wikileaks cables.

Huh? The government gets to tell people what not to read? Is it illegal to read these documents? To read about the documents? To report about the documents?

Absurd. Perverse. Pathetic. Stalinist. Dangerous as hell.

Think about it. These leaks happened in the first place because disillusioned, marginalized, alarmed, and angry government employees decided to do it. How does the ante get upped now?

The government is acting out of pride, panic, and the impulse to retaliate. That is a recipe for catastrophically bad decisions and a loss of authority.

The calculus of government by trust, allegiance, gratitude, consensus and respect is wildly different from the calculus of government by fear, obedience, fiat, suspicion and deception.

These leaks are going to get spun into a reason to clamp down on the Internet, to classify conversation as well as government documents, and to further privilege certain policies as being beyond the scope of public knowledge or approval.

This is another big step down the old Lost Highway of tottering, bankrupt empires trying to hold on with sterner and sterner measures.