Counterintelligence people are still allowed to look at the leaked documents, and (through the proper channels) make statements about them. It's the rank-and-f

Counterintelligence people are still allowed to look at the leaked documents, and (through the proper channels) make statements about them. It's the rank-and-file people who aren't supposed to look at this stuff, and that's mainly to avoid two things: 1) Disclosing additional information, or inadvertently attesting to the validity of documents. (obvious attack: release two plausible contradictory "top secret" documents" which cover the whole space you care about; when people discredit one, you have strong evidence of the latter.) 2) Complicating later CI investigations -- if MAJ Snuffy has downloaded wikileaks docs onto his personal laptop, and a scan finds a bunch of TS/NOFORNicate documents on it (heh), it will be a false positive. If SSG Evil wants to exfiltrate documents, she can just fill a laptop with wikileaks stuff and her own documents and then, if caught, claim it was just wikileaks downloads. But CI investigators are allowed to touch this stuff. Just like some FBI people see child porn all the time (which has to be one of the shittiest jobs in infosec).