The U.S. Army has restricted Army personnel’s access to the news coverage of the National Security Agency’s spying programs by blocking the Guardian’s website.

The Monterey County Herald reported Thursday that U.S. Army employees at the Presidio of Monterey in California said the Guardian’s website had been blocked and they could not access the newspaper’s coverage of the NSA’s spying programs.

In an email to the Herald, Gordon Van Vleet, an Arizona-based spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), said that the U.S. Army is filtering “some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks.”

“We make every effort to balance the need to preserve information access with operational security,” Van Vleet wrote.

“There are strict policies and directives in place regarding protecting and handling classified information,” he added.

Van Vleet has also told the Herald in a phone interview that the filtering is “Armywide” and is not restricted to the Presidio of Monterey.