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US Democrats Accidentally Publish Whistleblowers' Email Addresses
iluvcapra writes "The US House Judiciary Committee recently emailed all of its potential whistleblowers information about how it was restructuring its whistleblower program. Unfortunately for its sources, it emailed them this information with their addresses in the "To:" field (and not the Bcc: field) It also cc:'d this email to the Vice President.
I'd like to think think this is some sort of ingenious subterfuge, but I'm doubtful."
I'd surely use a free, disposable email account.
Why didn't the person just go the Anonymous Coward route?
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Nice inflammatory title line!
Why exactly do we have to make an IT gaff, even as massive as this one, partisan? Do we know who's staffers actually sent out the email? You do understand that the Judiciary committee does have Republican members right? Beyond the fact that Republicans don't seem to do inquiries into the Bush Administration, it's not like this wouldn't have happened if Republicans were in charge of the judiciary committee.
That said, this is absolutely unacceptable.
There are lives at stake here!
So here are our options:
1) Incompetence, or
2) Malice.
We're screwed.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
This reminds me of that Army guy who "anonymously" complained about the torture of Iraqi prisoners, only be thanked by name by the Secretary of Defense on TV while in an Army canteen in Iraq. The message is clear: if you are a whistleblower, you will regret it.
Tips were submitted from a web form with no email verification. Some joker likely thought it would be funny to use the public address for the VP's office when submitting a tip. When the mass mailing was sent it out, it got sent to that address as well.
Next year, they can point to Cheney, and screech that he obtained (and implying that he will use) personal information on the whistleblowers. The exact mechanism of how he got it will be brushed away.
Or so my tin-foil hat wearing buddy told me.
Someone should email them an apology. ;-)
You meant: US Democrats "Accidentally" Publish Whistleblowers' Email Addresses (Note the scare quotes) Now *that*'s a Slashdot headline.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Apparently you're too young to remember when the Democrats had real power in the 80s. Both parties are equally evil. The question is only where you want the evil directed, as that's where there are slight differences.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Yeah. Sometimes I don't know if Slashdot has devolved into DailyKos parody, self-parody, sarcasm, or just old-woman shrillness.
Dark Reflection
3) All of the above
1) Incompetence, or
2) Malice.
We're screwed. I really wish I could mod this (+1, Amusing At First But Gradually Becoming Horribly Depressing As You Realize The Implications).
I'm going with 1 with the addendum of 'this is a new level of stupid.'
http://twitter.com/OLDTELEGRAM
It boils down to no options at all: Grey's law.
Software patents delenda est.
When the Democrats came in in 2006, I was expecting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to be unleashed on us.
Instead we got Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, two of the most ineffectual politicians of all time. My God! Every time Reid opens his mouth, he makes a little man smaller. Pelosi, having failed to install a carer criminal as Whip, finds herself in an ongoing monkey knife fight with Hoyer. Meanwhile Charlie Rangel's prposing that tax rates be raised, as we try to shrug off the economic effects sub-prime lending fiasco. Oh, and troops out of Iraq? No. In fact, the numbers in-country are up.
End result? Completely stalled government, to the point where we don't even have a budget proposal. Better yet, Democrats are looking so imcompetent, they may just lose massively in 2008.
I like it.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If they willing buy me beer and discuss technology, politics, and women, I may not call them friend but I would certainly give them my gmail address!
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Indeed. The Dems and Reps are both moronic and evil -- it's just easier to catch the Reps at it because most members of the media (except for Fox and the radio talk show hosts) has a chip on its shoulder about them.
I call bullshit on the source of the error. By implicating the technology as the source of the error, the Justice Department is failing to address the real cause -- human error and incompetence in the Justice Department. This single statement alone reinforces the point of the original investigation -- the politicizing of the Justice Department.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Almost.
So imagine you're some legislator guy who graduated from law school back in the day when lawyers never touched a keyboard because people might think they were a lowly paralegal. You're a damn good lawyer, and at least try to be as good a politician as you can and still be a successful one. You actually know a great deal about things like the Internet, but in general, high level terms. You are well up on its legal, economic, sociological and even philosophical implications. You just don't know a damned thing about how it works, although unlike Sen. Stevens you are smart enough not to venture an opinion.
So, you hand this message to an aide, "get this to all the whistleblowers on our list." The aide has exactly the same background as you, although he has a bit more practical skill at things like making PowerPoint presentations. The order goes down the line through a sequence of people with similar backgrounds and aspirations but increasingly less experience and seniority, until it reaches somebody with so little experience and seniority he actually has to do the typing.
That is the person who has to make the right information security decision.
Contrast this with the executive branch. The executive branch has something at its disposal called a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are notoriously slow at getting things done, because their primary function is to preserve an institutional memory of every mistake that has ever been made and is worth remembering. They do make new mistakes of course, but provided you apply the appropriate feedback, they will remember that mistake and adapt to avoid it in the future. In minor cases they will adjust by simply engraving additions to the relevant procedures they follow. Given severe feedback, they respond by sprouting entirely new organs and body parts whose function is to stop the rest of its body from doing that thing again.
So, in the executive branch, the order goes down the chain of command, but with two differences. The least experienced person probably has a manual which contains a procedure to do these things, a procedure that has provisions for avoiding disclosure of distribution list recipients. Secondly, if the mistake contemplated is grave enough, the work flow is designed so that once a task is complete, it doesn't simply go out the door. It is passed up through multiple layers of review until it reaches somebody senior enough to authorize that. His job is not to check that the proper procedure has been followed; that has been taken care of at a level below him but above the person doing the work. This guy's job is to use his experience in determining whether the standard procedure has failed in its purpose.
When the next administration comes in, and all the people "at the top" of the organizational chart are changed, and all of the political philosophies have been duly stood on their head, the procedure, work flow, and personal memory have all been retained intact. Of course it makes it completely impossible for those politicians to implement the policies they've promised as quickly as they've promised.
It is entirely possible that the bureaucracy has neither a procedure nor a work flow nor a person to prevent any particular problem. But if the problem is sufficiently serious, it will immediately sprout all three features. If you lay aside your well earned dislike of the thing, bureaucracy is actually remarkably quick and effective at adapting to avoid routine mistakes, provided (and this is important) that it is actually ordered to do something about them.
About the only problem a bureaucracy can't quickly adjust to is not getting something fast done or cheaply enough. Fixing that problem requires paring down work flows and streamlining procedures and cutting staff (particularly middle management), which are the very things that embody the institutional memory that is their reason for existence. It is probable that some institutional memory is lost as minor changes are made, which is why bure
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Please....the Bush's don't have a monopoly on either malice or incompetence (and to be completely honest, our problems are more due to GWB taking incompetent action than taking malicious action). If the Iraq War had been prosecuted competently, all we'd have left in Iraq now is a police force training Iraqis on how to police their own country.
No, it wasn't malice that caused this to be a mess -- it was incompetence.
I participate in a Product Testing group maybe once or twice a year and I had to sign a strict Non Disclosure Document and was assured in return that my Identity would also be kept private.
One day I get an email FROM: The President of the Company thanking me for my help in the past year.
The TO: field also had the emails of EVERYONE else who had apparently participated.
Some of the email addresses were work emails or similar with things like: john.smith@example.com
Not difficult to figure out who they were.
After replying and tearing the President a new one, I got a polite email back saying there had been an "error" and they apologized.
"They would never intentionally disclose my personal information."
So I replied again and said that if this was not intentional then it was incompetence and if it was incompetence what plans did they have for ensuring this would not happen again?
If I happened to "accidently" disclose what products I was testing would I be able to use the same excuse? Or would I get sued?
I got no answer to that one.
I like microcars
The Dems have controlled the house and senate for a huge majority of that time, who makes laws and spends money? Democratic presidents got us into Vietnam, as for your excuse I suppose if Hillary or Obama win the election (both of whom have said they dont know when they'll get troups out) and things get far worse it will be more Hillaries fault than Bushes? get real..
As for Nixon being over the worst part? " By 1968, the peak of U.S. involvement, there were more than 500,000 troops in the country. During the same two-week period of April that year, 752 U.S. soldiers died, according to a search of records kept by the National Archives."
4. Profit!!!! (See? No '????' needed with politics; there's always profit to be had when you control everything!)
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
A new organization called "Law Enforcement Against Prohibition" ( leap.cc ) was organized to give a way for (sometimes former) law enforcement and justice personnel to voice their opposition to the "drug war".
Anybody can join, you get a newsletter and you get asked to contribute so that they can afford to send volunteer speakers around to various conferences or on speaking tours to talk about the pointlessness and active harm they saw the "drug war" causing when they were part of it.
Well and good, but they were clearly amateurs at first with the Internet side; the first newsletters were plain text and HTML expertise came slowly. And on November 15, 2006, they sent an E-mail to 5000 addresses with all of them in the TO: line, blowing out the capacity of my webmail service at least to even process it properly; about 3000 of the addresses wound up in the text of the E-mail itself.
Just for grins, I spent about half an hour cutting and pasting the list into a file, and using simple Unix text tools to organize them into a nice sorted text database, revealing how many of them were outright duplicates, how many were obviously for the same guy at two addresses, did a few simple stats on locations and agencies.
I thought of sending them the benefits of my work, so they could clean out the dupes, but decided they'd probably (a) not be pleased and (b) weren't smart enough to use the help anyway.
A good number of people gave addresses that didn't reveal their name outright, others were fully named, along with the government service they worked for, after the "@". I'm sure a number of them were uncomfortable with the thought of their boss or chief knowing they were not solidly behind department policy. Many would not have been law enforcement types, just rank & file citizens like myself - but also not comfortable with the idea of it getting out they were part of an organization that many bosses would tend to assume was joined by stoners. (As opposed to civil libertarians, certainly MY only reason for joining!)
"Only Nixon could go to China", and only 50-something narcotics cops can speak out against the drug war without automatically falling under suspicion of being on drugs.
I haven't donated LEAP any money yet, though I've received a few letters; I'm only slowly coming to the belief that they are bright enough to pound sand.
Your list: Gulf of Tonkin, Rolling Thunder, 1968 Democratic convention, J Edgar Hoover's decades of antics, Jim Crow, Japanese Internment, Bay of Pigs. As for habeus corpus, Bill Clinton signed the first limitation since the civil war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
This does not absolve the present junta of any of its misdeeds, however. But it does refute your point.
The victims, +5 modded:
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=341919&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=21139759
Interviewer to Will Rogers; "Sir, are you a member of an organized political party?"
Will Rogers; "No. I'm a Democrat."
Best regards.
As for misdeeds by the Democrats, it wasn't in the 80s, but apparently you're forgetting about that debacle the Vietnam War.
And more than the war:
- The draft was really a social-planning operation, trying to stave off a depression when the boomers graduated high-school and hit the unskilled job market by "channeling" them into government-preferred carreer paths with the threat of conscription if they didn't go on to full-time higher education and/or get work in particular jobs that carried deferments. (See the "channeling memo".)
- The FBI was used to infiltrate antiwar, civil rights, and other outside political organizations (such as civil rights groups) and not merely surveil them for violent/illegal activity, but sabotage their legal activities (for instance: By stirring up marital strife with faked reports and evidence of infidelity, planting evidence of crimes, agent provacateurs, etc.). (See COINTELPRO.) (Other agencies, such as BATF, were also involved.)
I could go on. (Like by describing Title II of the McCarran Act (since repealed) and the perparation for its use...) One of the few good things to be said about both parties of the time is that they didn't actually pull that trigger.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
But you see, doing nothing (at least, doing nothing very visible to the public) was the correct response to the first WTC incident, and would have been a better response to the second. Haven't you noticed how much more crap everyday life is, this time around? That's the effects of the crazy, exaggerated response that you're feeling. The attack itself was just part of an ongoing pattern where the US gets its terrorist attacks (and yes, every country suffers them routinely, and always has) in rarer, larger lumps. It was (in the statistical sense) expected, and need have changed nothing.
To fight terrorism, you need to avoid instilling fear. Because terrorism is the instilling of systemic fear. I understand that the word was originally coined for the case where the government is doing it, and I'm not sure that isn't what's happening now....
...At this point they are x-raying your shoes and stealing your drinks, to my mind for political gain. They figure that in dangerous times, you will vote for dangerous people. Statistically, the only thing that's measurably dangerous about the 21st century is the state of the environment - and I'm not trying to be a scaremonger myself; it's just that now that a significant portion of the earth's surface is under aggressive active 'management,' it's an obvious recipe for disaster that we are not, in fact, managing it. But it seems like Al Gore is the only person in politics who has figured out how to articulate this effectively as a source of fear, so everyone else is starting wars and x-raying footwear to, as they say, 'scare up the votes.'
At a deeper level, this may all be a reflection of party politics, as a phenomenon. After all, in times of calm, we're less inclined to think in us-versus-them terms, so, logically, we're less inclined to support parties over policies. To get the majority of frankly sensible people to vote for their parties without question, regardless of any unsavoury planks in party platforms, perhaps a level of freaked-out-ness is required. It's a sobering thought.
While I agree with most of your points, I must say that the one of the important things distinguishing us from the barbarians attacking us is that we don't torture, while they do. Incidents like Abu Ghraib and the CIA torture memos undermine that important distinction and begin to lower our society to the same level as our enemies.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
[person A lists complaints a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k] [person B quotes source out of context] [person B takes source and says k is wrong, therefore person A is an ideological hack (ignoring a through j)]
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically, with some experts estimating that 150 foreign nationals have been victims of rendition in the last few years alone.
Grammar Nazi
Seriously, the notion that this was accidental is amusing.
I remember years ago when I worked on the recall campaign for an infamous governor (who is currently in prison) - we tried to oust him from office and had to collect 10% of the voting public's signatures on petition in order to force a recall election. The governor laughed at the recall effort going on television saying, "I do not think these signatures are legitimate. I plan to look over each and every name of whoever signed these petitions just to check" *wink* *wink* This kind of subtle intimidation of activists and people who take a stand against wrongdoing is nothing new. I wouldn't be surprised if the exposure of the whistleblowers was intentional.
Trying to play the historical blame game based on political party is a fool's game. Parties aren't stagnant. The Democratic and Republican parties of the 60s and 70s, for instance, have effectively nothing to do with the present day alignments
Very few of you remember that a good portion of what used to be the Democratic party moved to the Republicans during the Reagan years. Prior to the 80s the South was entirely (very conservative) Democrats. They subsequently turned Republican. The people didn't change, they just changed parties.
Similarly, much of the liberal end of the Republican party moved to the Dems when the social conservatives took over their party. As has been noted many times, it is debatable whether Barry Goldwater would be a Republican today. Certainly the Rockefeller and so-called Eastern Establishment end of the party went Democratic in droves.
Viewing history based on a party label is preposterous. Look at the mindsets, personality types and philosophies involved in historical events for more meaningful analysis. They are the things that endure time, not party affiliation.
Leave the gun, take the cannolis.
Bad form to reply to myself, but I just got out of the shower and that's the best place to think.
I find it funny that the U generation (those who fought in WWII) were enabled by the V generation (hippies) to create this debt. The U generation aged and the V generation took over power and the V generation is still doing everything it can to throw even more money at the U generation (Medicare Part D, refusal to change Social Security for younger generations, etc). Part of that is probably the greed of knowing the first V generation people are filing for their Social Security benefits, so the rest of them will start cashing in soon too. We have an $8 trillion debt right now and in a few years, it's going to take that amount yearly to pay for the tens of millions of boomers collecting money every year. Still not satisfied, they want to socialize the entire health industry.
They can criticize GWB's spending (and I will too), but $1799 billion of the $2592 budget is already going to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and interest on the debt. The last thing anyone on the left has the right to complain about is government spending, much less on Unconstitutional (read, government stealing your rights) programs created by them, especially as they try to create more programs, spending and debt.
Generations X and Y are royally screwed thanks to the policies of our parents and grandparents... the last thing we should be doing is pandering to them and defending and promoting their ideology that got us here.
Stop Koolaid Politics
From the ACLU: I'd suggest that you do the same. Re-read what you quoted. The phrase, "traces its roots" is key here.
Rendition was the practice of extraditing non-U.S. citizens to their countries of origin for interrogation. It was a questionable policy and one of Clinton's gravest policy mistakes IMHO, but nothing like extraordinary rendition which expands the program to exporting anyone we feel like to any destination country we think will torture them sufficiently.
The controversy arose when it became clear that we were exporting prisoners of war to Syria, Egypt and anyone else that was willing to wield a cattle-prod in our name. As someone who grew up liberal but has become increasingly conservative as I grow older, I find the defense of this practice by Republicans who don't want to break ranks with the President to be abhorrent. This is a violation of what the Republican party used to stand for, and Bush et al. should be jettisoned from the party for it. Not everything that a Republican administration does should be beyond the reproach of the party.
That logic works for actual deliberate actions of a committee.
But this was an accident. It's not like the Democrats voted for it and the Republicans against it.
A much more logical headline would have been that the House Judiciary Committee, or even 'The Democratic-lead House Judiciary Committee', published the addresses. An even more accurate one would have been that a staffer of the House Judiciary Committee did it, because I can assure people 'Committees' do not send email. (All in favor of pushing the send button, say 'Aye'.)
But 'US Democrats' is totally misleading. Neither the Democrats or the Republicans did this. Possibly one of them is at fault, more than likely some HJC staffer is at fault. (IIRC, Committees have staff that's independent of any of their members for exactly this sort of activity, but I could be wrong.)
Although I wouldn't have really said anything about the headline if we hadn't had the assertation that, 'had the Republicans done it, blah blah blah'. The idea that the Republicans would have taken more heat for this just annoyed me when the Democrats are taking the heat right now with absolutely no grounds.
That said, I do blame the HJC for not having more privacy safeguards in place, when they are explicitly looking at 'retribution' in the Justice Department. And I mostly blame the Democrats because I expect the Republicans to be irresponsible. But they aren't the ones who screwed up, they just failed to put safeguards in place to stop screw ups.
Actually, might I suggest that email is a damn stupid communications medium in the first place to use for whistle blowing? Especially when it's not anonymous? (They aren't listening to anonymous people in this investigation.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
You just learn what you can trust your relatives/friends/colleagues/employees/subordinates/bosses with.
;) ).
Nobody can be trusted in everything. Nor is everyone competent in everything.
I do get impatient/annoyed/angry with stupidity and ignorance, but it's malice and dishonesty I find hard to accept in a friend.
So, even dogs could be my friends as long as they're not too malicious or dishonest (stealing a dog treat and pretending not to have done so is tolerable
Anyway on the subject of competence and trust: publishing whistleblowers email addresses really does a lot of damage. Doesn't just affect the present ones. There are already lots of disincentives to be a whistleblower, so in the future more people will just "shut up" and go with the flow.
So the main problem I see is why were people likely to be incompetent in this area allowed access to such addresses? If you want to keep a secret you should minimize the number of people who know that secret.
A sufficiently high level of incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
I believe this case qualifies. They put the whistleblower addresses in To field _TWICE_ (RTFA). The people responsible should be jailed because they are an obvious danger to too many people.
If I'm not a qualified bus driver I don't pretend to be one or even try driving a bus when other lives depend on me doing things correctly.