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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.
3) All of the above
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
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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!)
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.
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