Slashdot Mirror
Ex-NSA Official Indicted For Leaks To Newspaper
Hugh Pickens writes "The Baltimore Sun reports that in a rare legal action against a government employee accused of leaking secrets, a grand jury has indicted Thomas A. Drake, a former senior National Security Agency official, on charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007. Federal law prohibits government employees from disclosing classified information which could be 'expected to cause damage to national security.' The indictment (PDF) does not name either the reporter or the newspaper that received the information, but the description applies to articles written by Siobhan Gorman, then a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, that examined in detail the failings of several major NSA programs, costing billions of dollars, that were plagued with technical flaws and cost overruns. Gorman's stories did not focus on the substance of the electronic intelligence information the agency gathers and analyzes but exposed management and programmatic troubles within the agency."
Adds reader metrometro: "Of note: the government says the alleged NSA mole uses Hushmail, which is all the endorsement I need for a security system." Perhaps Mr. Drake was unaware of Hushmail's past cooperation with the US government?
"exposed management and programmatic troubles within the agency."! Can't have management look bad!
Check out Glenn Greenwald's post on this exact issue. He raises an extremely important point:
- Illegally wiretapping US citizens, and/or ordering illegal wiretapping of US citizens: No problem, we have to look forwards, not backwards.
- Exposing illegal and inefficient workings of the NSA: throw the book at 'em.
Something is very very rotten.
I am officially gone from
The real problem here is that officials use the security system to hide their fuck ups. By making all kinds of crap classified that shouldn't be they clog the system and reduce the efficiency. It's impossible to run a security system when you flood it with tons of info that is only classified because it's embarrassing to the morons in management.
charges of providing classified information to a newspaper reporter in hundreds of e-mail messages in 2006 and 2007
How is it that a guy dumb enough to use e-mail for this was a senior NSA official?
It's what they'd do in Russia.
Of course, in Soviet Russia, accident would have YOU.
he was exposing government waste
if he were exposing state secrets, let him rot in jail
but that's all sound and fury surrounding the real issue of what was actually disclosed, and why
the substance of his disclosures and what motivated him: wasted tax payer dollars on lame NSA projects
as far as i am concerned, for his actions, this guy is a hero. we need MORE government employees like this. and his timing is impeccable, government waste is pissing off the country like never before right now: perhaps the tax party can make him some sort of patron saint?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hushmail is notorious in certain circles for sharing people's PGP keys with investigators who come knocking. This was in relation to DEA and Customs investigations in Operation Web Tryp to crack down on people using the internet to get ahold of research chemical indoleethylamines and phenethylamines (read: designer psychedelics). A lot of these people were using Hushmail, and when the investigators went to Hushmail, the provider burned their users. If they'll rat you out to the DEA and Customs, bet your sweet ass they'll rat you out to the NSA. Fuck, read this article at Cryptome.
If you need any expectation at all of ACTUAL privacy (the kind that'll keep you out of prison), don't use Hushmail. Someone people actually trust, like maybe the people behind Wikileaks, should start a real anonymous mail network.
--Obyron
This is about the fact that someone exposed the fact that they are wasting money in a highly incompetent manner.
Actually the government is quite competent at wasting money!
mmmm...forbidden donut
Can anyone say Valerie Plame?
Wherever you go, there you are.
Oh my god. This is the funniest post I've read in years.
Tell me, which article of the Constitution permits
1) unreasonable searches and seizures by
2) agencies under no or very little congressional oversight
3) which have secret budgets?
I think you and the tea partiers will be slightly disappointed once you get around to understanding the constitution instead of reading it for selective applications of your own biases.
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
That money got wasted in a highly incompetent way is not news.
That someone is getting in trouble for whistleblowing is not especially news.
But this kind of whistleblowing is always going to end badly for the whistleblower, because even if a legitimate transparency function is served (calling attention to wasteful and inefficient program administration), the programs themselves are classified. In the public eyes, they're not supposed to even exist. To praise them in public would also be a breach of classification. So, this is the hardest class of whistleblowing on the books: even if 99% of the classification decisions on the program can be written off as cover-up, there's still a critical core of legitimate secrecy which gets violated. Trends and techniques used in espionage get exposed. Adversaries are tipped off. Whole lines of intelligence gathering dry up, fail, or have to be abandoned.
It's an unpleasant situation.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Yeah, that's right.
We have a whistle-blower law to protect the American taxpayer, but if it's deemed classified, all bets are off.
Great, just great! So, if I want to be a crooked government official, I just need to be able to classify it as "Secret" and "National Security" and I'm off to the Bahamas!
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. One need look no further than United States v. Reynolds to see that classification will be abused.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
for example: the security apparatus around nuclear power plants, that should not be exposed and anyone who does should be punished. that's what i was talking about
but something like bush and cheney's end runs around the constitution: yeah, that should be exposed
so i apologize, you are correct:
i should have qualified my comments better, as i was only really talking about the kind of state secrets like missile launch sequences, that should never be divulged publicly. but you are correct to take issue with my blanket comment, it was unqualified, plenty of "state secrets" need to be divulged
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree that over-classification is a problem from a transparency point of view. However, I disagree that it decreases efficiency - in fact efficiency and convenience is one of the big reasons that documents are unnecessarily classified to begin with. When you work on a classified system (like a computer) any documents you generate are automatically treated as classified at the highest level that the system is approved to process. Decreasing or declassifying a document requires you to go through a formal process.
If you are working a a project that is mostly unclassified with a view classified elements, then people spend most of their time working on the unclassified systems, and moving over to classified is a hassle that is only done when needed. As the amount of classified increases, it becomes more of a hassle as you have to split your work between two systems, generate tons of one-time-use CD-Rs for transferring unclassified data to the classified system (which must be immediately marked as classified and appropriately destroyed or tracked). After a point where most of the documents you generate are classified, it is just easier to do everything on the classified system, treat everything as classified, and just go through the review process when you legitimately need the document to be unclassified. In addition to decreasing the amount of data transfer that needs to take place, you also relieve yourself of the worry of accidentally including classified information in an unclassified document (or more likely, indirectly relieving classified information by the association of various unclassified information).
Finally, there often are legitimate reasons why things like schedules and budgets need to be classified. For example, if they include production quantities that are classified. I have worked on projects where the vast majority of our work was unclassified, but we still had both classified and unclassified versions of the budget. I can imagine project where it would be easier to only have a classified version.
All that said, not knowing the details of this case, I can't say whether the information release was legitimately harmful to National Security, or just a gross violation of procedure for good reasons.
Posted anonymously not because any of this is sensitive, but to avoid attracting unwanted attention to myself, by advertising to the work that I work on classified projects.
One of the very first things you have to do before getting a security clearance is sign a document acknowledging that revealing classified information is punishable by a fine of $10,000 or 10 years in prison or both. If you can't handle that from the outset, you have no business having a security clearance.
Make no mistake: this was a very serious crime. While I applaud this guy's intent, the proper place for his complaint was either the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, or the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From that point on, it is the responsibility of those Congressional committees to follow up on the information. No person other than the Director of Central Intelligence or the President has the authority to release classified information.
If you think that sucks, then imagine the situation where everyone with a clearance got to decide on their own whether that information should be kept secret or not. There wouldn't be any point to having classified information, and you might as well give it all away to the Chinese/Russians, etc. Do you think they'll reciprocate?
Necron69
yeah, again, i utterly fail in the comment qualification department
anyone who divulges a LACK OF security like this guy should get the congressional medal of honor
anyone who divulges the OPERATING DETAILS of a genuine security apparatus should get a cold cell
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Except for the fact that not just any government official can classify something. This is a typical slashdot rant, and one that most people on slashdot don't understand.
Executive Order 12356:
Sec. 1.2 Classification Authority.
(a) Top Secret. The authority to classify information originally as
Top Secret may be exercised only by:
(1) the President; (2) agency heads and officials designated by the
President in the Federal Register; and (3) officials delegated this
authority pursuant to Section 1.2(d). (b) Secret. The authority to
classify information originally as Secret may be exercised only by: (1)
agency heads and officials designated by the President in the Federal
Register; (2) officials with original Top Secret classification
authority;