US Government Releases DoD Report Critical of NSA

decora writes "Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project has posted a summary of the newly released DoD Inspector General report (PDF) on the NSA's Thinthread and Trailblazer programs. The DoD found that NSA 'disregarded solutions to urgent national security needs' and that 'TRAILBLAZER was poorly executed and overly expensive.' NSA contractors had a 'fear of management reprisal' for cooperating with the DoD audit. The FBI later raided the homes of several people involved with the report, and Thomas Drake faced Espionage Act charges for retaining information related to it. Those charges were dropped two weeks ago. Radack and the GAP represent Drake on whistleblower issues."

Comments

Humans are human

[mtrachtenberg]

When human beings are offered the opportunity to work at secret agencies, on secret things, they will take advantage of the ability to keep their mistakes secret.

That is why secrecy in government is bad, and transparency in government is good. It doesn't take Einstein to understand this.

The United States government has poured billions (trillions?) into secrecy. That is bad.

Re:Humans are human

[hey!]

When human beings are offered the opportunity to work at secret agencies, on secret things, they will take advantage of the ability to keep their mistakes secret.

That may be true, but in this case it was the workers at the secret agency who were the whistleblowers trying to uncover waste. The secrecy came from the political appointees above them. It was the President above those appointees who initiated the vendetta against the whistleblowers. The vendetta itself was performed by a different, non-secret agency. The people working at the agency tried to make the waste public, but it was the political overseers who for its own reasons continued to pour money into the program for years after the agency's own IG branded it a billion dollar boondoggle.

So, I'd say that in *this* case, at least, it wasn't the career bureaucrats that failed the American people. It was democracy itself that failed. We, the people deserved to get fleeced of ever dollar the frauds we elected took out of our hide, but letting those frauds use mafia tactics on the only responsible and honest people in the scenario is going too far.

How poorly

[Aladrin]

How poorly executed and overly expensive does something have to be for the government to think that about it? :D

I suspect it's no worse than anything else right now and they're just trying to make it look like they didn't waste time and money on a useless investigation.

I mean, 'disregarded solutions' ... You mean, they didn't think they'd be the right direction to go? Isn't it part of their job to determine that kind of thing?

Re:How poorly

[cptdondo]

How poorly executed and overly expensive does something have to be for the government to think that about it? :D

The vast amount of government operations as as efficient, if not more so, than private sector equivalents. Why do you think private enterprise is so afraid of govenrment competition? If government is so bad, then the health insurance industry should welcome the new healthcare law instead of spending millions/day to fitght it. If they can truly provide a better product at a lower price, what are they so afraid of? Now that is not to say that government doesn't have spectacular failures, but so does the private sector. Bears & Sterns, anyone? Lots of even large companies go belly uip and disappear. We (American consumers) pay for that - even if you don't see it. We pay for it through higher taxes that support unemployment, higher prices on mortgages and consumer loans to repay the money the banks lost, higher prices on goods to repay investors, and so on. We pay for it all; just in different ways. The main difference is that a government failure is trumpeted all over the place and tax payers get irate and a private failure is quietly swept under the rug leaving the investors holding the bag. No matter what we all pay for all failures.

Re:How poorly

[Bengie]

The problem with your example is it's healthcare. There is an incentive for healthcare, to no fix the problem, but prolong it. Situations where something is needed, but is a bad business investment, those need to be run by the government.

It really comes down to Health and Infrastructure should entirely be government, as they naturally cause abuse.

A lot of government institutions have the idea of "throw money at it and don't keep track of it", because there is no real reason to. All they need to do is vote in more taxes, which there is little people can seem to do about.

Re:How poorly

[cptdondo]

It's not just healthcare. As you say, anything that doesn't have a profit motive. Clean drinking water. Sewage treatment. Roads. Basic fundamental research. Arts (real arts, not the crap from Hollywood). Public radio and TV. Public buildings. Public transportation. Lots of really good examples where the private industry doesn't do well.

Most government is accountable. It's just that people don't understand how accountable, and there is always some politician who will dig up one invoice and use it to tar the entire government. I'm not defending gov't waste; I'm simply saying that any large organization will have some waste.

Transparency Important

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Transparency in Government is important, but not always practical. Undercover operations, signals intelligence, military development or deployment, counterintelligence work, and plenty of other areas exist which should function with very limited transparency--but still with accountability. A culture that accepts lawbreaking and promotes covering the back of fellow officers (or soldiers) in any law enforcement community, is a massive problem for justice, because it actively works to prevent justice and it passively allows criminals to thrive. Whistleblowing to superiors or to the appropriate government agency about a superior's conduct should never be something that one should need to fear reprisal for.

If someone is an ass--whether a superior or reporting a superior, that can be noted. But they should never get fired for doing the right thing.

The problems with not having such a culture are massively magnified where there is no transparency. Where there are legitimate reasons for the lack of transparency, a culture which does not tolerate lawbreaking and which encourages reporting of it (ideally without entrapment) will go a long way toward making sure people stay on task. It's not just toleration of lawbreaking that lets people break the law--it's living around people where breaking the law is commonplace.

Re:Transparency Important

[nedlohs]

I suspect it's an impossible balance.

At some point it becomes corrupt and there's nothing that can be done short of "the people" kicking up such a stink that things are forced to be changed.

You can't control the culture, coruption is too useful and ever growing. Just look at any popular TV show/movie and how the "good guys" are presented and how taking short cuts is always a good thing...

Plus of course you get it from the top when you get someone like Nixon being elected President (it doesn't matter if you think someone else is worse, we have proof of Nixon's doings and hence he's the best example). Who are you going to blow the whistle too?

And of course Hoover's FBI were considered great buys by most people at the time.

To an extent...

[Kamiza Ikioi]

A totally open government is no government at all. Almost no decisions are not made out in the open, except for Rain Man. All we see is the result of decisions. Taking transparency to its logical conclusion, we'd bug every government employee and politician 24/7. Government would grind to a halt. I'm for open government, to a point. Regardless of what I want to know, there are things I don't want enemies of the state to know.

Secrecy isn't bad. Abuse is bad. Secrecy just makes it easier. But let's not put the cart before the horse. The problem is abuse, and that is solved by audits of even secret agents. One doesn't need to know what the secret program is if they know the grade of the report and the auditing and auditors are open to scrutiny. Companies regularly conduct blind audits for the advantages of being more objective and less subjective.