White House Official Tracked Down and Fired Over Insulting Tweets

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "BBC reports that Jofi Joseph, a senior National Security Council staffer who was a key member of the White House team negotiating on Iran's nuclear weapons program, has been fired ... after a months-long probe into a barrage of tweets that included caustic criticisms of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and top NSC officials, especially Ben Rhodes – whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi. Joseph, who posted under the now defunct Twitter name @NatSecWonk, gave a lacerating commentary on anything from policy to personal appearance. 'Was Huma Abedin wearing beer goggles the night she met Anthony Weiner,' he tweeted, referring to the scandal-hit former New York mayoral candidate and his wife, a former aide of Hillary Clinton. He tweeted that Mrs Clinton 'had few policy goals and no wins' in the Middle East. He said Chelsea Clinton was 'assuming all of her parents' vices,' and targeted figures such as Republican commentator Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney's wife Ann for their looks and weight. Many in the foreign policy community reacted with shock to the revelation that Joseph was the mystery tweeter because Joseph was well known among policy wonks and his wife, Carolyn Leddy, is a well-respected professional staffer on the Republican side of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. 'What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments,' said Joseph in an apology. 'I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologize to everyone I insulted.'"

Comments

For an archive of his account

[barlevg]

Wayback Machine evidently doesn't bother with Twitter, but the page can still (for now) be found on the Google Cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://twitter.com/NatSecWonk

Re:For an archive of his account

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally the NSA archive of "everything" has paid off ... and it only took them a few months to find out who it was. No wonder we're harvesting anything and everything our citizens do.

Re:For an archive of his account

[dyingtolive]

I think he's saying that he's not the troll Slashdot needs; he's the troll Slashdot DESERVES.

Re:For an archive of his account

[paiute]

I think he's saying that you go to Twitter with the troll you have, not the troll you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[nefus]

Will all the secret public email accounts being used to pass information to the press and between departments... they fire a tweeter?

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[barlevg]

To be fair, any corporation would have done the same thing. If Pepsi (say) discovered a Twitter account that repeatedly says that Pepsi tastes horrible, and it turned out that the owner of the account was one of their employees, it wouldn't matter if that employee never used his or her real name--he or she would be canned faster than, well...

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Austrian Anarchy]

Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer? You just can't fire people for no reason (well, you're not supposed to.) I mean if an employee is doing their job, performing well, and secretly bashing you on twitter, is that really a legal ground for termination?

It does not have to be against the law to criticize your employer for your employer to fire you over it. Your employer can fire you for just about any reason they like. Government as employer? Might take longer, but amass enough paper against you and eventually you go away. However, if your employer is the government you could easily be subject to jail and fines if you say the wrong things in the course of your criticism (not saying that applies in this case).

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Threni]

> What grounds would you fire such a person under?

Doesn't every single employment contract in the world contain words to the effect that you'll be fired if you give the employer a bad name?

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[cold fjord]

Apparently there are repercussions for criticizing the "most transparent administration ever" cover ups.

For months, White House and State department officials searched for @NatSecWonk, a hunt that intensified after he repeatedly expressed doubts about the official administration accounts about the Sept. 11, 2012 attack in Benghazi.

So, why did they force survivors to sign secrecy agreements?

BenghaziGate: At Least 5 CIA Employees Forced to Sign Nondisclosure Agreements

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[SJHillman]

Here's a good rule of thumb: If you'd get fired for yelling it in the office, you'll get fired for doing it online in the office. If you'd get fired for yelling it on the street, you'll get fired for doing it online period.

Most companies would fire someone for going around telling people in the general public that their company sucks. If nothing else, it's a big ol' conflict of interests.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Tuidjy]

Who needs grounds? Employment at will - you can fire anyone as long as you are not firing him for belonging to a protected category, like being over a certain age. And of course, you CAN fire someone for anything, just do not tell anyone why.

As for precedent, beer companies have fired their drivers for always drinking a competitor's brand, and that's a lot less damning in my book. And yeah, it was perfectly legal.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[duke_cheetah2003]

It does not have to be against the law to criticize your employer for your employer to fire you over it. Your employer can fire you for just about any reason they like. Government as employer? Might take longer, but amass enough paper against you and eventually you go away. However, if your employer is the government you could easily be subject to jail and fines if you say the wrong things in the course of your criticism (not saying that applies in this case).

In this particular case of Joseph, yes, his position required a respectable public image. But I'm talking more about grunts, people not in the public eye. Taking the Pepsi example, I mean, do you really think that'd stand up in a court if the fired employee made a huge stink over it? There are laws against discrimination in hiring/firing practices. Those are all based on tangible qualities, such as age, race, gender, sexual orientation.. but then we get to.. religion. That's protected too. And that's an opinion, a preference. So seems to be you'd have a pretty nice wrestle in a court if you fought wrongful termination for personal opinions expressed in your offtime, against your employer (or anything else for that matter.)

Enh, just more reason to cover your tracks as BEST you can when you post on the internet and worry someone might object to it.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Grishnakh]

If an employer fired an employee for something like this, I think the employee would have major grounds to sue, not for wrongful termination, but for spying and violation of privacy. Employers don't go to the kind of trouble the Obama Administration went to to discover this guy's identity. From the article: "After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets..." So they spied on the guy's shopping habits? How'd they do that exactly? If an employer somehow got your bank or Visa/Mastercard to give them access to your shopping information, and also somehow tracked your travel patterns, there'd be hell to pay. But Obama does it and it's just fine apparently. It's highly disturbing that this guy was found out at all; obviously he wasn't intending to divulge his identity, so there had to be some kind of illegal or unethical breach of privacy protections in order to discover his identity.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Grishnakh]

The difference is that a normal employer would have no reasonable way of discovering the employee's identity. But with the NSA, Obama can find anyone in his staff who complains, and deal with them harshly, privacy be damned.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[SJHillman]

Anonymity is just security through obscurity... it's nice when it works, but you really shouldn't count on it to do stupid shit.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Austrian Anarchy]

It does not have to be against the law to criticize your employer for your employer to fire you over it. Your employer can fire you for just about any reason they like. Government as employer? Might take longer, but amass enough paper against you and eventually you go away. However, if your employer is the government you could easily be subject to jail and fines if you say the wrong things in the course of your criticism (not saying that applies in this case).

In this particular case of Joseph, yes, his position required a respectable public image. But I'm talking more about grunts, people not in the public eye. Taking the Pepsi example, I mean, do you really think that'd stand up in a court if the fired employee made a huge stink over it? There are laws against discrimination in hiring/firing practices. Those are all based on tangible qualities, such as age, race, gender, sexual orientation.. but then we get to.. religion. That's protected too. And that's an opinion, a preference. So seems to be you'd have a pretty nice wrestle in a court if you fought wrongful termination for personal opinions expressed in your offtime, against your employer (or anything else for that matter.)

Enh, just more reason to cover your tracks as BEST you can when you post on the internet and worry someone might object to it.

If you are talking about one of those non at-will States, or some foreign country, then the job for life no matter what comes into play. However, the issue is dissing your employer, which is the least "protected" version of speech out there. Then again, I am not sure who you are arguing against, since I don't think the Pepsi employee has, or should have, any chance of overturning a firing for that. Neither should the fed in question either.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[FriendlyLurker]

Just using the tools put in place. Evil, but hardly as evil as using the surveillance state to squash political dissent which received much less mass media attention that this internal witch hunt. Key OWS supporters lost their jobs, were put on no fly and do not employ lists but since they did not have big Washington insider status, they get no press.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Cajun Hell]

The story here isn't that he was fired. It's that the Whitehouse investigated him. He didn't accidentally leak his identity to some private sector reporter who put it in their article, and then the president saw it in a newspaper. They spent time and money on trying to figure out the identity of a totally irrelevant and unimportant Twitter user over a bunch of totally irrelevant and unimportant tweets. Like, this was important to them.

At least Pepsi would be able to somewhat justify such an expenditure, since their marketing really is so important, and all Pepsi stockholders would agree that marketing is a good use of funds. But what say America's "stockholders," about our new "marketing counter-intelligence" program?

They guy wasn't even saying stuff analogous to "USA sucks for tourists. Foreign tourists should take vacations somewhere else and spend their money there instead of in USA." or "You should buy used F-16s from Israel instead of from USA." He was just talking shit about shit. There's no legitimate reason for the government to have been working on this.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[bitt3n]

The other difference is that the ability to criticize one's government is different in kind from the ability to criticize a soft drink. It might not be unreasonable for Pepsi to attempt to keep its employees from undermining the company's success on their own time, given that someone who hates Pepsi can choose to work at another company. Contrarily, given that government is a monopoly, expecting an employee to give up his right to criticize it seems far more dubious, since, aside from voting (or emigrating), such criticism is his only means to effect changes in it. If a government employee were to limit himself strictly to criticizing government policy, and did so from an anonymous account, so not to lend to his comments the authority of his office, it seems questionable to punish him for it.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[JDG1980]

Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer? You just can't fire people for no reason (well, you're not supposed to.) I mean if an employee is doing their job, performing well, and secretly bashing you on twitter, is that really a legal ground for termination?

Most private-sector jobs in the U.S. are "employment at will". That means employees can be fired for any reason or no reason, as long as it's not for a reason specifically prohibited by federal law (race, gender, etc.) I don't think this is good policy, but it is how things currently work in most places (pretty much all non-union shops). And one reason that it hasn't changed is that most Americans don't realize how bad it actually is: that as workers they essentially have no rights.

Federal civil service jobs are different. A rank-and-file Federal employee can pretty much say anything he/she wants about the government, as long as it's not on the clock. But the most high-ranking staff members at government agencies don't have civil service protections; they are political appointees and are expected to support the administration's goals and objectives. A random clerk processing Social Security claims can tweet all he/she wants about politics, but if the Secretary of State shoots his/her mouth off against the President's wishes, they will soon be "asked to resign".

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Grishnakh]

If you get caught because you screwed up somehow, that's perfectly understandable. But if you get caught because the country is spying on all its citizens with a program that would make the Stasi proud, then there's much bigger problems, for everyone.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[luis_a_espinal]

Are you sure about that? What grounds would you fire such a person under? Is it against the law to criticize your employer?

It is not against the law for an employer to fire an employee for criticizing him/her/it. Freedom of speech is not required to be defended within the premises of a private entity, nor does it give you ABSOLUTE IMMUNITY from the consequences of your actions. If you cannot make that distinction, you are an ignorant fool.

Consider this, if you work for an employer, and you tweet "my employer sucks", do you honestly believe you are immune from getting fired (even if indeed your employer sucks)?

The only things you cannot get fired for are already stipulated in federal and state laws. The typical protections against labor discrimination regarding gender, age, race, religion, political affiliation, retaliation over obeying the law, sexual harassment, and other protected statuses that emanate from them.

The list sorely misses some important ones (say, sexual orientation), but that is not to say that bad mouthing or publicly criticizing your employee (or doing anything that gives a "bad" image, something that will most likely be in the employment agreement that you willing signed) should be protected against getting fired for it. That is just silly.

Re:Secret Emails and they fire a tweeter?

[Obfuscant]

so it should never be allowed to fire employees who are critical of it.

When his insults extended to the wives and children of the politicians, he went from "criticizing the government" to "unacceptable behaviour for a political appointee". And if he was leaking insider information about diplomatic negotiations, then he deserves to lose his security clearance, and with that loss goes his cushy job.

The government is not a monopoly employer.

I can't believe ...

[cascadingstylesheet]

I can't believe that any prominent person tweets at all. The medium encourages inflammatory behavior and doesn't let there be any context. Recipe for disaster.

Re:I can't believe ...

[avandesande]

I am not able to attribute the quote but it goes something like this- "you see a person's true face when they are wearing a mask..."

Speaking of dodging questions. . .

[smooth wombat]

especially Ben Rhodes â" whom he accused of dodging questions about Benghazi.

I find it amusing people focusing on an event which transpired over a few hours when absolutely no investigation or questions were raised about the two DAY refusal by the Bush administration to send in more troops to block the escape of Bin Laden.

For those that don't know, officers on the ground, both U.S. and British, made repeated requests over a two day period to have more troops dropped in to block escape routes for Bin Laden when they had him pinned down in Tora Bora. They could hear him over the radio telling his people the end looked near and he had failed them. According to one British source, they estimated the troops were within 2 kilometers of Bin Laden.

However, for those two days the Bush administration refused all requests for more troops, claiming the Afghan forces could be used instead of allied troops (which was a complete failure). As a result, Bin Laden ran free for another decade until the Obama administration was able to track him down.

Funny how not one person ever jumped up and said, "We need to investigate why Bin Laden, the man who planned the worst terrorist attack on American soil, was allowed to escape!", yet people are hellbent on talking about mistakes made over a few hours which somehow ranks higher in importance.

Re:Speaking of dodging questions. . .

[FriendlyLurker]

How can you have a "war on terror" if you quickly take out the high profile leader of your worst enemy? That was one long decade of profits that they bought themselves...

Re:Speaking of dodging questions. . .

[smooth wombat]

The only Congressional report on the events is this one which occurred in 2009, 8 years after the event.

Unlike Benghazi, there was no drumbeat, from any source, on how Bin Laden was allowed to escape, no daily update from Fox on how the most wanted criminal in modern times was allowed to escape, no daily demands for Congressional hearings on the matter. None.

There are no rose colored glasses on this event. There were no investigations, no cries of indignation or threats of impeachment. Instead, there was silence and when pressed, Bush refused to answer any questions. The same way he did when pressed to turn over documents on the 9/11 attack.

You do know Bush turned over 1, ONE, document for the entire 9/11 Commission report. Both he and Cheney refused to appear before any Congressional hearing or provide information to any Congressional member without a lawyer being present and with no documentation of what took place.

Imagine if this administration had done the same thing over Benghazi. The South most certainly would have risen, and the lynchings would have been fierce.

Re:Inside the Bubble

[Grishnakh]

Yes, and thanks to ubiquitous NSA spying, they were able to catch this dastardly man and put a stop to his treacherous activities. Aren't you glad Obama has the NSA to find out anyone who criticizes him?

Penny Arcade

[dcollins]

It does lend credence to John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

He got fired, not imprisoned

[sl4shd0rk]

Dunno about you, but if I were to make comments like that where I work, I expect the boss to say something like 'I see you're really unhappy here, so why don't you take this box and clean out your desk'. Why is this a big deal? It's not like he got jail time out of it.

Re:malarchy...thats nothin.

[idontgno]

Back in my day we'd track down, invite them to a duck-hunting outing, and SHOOT the bastard ourselves.

FTFY.

Everyone loses when we vote Repiblicrat

[Cajun Hell]

While firing the unprofessional jerk after he was outed is perfectly defensible (I have no problem with it at all), the government did get caught working against America's interests again:

The website Politico said White House officials had worked over months to discover the identity of Mr Joseph - a key member of the team negotiating over Iran's nuclear programme.

It said his travel and shopping habits had been profiled by parsing over 2,000 tweets.

Why THE FUCK was the government spending time investigating this? And why the fuck is this not a big secret?

The BushBama whitehouse is seriously confused about what the country needs from its government, and over the last 12 years they have just gotten repeatedly more brazen and open about it. Is it simply that really, nobody cares?

I pay taxes in order for you to funnel them to obscurely-overbilling contractors for substandard work, so that they can then divert a portion of their obscene profits to the re-election campaigns of the people in congress and administration, who make the funneling happen. That is why we have government: to give crooks a non-violent outlet for their greed and need to victimize society. A few billion dollars here, a few billion dollars there .. we have a strong economy and can sustain that.

But I don't pay taxes for you people to spend it tracking tweets. That's not what government is for! All these crooks need to get out of the surveillance game and back into mainstream profitable corruption. And we voters should insist upon it. Please, everyone: stop voting Republicrat.

Obama Administration Shill Alert

[Anonymous Coward]

Any time Benghazi comes up, it's imperative for shills to employee "but-but-but-Bush!"

Re:Inside the Bubble

[Dunbal]

But remember, it's only "metadata"!

So...

[acoustix]

We fire a guy for insulting tweets, but....

- We don't fire people for the Fast & Furious illegal gun running op.
- We don't fire people for the IRS scandal.
- We don't fire for the lies to the public regarding Benghazi
- We don't fire for the absolute disaster that is the Obamacare implementation

It's nice to see that our priorities are in order. It's also obvious that this administration is extremely thin skinned and cannot take any amount of criticism. They view their political enemies as a first priority and everything else be dammed.

So what did it cost to find him?

[godel_56]

From TFA:

"After a probe that included an investigation into Joseph’s travel and shopping patterns – parsed from over 2,000 tweets - lawyers from the White House counsel’s office confronted Joseph and ordered him to leave the executive complex, according to two sources familiar with the situation."

There's your tax dollars at work. Money well spent, I'd say. /sarcasm.