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Man Caught Trying To Sell Plans For New Aircraft Carrier
New submitter cyberjock1980 tips news that an engineer has been caught trying to deliver schematics for an aircraft carrier to the Egyptian government. The 35-year-old civilian received security clearance four months ago after working for the U.S. Navy since February. FBI agents made contact with him, pretending to be with the Egyptian government. They struck a deal to buy documents about the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, the first in a new line of improved, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. The man sold four CAD drawings for the carrier, and was later seen photographing another set of schematics. A bond hearing is scheduled for Wednesday.
So this is basically and artificially generated crime, made by the FBI. They must be running out of real spies.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Since the guy doesn't have a history of such a thing it very firmly ticks box number two for entrapment. I suspect someone's taking the lazy way up the promotion ladder and this guy is part of the way of doing it. Such bullshit is disturbingly common.
Now let's try using our brains:
If the guy hadn't been approached, he wouldn't have done it.
If the guy had been approached by actual foreign intelligence agents, he may have sold out, or he may have responded differently. Impossible to predict.
If the counterintel folks had an inkling that he might be vulnerable to selling out, then why the fuck didn't they simply REVOKE HIS SECURITY CLEARANCE!?!?!
Instead they deliberately sought to push someone over a line that would be criminal so that they could get someone put in prison, and collect big bonuses.
This is immoral, and should be a felony. There is no basis to conclude that if the guy was simply removed from access to classified, that he would still have presented a threat to national security. Therefore by revoking his clearance, the threat to national security would have been eliminated. Unless the guy had *already* taken the classified, in which case I have no argument, that is a crime. But it appears to be the case that he hadn't removed the classified until after getting the bid, so...
The question we need to start asking ourselves is what is morally right to do here? Choose the option that is most punishing? Or choose the option that simply removes the alleged threat to national security?
I think that the answer is that if the following conditions are true or highly likely to be satisfied where security clearances are involved: 1. Someone is considering or likely to commit a crime when confronted with additional pressure (ie., worsening financial troubles, etc.) and/or opportunity (someone walks up and offers a bag of cash for information that would be a crime to hand over), but 2. has not yet committed the crime, then they should simply have their clearance revoked and be fired. After all, it is the existance of circumstances that would lead counterintel to believe that someone is untrustworthy that is one of the main basis for denying clearances in the first place.
In my dictatorship it would be a crime to push someone over the edge. Period!
In this particular situation, the counterintel people are incompetent as well and at a minimum should be fired because they pushed someone over a line causing them to remove classified from the secured systems where they reside, and carry them (one way or another) into the wild!!!
So the fucking counterintel are the goddamn threat to national security!
Because once that guy managed to sneak it out, it could have gone anywhere besides the fake customers. He could have put it on his iPhone, or some other compromized platform, causing that info to now be in the hands of Russian mafia. This was a serious security breach egged on by counterintel who utterly failed to accomplish their misson which is to ensure that this shit never makes it out the fucking door in the first place.
It also indicates something is seriously wrong with the Navy's handling of classified, because where I work, it would be extremely difficult to do something like this since among other barriers, all classified computing has no internet connectivity, at least two people must work in a vault together, and you can't stick a thumb drive into the classified computers (guessing here, based on training courses, since I am fortunate enough to not have to work with classified).
To take the opposing position means that you think it would be a good idea for the government to do this: Find all the people likely to sell classified information if given the chance, and give them jobs with access to classified so that you can then entrap them and put them in prison, while leaking classified all over the fucking net in the process.
Well lets just take this to its logical conclusion why don't we: You agree then that the government should target all citizens with schemes to get each and every one of us to finally crack and do something criminal. You agree that you would like to have all sorts of criminal proposals put to you by strangers who walk up to you eve