Let me try to be clearer, the point I'm trying to make is that any leaking of classified documents without proper authorization is a criminal act. Whether or not it is justifiable is a matter of morals and ethics but not so much legality and even then there are methods to bring questionable classified activities to someone's attention without broadcasting them to the world by way of your favorite media outlet.
Not to belabour the point, but most NOC's do not work directly out of an office at the CIA headquarters to which they enter through the front door every day nor do their spouses routinely tell people their wife's profession or grab headlines by going on speaking tours and writing op-ed pieces for nationally distributed newspapers.
Standards at the CIA may have fallen over the past couple of decades but I still think they are a little better at protecting their NOCs ID's than that.
Anyone, without the express permission of someone with the proper clearance to do so (and different documents can be declassified by differrent people), who leaks classified/top secret information has broken the law, there is not much debate about that but whether or not they will face criminal prosecution is an entirely different matter. As anyone familiar with the the legal system knows, failure to be charged/convicted of a crime does not neccesarily indicate innocence, just an inability or a lack of will to prosecute.
The first problem in these types of cases is that without a clear line from the person in question to the reporter to the story (hard to corroborate with the first amendment protections offered journalists) it is very hard create a case that meets the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard. As long as the target of the investigation continues to claim their innocence, and the reporter refuses to expose their sources, then there will always be some question as to who said what to whom.
Second, many times it is politically expedient to just let the 'leaker' go. Once removed from their position (which doesn't require the same standard of proof as a criminal case) they are often seen as effectively cut off from leaking any further data and ignored. Any attempt to prosecute, unless a clear cut chain can be shown (see problem 1), may be played up by the political rivals as a witch hunt.
Third, the will of the people may make prosecution impossible. Even if the details, as revealed, seem to indicate illegal activities, it is still a violation of the law to make them public without proper authorization, but if an illegal activity is brought to light it is almost impossible to find 12 people who would convict. Therefore in those types of cases almost no one in any position of power would attempt to prosecute. No elected official, or bureaucrat reliant on said official for their job, would want to be seen as the defender of the activity to avoid any permanent tarnish. Even in these type of clear cut cases (which are an extreme rarity), as I mentioned in response to your other post, a much more legally sound way to make things public is to report your concerns to a Congressperson/Senator (or more than one if you want) who sits on the appropriate review committee, in these cases the Intelligence committees. They have the necessary clearence to see almost all protected CIA/NSA/FBI data (not sure what they couldn't see, if anything, if they really wanted) and have certain legal protections not affored to the average analyst in making aspects of this data public. They may not be able to technically declassifiy the data themselves, but depending on when and where they make certain parts public, they may have some of the protections that the various houses of the legislature provide.
None of this makes the leaking 'legal' by any means, just increases the likelihood of the leaker avoiding prosecution and as we type, several of the current leak cases are at least in the priliminary stages of DoJ investigations. What will come of those investigations is anyone guess.
That is true for most businesses but not the entire case for workers who deal with Top Secret data. The 'whistleblower laws' actually spell out the exact procedures to report any instances a person may believe violates the law. It usually defines a clear chain of command, seperate from the organizational one, to which the whistleblower may report to without violating their high security clearence. Each organization is different, but under the American system I believe if all else fails they are also permitted to report to the Congressperson or Senator who sits on the proper review committee. So in all the recent cases the analysts or agents should have, instead of leaked information to a friendly newspaper, reported their concerns to the designated official and failing any resolution there to the Congressman/Senator(s) of their choice on the Intelligence committees. Only after recieving no satisfactory answer after all those steps are taken should they even consider making classified information public.
In most cases a person reporting their boss only has to deal with repercussions from their boss, in the case where a person is reporting a problem that involves a highly classified government program, they also have the added weight of having to be aware of the repercussions to the countries security.
The point being made by the post I was responding to was that there was no oversight. I mentioned that there were in fact oversight committeess made up of representatives of both elected national parties which were informed of the goings on of these programs. If you want someone else to be in there to represent you personally then go get them elected to federal office, otherwise you have to live within the limits of your two party system, END OF STORY.
For the rest of your argument, I'd seriously recommend doubling your dosage (but please consult your physician first) as it seems your having some strange debate that no one else here is party too. Good luck with that, I hope you win.
My point being that this is often used as an ad hoc attack against someone who people of the left tend to disagree with even though every independant study I've seen on the subject suggests that Fox News right wing bias is much much less than the majority of the remaining MSM's left wing bias (with noted exceptions to "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer", "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and "Good Morning America" which tend to fall just slightly to the left of center). In most cases the studies I have seen have shown a just slightly right of center bias on Fox and not the far outlier those on the extreme left love to claim.
Of course in a industry with a self reported rate of 70-90% liberals (and according to survey data more to the far left than center left on most topics) anyone who happens to not follow the groupthink agenda is seen as an extremeist for the right side.
It's amazing that even with my admittance that I do not watch Fox news with the exception of two talk shows, you still maintain that I'm essentially brainwashed by them. I rarely, if ever, use even the couple shows I do watch on Fox as primary sources for my opinions.
What am I making up? If you point it out I'll find you what I have to back it up.
In another post in another thread I was accused of being a 'fox news watcher' (seems to be a very common attack against anyone who disagrees that the President is not evil); I watch a total of 2 shows on Fox News and neither of them are the actually news. When it comes to real news programs I'm more likely to watch CBC Newsworld (being Canadian and all) or CNN although in all honesty I get more news from google searches than from TV.
Clinton lied under oath during a civil case, a direct violation of the law and of the plantiffs right to a fair trial.
In this case the best you can come up with is that Bush declassified documents to disprove allegations made against his administration by a partisan hack. Allegations said hack made in the established print media while pretending to have the backing of the office of the Vice President. Allegations that even the bipartisan 9/11 commission have said were blatently false.
So in your world, the President is not permitted to respond to an obviously partisan attack against the administration by presenting the facts to the media.
And for the record, even the FISA court backs up Bush's Constituitional authority for the original NSA wiretaps so it's not just me "playing with definitions", that's the decision of the judges specifically assigned to hear these cases.
It seems you may be have the same type of trouble with the meaning of the word 'lie' that Clinton did with the word 'is'. Just because you don't like what he is saying does not make it a lie.
That doesn't change the fact that at least one of the known leakers was both a contributor and volunteer to his campaign which shows a definate ideology differnce between them and the current admin.
An why would you assume that? The procedure to file a complaint are not a national security concern though the actual paperwork may be. They are usually laid out in the various agencies 'whistleblower' rules.
They have also been widely written about and discussed over the past couple of months (sometimes in step by step detail and other times in a very general sense) but I'll leave it up to you to find them.
Except that by any legal definition of 'leak' neither of them leaked anything. By all accounts the President (or VP acting as legal proxy) authorized Libby to release portions of the documents he discussed with Novak, meaning from that point on they were no longer classified (it's one of the powers of the President that not even the most anti-Bush Democrat questions).
They were then widely released to the general media just a couple days later.
The big difference, in these cases, Libby and Rove had the legal authorization to release the information they did, the CIA and NSA analysts did not. You can debate the reasoning behind the President giving them the authorization but that's a partisan debate and NOT a legal one.
Now can you point to how in any of these instance the whistleblower laws were followed? And can you point out in the whistleblower procedures the step to talk to a NYT reporter.
I agree with the fact/seem mixup, it was actually a melding of two sentences from an earlier draft. In the original I brought up the fact that the at least one of the confirmed leakers has very strong ties to both the Democratic party in general, and the Kerry campaign in particular as do several of the names being thrown about for possible sources for the other leaks. I later decided to cut it down to just a general statement about politics as a motivator and the result was a hacked together sentence.
I would submit that the burden of proof is on you to show that they did as you are atttempting to justify their actions.
In at least a few of the recent cases it has been shown that the leak to the papers was pretty much their first move to 'complain' about the programs in question.
It's pretty simple really, it is that 'little circle' that can cancel the funding. They do not have to go to the floor, they can decide amongst themselves. You even included my stating of that fact in your response.
Just to follow up, under none of the set procedures to report a supposed violation of the law for any TOP SECRET program is there a step to call up a NYT reporter.
And it's fine, and even healthy, to distrust your government to a point, but if employees take it upon themselves to reveal what is without a doubt, national security secrets willy nilly, then the government will cease to function.
I happen to deal with confidential information everyday (even the occasional Classified document) and have friends that work closely with information classified as Top Secret for national security purposes. Now while my leaking could only cause embarrasement for either the government or whichever target I leak info about, my friends could leak info that could compromise national defense.
In both instances the government has entrusted us with access to these specific records for the express purposes of doing our jobs. Without that trust, our respective jobs would be nearly impossible to complete and the pace at which things would get done would be almost imeasurable. Some days even the minor restrictions placed on us when communicating with our coworkers is enough to make things takes 10 times as long as you'd like, I couldn't even imagine what it would be like if we weren't allowed to deal with the data directly and had to jump through hoops to get even the smallest morsel, all because the higher levels of the government could not disseminate any information for risk of it being made public. There is a reason some things are private and some are public.
These people violated that trust, plain and simple. They had no standing to declassify the information they shared and no legal grounds to make it public. In the international wiretapping case, even the court that would have jurisdiction (FISA) has publically stated that they do not see it as having violated any laws, but yet an analyst or two decided to take it upon themselves to make it public anyway.
That may have also been your point but when you inject a blatent partisan attack, with little basis in fact, it's hard not to reply with what I would consider a pretty clear cut counter.
And I don't believe I was painting anyone as a leftist for opposing these programs, but you have to admit, it is a general left of center push to try and make this a major topic of discussion, and who knows some of the politicians may even really care, but I have my doubts. Admittedly there are those on the right who are gladly jumping on the bandwagon to try and score their own political points.
And I agree that there are probably a lot of clandestine programs going on unseen by any elected officials eyes, even the Presidents, as the very nature of the beast seems to call for actions that require a cloak of deniability. That's always a dangerous thing, but can be controlled, to a degree, by a vigilant legislative branch. These program aren't cheap, and when someone notices a crate load of $50,000 hammers being sent to a particular air base, they are within their rights to ask for justification or cut the funding. It's not an easy job, but because of all the pork routinely added to every bill passed through congress, it's increasingly hard to do.
That doesn't seem to apply in this case however, as both of the NSA programs that have been exposed of recently, have had direct congressional oversight. The intelligence committees have had constant reports on what it was exactly, that these programs were doing. The proper steps were followed and everthing was as above board as a top secret program can be.
And I have absolutely no problem with Qwest demanding a warrant or refusing to join in the program without one. What I do have a problem with is the leaking by the unnamed sources, to the press without at least first going through proper channels.
We have already had at least one case in the recent spat of intelligence leaks which appears to be unfounded (the secret prisons that an independant EU investigation failed to find any evidence of whatsoever) so it's not unreasonable to assume what two analysts think or know or think they know about a certain program may not be 100% accurate. Had they asked any federal judges for their off the record opinions or were these just their own personal beliefs in the reasoning behind not getting the warrants? Did they research the history of prior related programs to determine if any rulings had been made with regards to this particular method of intel gathering?
These are the type of questions the review process is there to ask whenever any allegation of illegal activity is made. The fact is most of these leaks seem to be performed with the primary intent to harm the image of the current administration or the particular organizations upper management and that is never an acceptable reason to leak classified information.
I'm sorry but you put forward one of the most idiotic arguments I have seen on Slashdot in a long long time, and that's really saying something.
Let me rephrase your argument for you to make it a little more clear how ridiculous it sounds:
"Under my supreme intellect I cannot think of any way in which a real-time social networking analysis could help in the WoT so it mustn't be useful. To prove otherwise please give real world examples of how this TOP SECRET program, of which we know the bare minimum, has managed to prevent one real attack."
You may not be able to grasp this but in general, confidential information gathered under TOP SECRET intelligence programs is not made public, even when it successfully stops a terrorist attack. Has something to do with not wanting to expose the inner workings of the TOP SECRET program.
As the old adage about the CIA (or I guess any spy agency goes): if they do their job right you'll never know about it. It's only when they make a mistake that it becomes news.
It's just amazing that all the leaks so far seem to have come from documented Democratic/Kerry supporters isn't it. No politics at play there.
As I tried to clearly state in my original post, there are clear cut procedures, independant of the administration AND THE PRESS for people with access to classified information who believe they have uncovered illegal activity to make their concerns know. In all the most recent leak cases, NONE of those procedures were followed or even attempted.
And for the record, members of the military have held the position of CIA chief before and most likely will do so again. The last time I believe was under that war monger, Jimmy Carter.
The members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees are well within their powers to launch investigations into programs they review if they should so decide. They can also cut the funding of said programs if they can get other members of their respective committees to agree with them. They are pretty much the final authority as to whether or not these programs can continue.
And I'm really getting sick and tired of these incessant hypothetical "if there was a Democratic President blah blah blah". Is your memory so short that you forget just 6 years ago. In term of the intelligence programs run under Clinton, they were much more evasive than these two NSA programs (Echelon, warrentless physical searches, etc..) and yet were permitted to run without much complaining by the Republican members of the committees or for that matter the national press. But don't let actual history get in the way of your rant.
His other problems were mostly of his own making and played up by both sides for political points. For instance, no one gave a damn about his sex life outside of the tabloids, but once you lie about it under oath, then it becomes a crime; one for which he was fined and disbarred by an non-partisan independant court if memory serves. And don't forget Hillary's speaking tour drumming up support by blaming the whole "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" for all her husbands problems, even though as it turned out, the allegations were true.
And the Starr fiasco was as much a Clinton invention as a Republican one; neither can escape from the taint of that mess. Just look up the "Magnificent Seven", the self named Clinton appointed judges that 'took it upon themselves' to stall and interfere with the independant prosecutors investigation thereby causing it to last a lot longer than was necessary, even to the point where they bypassed the normal assignment procedures to ensure certain cases ended up on there benches. Incidentilly, a large number of their rulings beneficial to possible Clinton witnesses and evidence were later overturned on appeal but by that time it was of very limited use to the investigators.
The cause of the majority of unrest is pretty simple to peg, an extremist view of a religon that has, since the time of it's creation, seen as it's ultimate goal complete domination over all others.
While the more moderates voices in today's Islam are willing to at least try the concept of winning over converts, the more radicallized forms, one of the biggest being Wahhabism, which just happens to be the prime form taught in places like Saudi Arabia and in many western mosques where the majority of todays terrorists come from, sees the fight against non-muslims or even muslims of other sects as their primary objective and believe very strongly that force is necessary.
The US hatred is a bit more prominent because they are the biggest and and most visable example of Western liberal philosophy, which stands in direct opposition to the very strict rules of these forms of Islam. They would be at the head of the line for targets regardless of their current actions in the ME. Now those actions are not winning them any friends in these extreme sects, but nothing short of complete surrender of their strongly held liberal beliefs would; that or a move to a complete isolationist foreign policy, which would essentially be the same thing as it's hard as a western liberal to look at people anywhere in the world being opressed by their government and not want to help (and by that I mean real opression not this hypothetical NSA stuff). It's also important to note that many of their interventions in the region are at the request of Middle Easterners themselves who understanding that their only real chance for a free society can come from outside pressures on their governments.
Now you can debate their methodology till the cows come home and there are many instances of them swatting a fly with a bazooka, but that's a much bigger debate than one I'm willing to get into here and now.
Just look at the history of the region, it's never been known for it's peaceful ways. You can try to push your 'Blame America First" philosophy but when put into the context of the region it just doesn't hold water.
As a simple excercise just count the number of truly representational governments in the ME.
So the fact that both NSA programs were routinely reviewed by both the Senate and House intelligence committees made up of members from both parties doesn't count right?
What else are they expected to do? Get a weekly article in the New York Times detailing all their clandestine activities?
There are probably many things the various government agencies have done or continue to do without Congressessional knowledge, and that is always a dangerous thing, but the facts seem to indicate that the NSA programs don't fall into this category. The proper authorities were kept up to date on the various programs details and at the time, had no problems with them.
I think the bigger story here is that there's been yet another leak of classified information without proper authorization. If these leakers who are sharing classified information with non-credentialed sources for their own personal reasons or political gain (there is a clear mechanism in place if they truly believed that a program was violating American law and leaking to a reporter is not it) continue to do this with such regularity, then they may as well just shut down the CIA and NSA and military intelligence agencies and just throw in the towel.
Yeah, you have to give big props to the Sony marketing team for the death of the Dreamcast. I've never understood their decisions though; it's like Sony decided to optimize the PS2 for paper performance while sacrificing real world gaming. Guess they wanted to use that "classified as a dangerous export" tag to help push their system sales, and it worked.
On paper the PS2 could push out 16.5 million polygons/sec while the Dreamcast only about 3 million but for anything besides simplistic single character games, a basic platformer for example, the Sony would drop down to equal or even below Dreamcast numbers while no matter what type of game you played on the Sega system the numbers stayed pretty constant.
The more independantly rendered objects in either the foreground or background you add, especially if one or more of them are additional independantly controlled characters, such as in a fighting game, the lower the PS2 counts get.
So yeah, while the PS2 could theoretically outperform the Dreamcast, it put all the onus on the developers to come up with ways to make a poorly laid out system look better than it should; not something most were willing to spend a lot of $$$ on. In general any game put out for both systems would probably look better on the Dreamcast than the PS2.
That being said, with Sony's PR department and a huge catalog of games, the Dreamcast was dead in the water as soon as Sega showed the slightest weakness. So what was unquestionably the weakest machine of the last generation of consoles (as the Gamecube and XBox both easily outperform the PS2 even on paper) became the all around winner.
It will be interesting to watch what happens in this round of the console wars. For me personally, I was interested in the 360 (mostly to get a system to play GTA on) but it's shoddy attempt at backwards compatability has really turned me off. Well that and the fact I wasn't all that impressed with the jump in graphic detail. I have a 56" HDTV and honestly, the difference from my Gamecube to the 360, while noticable, didn't really seem to justify the current price. If they come out with some more unique games that required the power of the 360 then it may change my mind.
The PS3, being even more expensive than the 360, looks like it's going to be even a harder sell for the few exclusive games I want to play and add to that the fact the Blu-ray drive may not even being able to play HD-DVD movies because of lack of HDMI??.
Right now there isn't even a doubt I'll be picking up a Wii (even the silly name is starting to grow on me). Being the cheapest and most 'revolutionary' or thethe decision all the simpler. As the PS2 made abundantly clear in the last round, the winner is not necesarily the one with the greatest graphics.
Slashdot Mirror
In reply to your comment; ?????
Let me try to be clearer, the point I'm trying to make is that any leaking of classified documents without proper authorization is a criminal act. Whether or not it is justifiable is a matter of morals and ethics but not so much legality and even then there are methods to bring questionable classified activities to someone's attention without broadcasting them to the world by way of your favorite media outlet.
Case closed.
Not to belabour the point, but most NOC's do not work directly out of an office at the CIA headquarters to which they enter through the front door every day nor do their spouses routinely tell people their wife's profession or grab headlines by going on speaking tours and writing op-ed pieces for nationally distributed newspapers.
Standards at the CIA may have fallen over the past couple of decades but I still think they are a little better at protecting their NOCs ID's than that.
Anyone, without the express permission of someone with the proper clearance to do so (and different documents can be declassified by differrent people), who leaks classified/top secret information has broken the law, there is not much debate about that but whether or not they will face criminal prosecution is an entirely different matter. As anyone familiar with the the legal system knows, failure to be charged/convicted of a crime does not neccesarily indicate innocence, just an inability or a lack of will to prosecute.
The first problem in these types of cases is that without a clear line from the person in question to the reporter to the story (hard to corroborate with the first amendment protections offered journalists) it is very hard create a case that meets the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard. As long as the target of the investigation continues to claim their innocence, and the reporter refuses to expose their sources, then there will always be some question as to who said what to whom.
Second, many times it is politically expedient to just let the 'leaker' go. Once removed from their position (which doesn't require the same standard of proof as a criminal case) they are often seen as effectively cut off from leaking any further data and ignored. Any attempt to prosecute, unless a clear cut chain can be shown (see problem 1), may be played up by the political rivals as a witch hunt.
Third, the will of the people may make prosecution impossible. Even if the details, as revealed, seem to indicate illegal activities, it is still a violation of the law to make them public without proper authorization, but if an illegal activity is brought to light it is almost impossible to find 12 people who would convict. Therefore in those types of cases almost no one in any position of power would attempt to prosecute. No elected official, or bureaucrat reliant on said official for their job, would want to be seen as the defender of the activity to avoid any permanent tarnish. Even in these type of clear cut cases (which are an extreme rarity), as I mentioned in response to your other post, a much more legally sound way to make things public is to report your concerns to a Congressperson/Senator (or more than one if you want) who sits on the appropriate review committee, in these cases the Intelligence committees. They have the necessary clearence to see almost all protected CIA/NSA/FBI data (not sure what they couldn't see, if anything, if they really wanted) and have certain legal protections not affored to the average analyst in making aspects of this data public. They may not be able to technically declassifiy the data themselves, but depending on when and where they make certain parts public, they may have some of the protections that the various houses of the legislature provide.
None of this makes the leaking 'legal' by any means, just increases the likelihood of the leaker avoiding prosecution and as we type, several of the current leak cases are at least in the priliminary stages of DoJ investigations. What will come of those investigations is anyone guess.
That is true for most businesses but not the entire case for workers who deal with Top Secret data. The 'whistleblower laws' actually spell out the exact procedures to report any instances a person may believe violates the law. It usually defines a clear chain of command, seperate from the organizational one, to which the whistleblower may report to without violating their high security clearence. Each organization is different, but under the American system I believe if all else fails they are also permitted to report to the Congressperson or Senator who sits on the proper review committee. So in all the recent cases the analysts or agents should have, instead of leaked information to a friendly newspaper, reported their concerns to the designated official and failing any resolution there to the Congressman/Senator(s) of their choice on the Intelligence committees. Only after recieving no satisfactory answer after all those steps are taken should they even consider making classified information public.
In most cases a person reporting their boss only has to deal with repercussions from their boss, in the case where a person is reporting a problem that involves a highly classified government program, they also have the added weight of having to be aware of the repercussions to the countries security.
The point being made by the post I was responding to was that there was no oversight. I mentioned that there were in fact oversight committeess made up of representatives of both elected national parties which were informed of the goings on of these programs. If you want someone else to be in there to represent you personally then go get them elected to federal office, otherwise you have to live within the limits of your two party system, END OF STORY.
For the rest of your argument, I'd seriously recommend doubling your dosage (but please consult your physician first) as it seems your having some strange debate that no one else here is party too. Good luck with that, I hope you win.
My point being that this is often used as an ad hoc attack against someone who people of the left tend to disagree with even though every independant study I've seen on the subject suggests that Fox News right wing bias is much much less than the majority of the remaining MSM's left wing bias (with noted exceptions to "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer", "NewsNight With Aaron Brown" and "Good Morning America" which tend to fall just slightly to the left of center). In most cases the studies I have seen have shown a just slightly right of center bias on Fox and not the far outlier those on the extreme left love to claim.
Of course in a industry with a self reported rate of 70-90% liberals (and according to survey data more to the far left than center left on most topics) anyone who happens to not follow the groupthink agenda is seen as an extremeist for the right side.
It's amazing that even with my admittance that I do not watch Fox news with the exception of two talk shows, you still maintain that I'm essentially brainwashed by them. I rarely, if ever, use even the couple shows I do watch on Fox as primary sources for my opinions.
Three words: pot, kettle, black
What am I making up? If you point it out I'll find you what I have to back it up.
In another post in another thread I was accused of being a 'fox news watcher' (seems to be a very common attack against anyone who disagrees that the President is not evil); I watch a total of 2 shows on Fox News and neither of them are the actually news. When it comes to real news programs I'm more likely to watch CBC Newsworld (being Canadian and all) or CNN although in all honesty I get more news from google searches than from TV.
Clinton lied under oath during a civil case, a direct violation of the law and of the plantiffs right to a fair trial.
In this case the best you can come up with is that Bush declassified documents to disprove allegations made against his administration by a partisan hack. Allegations said hack made in the established print media while pretending to have the backing of the office of the Vice President. Allegations that even the bipartisan 9/11 commission have said were blatently false.
So in your world, the President is not permitted to respond to an obviously partisan attack against the administration by presenting the facts to the media.
And for the record, even the FISA court backs up Bush's Constituitional authority for the original NSA wiretaps so it's not just me "playing with definitions", that's the decision of the judges specifically assigned to hear these cases.
It seems you may be have the same type of trouble with the meaning of the word 'lie' that Clinton did with the word 'is'. Just because you don't like what he is saying does not make it a lie.
That doesn't change the fact that at least one of the known leakers was both a contributor and volunteer to his campaign which shows a definate ideology differnce between them and the current admin.
An why would you assume that? The procedure to file a complaint are not a national security concern though the actual paperwork may be. They are usually laid out in the various agencies 'whistleblower' rules.
They have also been widely written about and discussed over the past couple of months (sometimes in step by step detail and other times in a very general sense) but I'll leave it up to you to find them.
Except that by any legal definition of 'leak' neither of them leaked anything. By all accounts the President (or VP acting as legal proxy) authorized Libby to release portions of the documents he discussed with Novak, meaning from that point on they were no longer classified (it's one of the powers of the President that not even the most anti-Bush Democrat questions).
They were then widely released to the general media just a couple days later.
The big difference, in these cases, Libby and Rove had the legal authorization to release the information they did, the CIA and NSA analysts did not. You can debate the reasoning behind the President giving them the authorization but that's a partisan debate and NOT a legal one.
Now can you point to how in any of these instance the whistleblower laws were followed? And can you point out in the whistleblower procedures the step to talk to a NYT reporter.
I agree with the fact/seem mixup, it was actually a melding of two sentences from an earlier draft. In the original I brought up the fact that the at least one of the confirmed leakers has very strong ties to both the Democratic party in general, and the Kerry campaign in particular as do several of the names being thrown about for possible sources for the other leaks. I later decided to cut it down to just a general statement about politics as a motivator and the result was a hacked together sentence.
I would submit that the burden of proof is on you to show that they did as you are atttempting to justify their actions.
In at least a few of the recent cases it has been shown that the leak to the papers was pretty much their first move to 'complain' about the programs in question.
It's pretty simple really, it is that 'little circle' that can cancel the funding. They do not have to go to the floor, they can decide amongst themselves. You even included my stating of that fact in your response.
Just to follow up, under none of the set procedures to report a supposed violation of the law for any TOP SECRET program is there a step to call up a NYT reporter.
And it's fine, and even healthy, to distrust your government to a point, but if employees take it upon themselves to reveal what is without a doubt, national security secrets willy nilly, then the government will cease to function.
I happen to deal with confidential information everyday (even the occasional Classified document) and have friends that work closely with information classified as Top Secret for national security purposes. Now while my leaking could only cause embarrasement for either the government or whichever target I leak info about, my friends could leak info that could compromise national defense.
In both instances the government has entrusted us with access to these specific records for the express purposes of doing our jobs. Without that trust, our respective jobs would be nearly impossible to complete and the pace at which things would get done would be almost imeasurable. Some days even the minor restrictions placed on us when communicating with our coworkers is enough to make things takes 10 times as long as you'd like, I couldn't even imagine what it would be like if we weren't allowed to deal with the data directly and had to jump through hoops to get even the smallest morsel, all because the higher levels of the government could not disseminate any information for risk of it being made public. There is a reason some things are private and some are public.
These people violated that trust, plain and simple. They had no standing to declassify the information they shared and no legal grounds to make it public. In the international wiretapping case, even the court that would have jurisdiction (FISA) has publically stated that they do not see it as having violated any laws, but yet an analyst or two decided to take it upon themselves to make it public anyway.
Glad I could do my part to help you get a little higher up on that pedestal of yours.
That may have also been your point but when you inject a blatent partisan attack, with little basis in fact, it's hard not to reply with what I would consider a pretty clear cut counter.
And I don't believe I was painting anyone as a leftist for opposing these programs, but you have to admit, it is a general left of center push to try and make this a major topic of discussion, and who knows some of the politicians may even really care, but I have my doubts. Admittedly there are those on the right who are gladly jumping on the bandwagon to try and score their own political points.
And I agree that there are probably a lot of clandestine programs going on unseen by any elected officials eyes, even the Presidents, as the very nature of the beast seems to call for actions that require a cloak of deniability. That's always a dangerous thing, but can be controlled, to a degree, by a vigilant legislative branch. These program aren't cheap, and when someone notices a crate load of $50,000 hammers being sent to a particular air base, they are within their rights to ask for justification or cut the funding. It's not an easy job, but because of all the pork routinely added to every bill passed through congress, it's increasingly hard to do.
That doesn't seem to apply in this case however, as both of the NSA programs that have been exposed of recently, have had direct congressional oversight. The intelligence committees have had constant reports on what it was exactly, that these programs were doing. The proper steps were followed and everthing was as above board as a top secret program can be.
And I have absolutely no problem with Qwest demanding a warrant or refusing to join in the program without one. What I do have a problem with is the leaking by the unnamed sources, to the press without at least first going through proper channels.
We have already had at least one case in the recent spat of intelligence leaks which appears to be unfounded (the secret prisons that an independant EU investigation failed to find any evidence of whatsoever) so it's not unreasonable to assume what two analysts think or know or think they know about a certain program may not be 100% accurate. Had they asked any federal judges for their off the record opinions or were these just their own personal beliefs in the reasoning behind not getting the warrants? Did they research the history of prior related programs to determine if any rulings had been made with regards to this particular method of intel gathering?
These are the type of questions the review process is there to ask whenever any allegation of illegal activity is made. The fact is most of these leaks seem to be performed with the primary intent to harm the image of the current administration or the particular organizations upper management and that is never an acceptable reason to leak classified information.
I'm sorry but you put forward one of the most idiotic arguments I have seen on Slashdot in a long long time, and that's really saying something.
Let me rephrase your argument for you to make it a little more clear how ridiculous it sounds:
"Under my supreme intellect I cannot think of any way in which a real-time social networking analysis could help in the WoT so it mustn't be useful. To prove otherwise please give real world examples of how this TOP SECRET program, of which we know the bare minimum, has managed to prevent one real attack."
You may not be able to grasp this but in general, confidential information gathered under TOP SECRET intelligence programs is not made public, even when it successfully stops a terrorist attack. Has something to do with not wanting to expose the inner workings of the TOP SECRET program.
As the old adage about the CIA (or I guess any spy agency goes): if they do their job right you'll never know about it. It's only when they make a mistake that it becomes news.
It's just amazing that all the leaks so far seem to have come from documented Democratic/Kerry supporters isn't it. No politics at play there.
As I tried to clearly state in my original post, there are clear cut procedures, independant of the administration AND THE PRESS for people with access to classified information who believe they have uncovered illegal activity to make their concerns know. In all the most recent leak cases, NONE of those procedures were followed or even attempted.
And for the record, members of the military have held the position of CIA chief before and most likely will do so again. The last time I believe was under that war monger, Jimmy Carter.
The members of the Senate and House Intelligence committees are well within their powers to launch investigations into programs they review if they should so decide. They can also cut the funding of said programs if they can get other members of their respective committees to agree with them. They are pretty much the final authority as to whether or not these programs can continue.
And I'm really getting sick and tired of these incessant hypothetical "if there was a Democratic President blah blah blah". Is your memory so short that you forget just 6 years ago. In term of the intelligence programs run under Clinton, they were much more evasive than these two NSA programs (Echelon, warrentless physical searches, etc..) and yet were permitted to run without much complaining by the Republican members of the committees or for that matter the national press. But don't let actual history get in the way of your rant.
His other problems were mostly of his own making and played up by both sides for political points. For instance, no one gave a damn about his sex life outside of the tabloids, but once you lie about it under oath, then it becomes a crime; one for which he was fined and disbarred by an non-partisan independant court if memory serves. And don't forget Hillary's speaking tour drumming up support by blaming the whole "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" for all her husbands problems, even though as it turned out, the allegations were true.
And the Starr fiasco was as much a Clinton invention as a Republican one; neither can escape from the taint of that mess. Just look up the "Magnificent Seven", the self named Clinton appointed judges that 'took it upon themselves' to stall and interfere with the independant prosecutors investigation thereby causing it to last a lot longer than was necessary, even to the point where they bypassed the normal assignment procedures to ensure certain cases ended up on there benches. Incidentilly, a large number of their rulings beneficial to possible Clinton witnesses and evidence were later overturned on appeal but by that time it was of very limited use to the investigators.
The cause of the majority of unrest is pretty simple to peg, an extremist view of a religon that has, since the time of it's creation, seen as it's ultimate goal complete domination over all others.
While the more moderates voices in today's Islam are willing to at least try the concept of winning over converts, the more radicallized forms, one of the biggest being Wahhabism, which just happens to be the prime form taught in places like Saudi Arabia and in many western mosques where the majority of todays terrorists come from, sees the fight against non-muslims or even muslims of other sects as their primary objective and believe very strongly that force is necessary.
The US hatred is a bit more prominent because they are the biggest and and most visable example of Western liberal philosophy, which stands in direct opposition to the very strict rules of these forms of Islam. They would be at the head of the line for targets regardless of their current actions in the ME. Now those actions are not winning them any friends in these extreme sects, but nothing short of complete surrender of their strongly held liberal beliefs would; that or a move to a complete isolationist foreign policy, which would essentially be the same thing as it's hard as a western liberal to look at people anywhere in the world being opressed by their government and not want to help (and by that I mean real opression not this hypothetical NSA stuff). It's also important to note that many of their interventions in the region are at the request of Middle Easterners themselves who understanding that their only real chance for a free society can come from outside pressures on their governments.
Now you can debate their methodology till the cows come home and there are many instances of them swatting a fly with a bazooka, but that's a much bigger debate than one I'm willing to get into here and now.
Just look at the history of the region, it's never been known for it's peaceful ways. You can try to push your 'Blame America First" philosophy but when put into the context of the region it just doesn't hold water.
As a simple excercise just count the number of truly representational governments in the ME.
If only we had an example of a Democratic administration using such tools.
... cough .. echelon ...cough
Cough
Pardon me.
So the fact that both NSA programs were routinely reviewed by both the Senate and House intelligence committees made up of members from both parties doesn't count right?
What else are they expected to do? Get a weekly article in the New York Times detailing all their clandestine activities?
There are probably many things the various government agencies have done or continue to do without Congressessional knowledge, and that is always a dangerous thing, but the facts seem to indicate that the NSA programs don't fall into this category. The proper authorities were kept up to date on the various programs details and at the time, had no problems with them.
I think the bigger story here is that there's been yet another leak of classified information without proper authorization. If these leakers who are sharing classified information with non-credentialed sources for their own personal reasons or political gain (there is a clear mechanism in place if they truly believed that a program was violating American law and leaking to a reporter is not it) continue to do this with such regularity, then they may as well just shut down the CIA and NSA and military intelligence agencies and just throw in the towel.
Yeah, you have to give big props to the Sony marketing team for the death of the Dreamcast. I've never understood their decisions though; it's like Sony decided to optimize the PS2 for paper performance while sacrificing real world gaming. Guess they wanted to use that "classified as a dangerous export" tag to help push their system sales, and it worked.
On paper the PS2 could push out 16.5 million polygons/sec while the Dreamcast only about 3 million but for anything besides simplistic single character games, a basic platformer for example, the Sony would drop down to equal or even below Dreamcast numbers while no matter what type of game you played on the Sega system the numbers stayed pretty constant.
The more independantly rendered objects in either the foreground or background you add, especially if one or more of them are additional independantly controlled characters, such as in a fighting game, the lower the PS2 counts get.
So yeah, while the PS2 could theoretically outperform the Dreamcast, it put all the onus on the developers to come up with ways to make a poorly laid out system look better than it should; not something most were willing to spend a lot of $$$ on. In general any game put out for both systems would probably look better on the Dreamcast than the PS2.
That being said, with Sony's PR department and a huge catalog of games, the Dreamcast was dead in the water as soon as Sega showed the slightest weakness. So what was unquestionably the weakest machine of the last generation of consoles (as the Gamecube and XBox both easily outperform the PS2 even on paper) became the all around winner.
It will be interesting to watch what happens in this round of the console wars. For me personally, I was interested in the 360 (mostly to get a system to play GTA on) but it's shoddy attempt at backwards compatability has really turned me off. Well that and the fact I wasn't all that impressed with the jump in graphic detail. I have a 56" HDTV and honestly, the difference from my Gamecube to the 360, while noticable, didn't really seem to justify the current price. If they come out with some more unique games that required the power of the 360 then it may change my mind.
The PS3, being even more expensive than the 360, looks like it's going to be even a harder sell for the few exclusive games I want to play and add to that the fact the Blu-ray drive may not even being able to play HD-DVD movies because of lack of HDMI??.
Right now there isn't even a doubt I'll be picking up a Wii (even the silly name is starting to grow on me). Being the cheapest and most 'revolutionary' or thethe decision all the simpler. As the PS2 made abundantly clear in the last round, the winner is not necesarily the one with the greatest graphics.