How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> Drake had discovered a shocking example while researching his postmortem report on the September 11 attacks. Months beforehand, the NSA had come into possession of a telephone number in San Diego that was used by two of the hijackers who later crashed planes into the World Trade Center. But the NSA did not act on this finding.
> As Drake later told the NSA expert James Bamford, the NSA intercepted seven phone calls between this San Diego phone number and an al-Qaida “safe house” in Yemen. Drake found a record of the seven calls buried in an NSA database.
> US officials had long known that the Yemen safe house was the operational hub through which Bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, ordered attacks. Seven phone calls to such a hub from the same phone number was obviously suspicious. Yet the NSA took no action – the information had apparently been overlooked.
If you are going to shred the foundation of jurisprudence, you should get something for your trouble.
The NSA used to understand concepts like compartmentalization ("need to know"). Their OPSEC shouldn't have allowed a single contractor to access so much data.
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7755493-the-silent-state
To see this in action, pick a hot topic, and watch any public hearing where our representatives are trying to get straight answers from department heads and middle management. It's infuriating.
Effective governance, transparency, accountability are still unsolved problems. Meanwhile, more eyeballs and fact checking can help, given enough effort and endurance.
Tell that to Thomas Drake. Tell it, for that matter, to John Crane."
Contrary to media meme, it is not mathematically impossible for Bernie Sanders to win the majority of pledged delegates, he would just need around 68% of the remaining vote.
It would take a decisive swing in the polls for sure, but not impossible. There are two weeks left and with Trump beating Hillary in many national polls, perhaps enough Democratic voters will see that a vote for Hillary is almost the same as a vote for Trump.
The FBI investigation is yet to have concluded as well.
And if that decisive swing doesn't come, I hope that the superdelegates, who will be the deciding vote in any event, will do what they were put in place to do in the 80's, and that is prevent the nomination of a candidate that would lose in the Fall election.
Are they undemocratic and a disgrace to the party? Yes. But the rules are the rules, and the process is the process. They were made unbound delegates by the party for this exact reason.
Make no mistake, if Bernie Sanders was ahead in pledged delegates, but behind in head to head polling with Trump, the superdelegates would not hesitate to deny the will of the majority of voters, that is why they were there in the first place.
They are also there to create a psychological advantage to the establishment candidate, who gets to include over 500 delegates in their count based on a poll of super delegates, who don't even vote until the convention.
The unwritten rules are different for the connected elite than they are for outsiders and whistle blowers.
My analysis is that at this point Trump is the heavy favorite to win the Fall election. Trump's negatives are already known and baked in, and enough people just don't care, while Hillary's negatives have not yet hit a floor. Trump has not even begun his attempt to define her.
Trump is about to bring up in an unavoidable way her ME intervention as Secretary of State, questionable Clinton Global Initiative deals, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, her paid Goldman Sachs talks, as well as comments made against women who accused Bill of misconduct.
Trump will continue to be an asymmetric opponent, with tighter OODA loops than Hillary.
She will try to define him, and he will morph. She will make an attack, and he will dominate the next news cycle with an expertly planted submarine.
She won't be able to pin him down, and she will be constantly on the defensive.
Hillary's best and only hope is demographics and identity politics, but my bet is that Trump shaves off enough economically aspirational voters that identify or want his success to win.
We live in interesting times, and it's going to be a very interesting election year.
I say heavy favorite based on the trend lines I see, and that Trumps negatives come from his words, where Hillary's come from her actions, and I think insulting words, style and positions are inherently easier to change/explain/apologize for than actions and character.
Trump's greatest strength this cycle is that he has never held elected office, when it comes to your financial pain, his hands are clean.
Manafort lays out his strategy for Trump[1], and I think it will work.
America has been here before, with another entertainer, Ronald Reagan.
[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/manafort-tells...
Unless, of course, you invested in one of Trump's many "failed" real estate schemes.
While true, that's not the play (IMHO). Think longer term.
#1 What Sanders is doing, intentionally or not, is building the party. If you attend your local Democratic party functions and ask around, you'll find that many were motivated to join by the Dean, Kucinich, Obama campaigns. Check back in 4 and 8 years, you'll find the rank and file of the Democratic party were Sanders supporters.
#2 Sanders is dragging the Overton Window to the left.
#3 The Clinton v Sanders primary contest is the best possible strategy leading into the general election. It reduces Trump's oxygen. Delaying the Clinton v Trump cluster@#$! is the best way to advance the Democratic agenda.
Edit:
#4 Sanders, win or lose, will have considerable input into the VP selection, cabinet, etc. Clinton will have to do something big to win over the Sanders supporters.
I already voted for Sanders in Missouri, over two months ago. I hope that no Bernie supporters in this state thought they could wait until now, because he only lost by 1500 out of 620k votes cast.
I do agree with you that at this point Trump is certain to beat Clinton by wide margins in the upcoming general election. She will attempt the same tactics that already failed for the Republicans. They'll fail for her too. I suppose I'll vote for Gary Johnson again. He might have more of a chance this time around, but mostly I don't want to waste a vote on the status quo. (Don't kid yourselves, Trumpets, Comb-over Donnie is as inside as inside gets.)
"Super"-delegates are kind of awful, but they would be less awful if they didn't declare their preferences until after the final state primary.
And superdelegates change their preference, as they did in 2008, so there is no reason to include their numbers in media graphs until their vote is cast at the convention.
Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the "proper" methods of whistleblowing didn't work. When the proper methods fail, fallback methods are used. When legitimate channels fail, whistleblowing has to appel directly to the people. This is practically guaranteed to have collateral damage.
Anyone who is angry with Snowden's methods should work hard to create safe and effective whistleblower mechanisms.
[1] The cutoff point for "too much" varying with personal opinion.
Which is odd, because I personally have not found any of the Snowden publications off topic or unnecessary. When I press these people about what they think shouldn't have been published, they always give me vague answers about "military secrets" and the like without citing anything specific.
It's a problem that the internal whistleblowing mechanism isn't working, but contractors shouldn't be picking reporters that then filter national secrets.
Anyway, Snowden could have made sure to personally review everything he turned over. It's certainly an open question if such a leak could have been as effective, but it would obviously be an improvement in some ways.
And yes, I do think that the person with security clearance minimizing their leak is a better than a reporter doing it.
Isn't that what happened? Snowden didn't give Greenwald access to the NSA network. He chose a subset of the information. Even that subset was more than would be prudent to make public, but filtering it further is a labor intensive process beyond the capacity of one individual, so he chose people he reasoned could be trusted.
It's not like the government would have provided a team of researchers with security clearances to help him sort it out.
Further, argument falls apart when he hands it over to journalists clearly unable to stop nation-state opponents per the very leaks. Of course someone hacked into them or bribed/coerced a copy. It should be assumed even without evidence given what we know.
So, when Snowden leaks those things, he's leaking national secrets we used to maintain an edge over the competition that America was fine with. That's not whistleblowing as it reveals legal stuff Americabs implicitly agreed to supporting foreign spying. Just a crime that sets us back while others continue their espionage.
I hope that was more specific. Such leaks are shy Snowden is partly a traitor who damaged our country. For domestic and some foreign leaks, he's a whistleblower that helped our country out a lot. I'm for lenient treatment, maybe immunity, given that. He should've learned from Manning that Dump It All (TM) was a terrible strategy with high consequences and inconsistent voter support. Future whistleblowers should focus on clear violations, corruption, and incompetence that everyone wants to stop far as voting public. Rest hurts credibility.
Concern trolling, obfuscation. Ignore them.
This isn't speculative: it's been done by other whistleblowers and he had time/resources to do it himself. He didn't. That's an evil or crime he has to own up to that's not whistleblowing.
While obviously work of fiction, it somehow feels like an accurate description of how this works, and this article only confirms it. If you stumble upon a secret that could endanger important people in the government, the government ain't gonna be helping you. I think Drake and Crane are lucky to be alive today.
Of all the whistleblower cases of the last 10 years, Thomas Drake has the most sympathetic. The conventional narrative about Drake appears to be mostly correct. But there are two very important details that this story not only leaves out, but implicitly contradicts.
1. Drake did not follow NSA whistleblower protocol in revealing details about Trailblazer. Unless NSA whistleblower protocol includes "create a Hushmail account and then send classified documents to journalists over it".
2. Drake was concerned about dragnet surveillance. But his concern wasn't "why" or "whether". It was "how". Drake blew the whistle on Trailblazer after a program he sponsored, ThinThread, was pushed aside for Trailblazer. ThinThread sounds a lot better in magazine articles, but it too was a large-scale dragnet surveillance system. The differences were that ThinThread was less expensive, and that ThinThread had better technical controls. But nobody on HN would be OK with ThinThread either.
For pretty much all of the whistleblower cases, you can go to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS.org) to get the original case documents.
It seems with every agency with poor oversight finds some important reason to punish whistleblowers for some comparatively trivial infraction to the one they reveal. The information they reveal rarely leads to punishment but thr small (possibly made up) transgression ruins there career and gets them crucified.
By all accounts this belies a broken system.
Again: the documents on FAS suggest that he created a Hushmail account and used it to send classified documents to reporters. "Not following protocol" doesn't capture that.
It doesn't seem to invalidate the account, nor does it seem like the most important comment to give to this story.
Here's the kernel of what seems to have happened, synthesizing both the Crane reporting from the Guardian today and the Drake indictment:
1. Drake favored a competing dragnet surveillance system that was pushed aside in favor of Trailblazer.
2. Drake lodged a complaint with the NSA IG that Trailblazer was a waste of money with inadequate technical controls. He is joined in his complaint by William Binney and several other former NSA employees.
3. Concurrently, Drake began leaking to reporters --- presumably, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who broke the first major NSA surveillance story for the NYT --- using Hushmail.
4. In handling Drake's formal complaint, the NSA managed to leak Drake's identity to DOJ. The article is fuzzy about exactly which law this violates (it refers to the Whistleblower Protection Act, much of which does not apply to national defense and classified information, and not the ICWPA, which has different procedures and protections). Either way: the White House is apoplectic about the Risen/Lichtblau scoop and uses the leak to raid Drake.
5. In the course of investigating Drake, DOJ discovers (perhaps by first ruling out Binney and the other original complainants) Drake's Hushmail leak. Drake is prosecuted.
The Guardian article would have you believe that Drake was prosecuted directly for blowing the whistle through formal channels. But that is not at all what seems to have happened. Yes, in the process of investigating Drake's complaint, there was a procedural foul (Drake's name shouldn't have ended up at DOJ). But it wasn't Drake's formal complaint that got Drake in real trouble!
Again: I think Drake has the most sympathetic case of all the NSA whistleblowers. His leak was extraordinarily targeted, not particularly political, and clearly in the public interest. I'm not writing to litigate whether Drake was right. I'm saying: the Guardian did a poor job of reporting this story.
Given Jacob Appelbaum's description[1] of the Guardian, this is not surprising.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJValv4YQcY#t=78 (note: strong language - Jacob doesn't pull his punches)
1. You're making Trailblazer sound similar to Drake's favored system. This is extremely misleading, and is a long discussion on its own. But making this claim paints Drake's motives as career politics and seeks to diminish his character by inferring ulterior motives. If nothing else, that isn't a productive debate.
2. Drake's complaint was not merely that it was a waste of money with inadequate technical controls. He was also not joined in his complain by William Binney.
Binney made the initial complaint, and it was to the Pentagon Inspector General, not the NSA Inspector General (if that is a thing), and he was anonymously joined by Drake and 3 others. This was in Two of the other complainants were former NSA employees who worked on the original program, and one was Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who had been trying to investigate the NSA on these matters (which is her job), and was getting stonewalled. Drake was still an NSA employee and did not want his career to be impacted, so his name was left off. Others, including Binney, who originally made the "competing system" initiated this because they felt that TrailBlazer was a modified version of ThinThread with all of the privacy protections removed and deployed domestically.
3. Drake did not concurrently leak to reporters. His contact with reporters was several years later. The first report was internally, then he went to congress, then in 2005 he finally went to the media. The Binney complaint was filed in 2012, and the internal escalations within the NSA and Congress had already been happening for years before (ultimately leading to Binney's 2001 resignation in protest).
Drake's hushmail communication was to Gorman of the WSJ about Trailblazer, not James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of NYT, who instead had a totally different story, which was the AT&T warrantless surveillance issue. He set some ground rules for his communication with Gorman, one of which was that he would not reveal anything classified. He maintains that he never did. The outcome of the trial was that he never did. Yes, this contradicts the indictment, for very obvious reasons.
Risen/NYT on the warrantless AT&T issue was a totally different story and in fact had nothing to do with Drake! The investigators of the leak thought the sources might have been the same, and they were wrong.
I bring up ThinThread because the article paints Drake as someone who was motivated to blow the whistle based on the same concerns Snowden had. But that's not what happened. Both ThinThread and Trailblazer were in large part motivated by concerns that more and more SIGINT had a nexus in the US, and that large-scale systems needed to be implemented to capture intelligence that had a US nexus.
When you look at the Drake complaint to the NSA IG through the lens of Snowden, your natural reaction is that the NSA was pushing the concern aside out of C.Y.A., to prevent the public from learning that it was monitoring US comms. But in fact, Drake's complaint is about how Trailblazer was monitoring US comms; the privacy concerns it had were procedural and not substantive. It wasn't stark, the way the article makes it out to be.
I was imprecise about the word "concurrent". My frame of reference was "between the numbered steps in my outline". You're right to correct me. Either way, the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't the IG complaint that got Drake in trouble; it was the communication with reporters.
You can believe that the communications with the press were proper (I don't agree) or in the public interest to the extent that they overrode "proper" (I do agree). But either way, you should be able to agree with me that in an article that is entirely about what happens when insiders at NSA raise concerns through official channels, the fact that Drake got in trouble primarily for what he did through unofficial channels is important to the story, and should have been prominently included.
I agree that if we're going to hold Guardian stories to the standards of Hacker News comments, I have much less of a case. That article would make a fine Hacker News comment.
The only classified information ever found was in Drake's house, and the court found that there was no evidence that it was passed to a reporter or anyone else. This is entirely consistent with what this article's source claims a whistleblower would be told to do.
The worst thing he did was violate a document retention policy and store classified information on uncleared devices. And if you're a whistleblower providing evidence, well...no shit?
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fgt8bg4fykz0b7x/Screenshot%202016-...
Second, whatever reasons he had for violating the NSA's process are besides the point. The lede of this story is that following NSA's internal procedures for blowing the whistle will result in NSA destroying your life. But as evidence for that argument, they marshall the story of Thomas Drake, where that is not at all what happened. It's critically important to the story that readers know that he did not simply follow protocol and then get punished for it. Instead, he followed protocol, was dissatisfied with its outcome, and then flagrantly and repeatedly broke protocol.
It's a very convenient strategy to try to hold my argument to account for what happened to Thomas Drake. But the point of my argument isn't Thomas Drake; it's the extraordinarily well-known and easily-acquired information about the Drake case that The Guardian not only left out but by repeated implication contradicted in writing this story. Just because the story lands on a conclusion you're comfortable with doesn't mean you should be comfortable with the story.
And for you the key part is that, when the protocols fail and are subverted by the IG agency, Drake is in the wrong? Wow.
Do you seriously not understand how indictments work? Why would you use them as your source for an account of the events? The whole point of an indictment, which consists entirely of unproven allegations by design, is to throw everything possible at the target and paint the worst possible picture to make your case. It's not a finding of facts and it's not an impartial document.
Lying in an indictment would not be news in any way whatsoever. Not lying in an indictment would be news. But it's not really considered lying.
What part of what I said do you think is a DOJ lie? Based on things Drake has conceded elsewhere, your claim may be more or less rebuttable. You have to actually make the claim before we can discern that.
The eternal line that makes law inefficient, and "government secrets" or "spy agencies" utterly untenable.
If you uncover something that seems very wrong, you are probably safe pushing back a little and making the matter known to your superiors. But if that isn't working, the best course of action is to get out. It won't stop the crap from happening, but you did all you could do without taking some very big personal risks, and at least the blood won't be on your hands.