I Was a CIA Whistleblower, Now I'm a Black Inmate | Hacker News Reader

I Was a CIA Whistleblower, Now I'm a Black Inmate

theintercept.com

153 points3chelon59 comments

As background:

Sterling was convicted after it discovered that he'd been leaking details of "Operation Merlin" to reporter James Risen. "Merlin" was a scheme in which blueprints for Russian nuclear arms technology was to be altered, such that attempts to test those weapons would fail, and then passed through to Iran's nuclear program. "Merlin" ultimately failed.

so where is the public interest to justify whistleblowing?

Here I am veering from simply providing a précis to something closer to analysis, but not too close --- I think this is uncontroversial:

Sterling isn't in prison for "whistleblowing", which describes the actions he took to alert the Senate Intelligence Committee to his concerns about "Merlin" and his complaints to CIA's IG about racial discrimination inside the agency. He's in prison for leaking details of a sensitive counterproliferation operation to a reporter, which is something else.

Of course no whistle-blower ever got convicted of 'something else' as an act of retaliation for the whistle-blowing.

I guess, but that's a difficult argument to falsify; you could make the same claim about pretty much any prosecution.

There are a small number of whistle blowers and a small % of the population get's prosecuted. If public whistle blowers in the intelligence community are over represented in the second group there is likely a connection.

Note: Selective prosecution means this holds up even if they really did the other thing.

No, you can only make those claims about defendants who in the past have attempted to blow the whistle on something and who then subsequently also got convicted for something else.

Given that the number of whistle-blowers is relatively small and that as a rule their lives turn to merry hell after they blow their whistle and that not rarely they are then prosecuted for something unrelated the claim is in fact not about 'pretty much any prosecution', even though you could make that claim that's not what I did.

I make the - simple to verify - claim that whistle-blowers tend to be punished in ways that have at first sight nothing to do with their blowing the whistle.

In fact I think you will find it rather harder to find examples of whistle-blowers that did not find some form of retaliation (through legal means or otherwise) on their path.

You're moving the goalposts. The original comment you wrote, which I responded to, suggested that whistleblowers were routinely convicted of other crimes as retaliation. That's a point I'm interested in litigating. The fuzzier point is less interesting to me.

Especially considering that the leaking happened in 2003 and he was charged in 2011!

As a counterpoint, here's what I expect Sterling and The Intercept might argue:

Sterling unsuccessfully raised several concerns, including criticisms of Merlin, internally with the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Getting no results, he turned to external whistleblowing through a Pulitzer-winning reporter.

This is in keeping with Thomas Drake's behavior - after being punished for attempting to use internal whistleblowing, he went outside the government and was given a minimal suspended sentence akin to what Sterling might have expected.

Both are forms of "whistleblowing": one within proper channels; the other, directly to the press. That's why Snowden is commonly referred to as a "whistleblower", without disservice to the term -- because he (prudently, in the view of many) saw it necessary and proper to bypass government channels, given the gravity of abuses he had become witness (and tacit accomplice) to.

Though in Sterling's case it is clear that his prison sentence is (ostensibly) for his having done the latter, not the former.

Not an U.S. citizen, just a wild guess: It's not very wise to give somebody, even altered, nuclear blueprints. It's a similar type of stupid stuff that NSA does when it puts backdoors into devices or cryptosystems.

It's not a bad plan as the idea is that the victim would spend billions developing a weapon that is flawed from the drawing board. Nothing would work right and they would have to start over setting them back many years from a workable weapon.

Rewrites are a bad idea in software, where the code has no cost, and are an even worse idea in physical projects. Starting with a a slightly flawed design is much, much closer to a working weapon than starting from scratch.

It would be incredibly naïve for the victim to assume their stolen plans are perfect and perfectly implemented. They would run the test, it doesn't work quite right, they fix the flaws, and they're now far ahead of where they would have been.

It is a bad idea if you grossly underestimate the operational competence and general cognitive fortitude of your adversaries, as the CIA appears to have done in this case. (Apparently the alterations were easy to spot, and it turns out the Iranians weren't so dumb as to blindly go out and execute them, as the operation's planners had hoped).

It's a terrible plan if you forget to account for the fact that the victim likely employs smart people too, and that before setting out on a billion dollar endeavour they might do a lot of cross checking. And indeed that's what happened, and much quicker than planned:

"Operation Merlin backfired when the CIA's Russian contact/messenger noticed flaws in the schematics and told the Iranian nuclear scientists."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Merlin

Well if they were getting the blueprints somehow anyway, subtle alterations to make them fail aren't a bad idea. The similarities with stuxnet are obvious, and that worked pretty well.

There's not really an analogy with student to make.

One program sabotaged the operation of existing technologies.

The other program advanced the technological state of nuclear weapon development in hopes that its flaws wouldn't be discovered until operation.

At best, this program pushed the Iranian nuclear program two steps ahead and one step back.

It turns out that a bunch of tacit knowledge is required to build working nuclear weapons. The designs are not sufficient at all, and it does make sense that you might be able to deter development by subtly leading developers down known dead-ends.

http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/awc/2013_buffet.pdf

> The Soviet and British programs, and in fact all subsequent nuclear programs, took longer to produce initial results than the original 23-month Manhattan Project. Each program involved hundreds to thousands of science staff and each faced substantial practical problems. MacKenzie and Spinardi posed that the spread of nuclear weapon capacity following the Manhattan Project progressed more along the lines of re-invention than technology transfer.

The blueprints weren't altered enough, apparently, and the Iranians were still able to use them to advance their nuclear program. Thus, it was sheer stupidity on the CIA's part.

And you know what you don't do? Point out the big, mean guy's stupidity in public. He gets angry.

As I understand it --- corrections welcome --- he leaked details of the program while it was still in progress.

And when Snowden was in flight from HK to Moscow, he was a fugitive, until he "was actually in the company of a legal adviser."

What you say, and how you say it, affects perception. The CIA understands this. The only solution is to eradicate death and suffering on the planet.

But within the government mistakes are made all the time, should every mistake be publicly acknowledged as it happens?

There's a mistake (painting the wrong building), and there are "mistakes", like Fast and Furious[1]. Doing something extremely risky in a half-assed manner and chalking it up to a "mistake" is just trying to shirk responsibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATF_gunwalking_scandal

Yes.

Our own government gave nuclear secrets to our enemy which hastened their progress towards nuclear weapons. The CIA should be held accountable for endangering the US and its allies.

If the CIA is going to be modelling their operations after Charlie Stross short stories, they might want to actually read to the end: http://www.tor.com/2012/07/20/a-tall-tail/

tl;dr: doesn't go well there either.

I can see them imitating all the mistakes of A Colder War too, if only they had access to tools this dangerous: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

Further evidence that "Three Days of the Condor" is prophetic.

Lots of comments here about the information he leaked from the CIA and zilch about race. This article isn't about the CIA; it's about racism in America.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Racism in America vs natural segregation vs enforced segregation. Let's talk about how ice makers only provide 1 thing, but TVs provide many channels. Personal preference or group mentality. Would everyone in that prison be OK with watching ESPN or Cops? What differences drive the differences in programming? How does innate racism fit in?

Off topic but what is the name for this (as a style element?):

> "Man, this is prison."

> "Man, this is America."

If I get what you're saying...

1: Regular text

2: >greentext

On 4chan, starting a line with ">" makes the text green, hence the name. It is often used to write stories in the present tense, as in:

>be me

>be bored at work

>go on HN

>lol new* can't even greentext.

>told him to delete system32

I don't think the GP is asking about quoting, but about the slightly altered repetition. "This is prison." "This is America."

The best I can do for giving a name to it is [literary parallelism][0]. There may be a more specific poetic term, but I don't know it and couldn't come up with it.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallelism_(rhetoric)

I believe this an Anaphora, even if in this case, repetition are not really close to each other

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphora_%28rhetoric%29

Linked from there is "symploce", which may be a better match?

That's a fun question. The style element that repeats the leading parts of sentences is called anaphora, but it's usually used to emphasize the repeated part. Here it is more used to illustrate the (supposed, but lamented) contrast between society in and out of prison.

On the whole, I'd say the expression is a form of dramatic sarcasm.

He wasn't a whistleblower: he was a leaker. He permitted national-security information to fall into the hands of someone not cleared to handle it.

Moreover, he shows not one whit of repentance for his crime.

To be fair, very early on he says, "I was charged with, and a jury convicted me of, leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter."

He doesn't try to protest his innocence.

> He doesn't try to protest his innocence.

No, but neither does he seem to have any real recognition that he did wrong.

Indeed, reading his article I get the sense that he's a narcissist.

Maybe don't assume that he's wrong. You only see what government presents to you about him. And you know, government would never make itself look bad.

It's an article in The Intercept. That isn't a publication that is known for making government look good.

Yeah. I have to turn my propaganda shades the other way round when I read that site - if you mix it up with Fox News you get a nice balanced world view!

For a view from the other side of political spectrum: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/twist...

> No, but neither does he seem to have any real recognition that he did wrong.

That's not what the article is about. He provides enough information to establish where he is and why.

You're looking for something that the author is apparently not interested in writing about. Why? No idea, but it's not terribly pertinent to the remainder.

Hmmm... sorta like Petraeus, then?

> He wasn't a whistleblower: he was a leaker.

So were Manning and Snowden.

In the end he was partly vindicated by the fact that Merlin (if other comments here are accurate) eventually put an operational weapon in the hands of Iran, a scenario he saw and presumably tried to avoid.

We will probably never know if anyone responsible for this program actually intended to arm Iran, but intentionally arming our enemies is not an unheard of tactic used by covert elements of our government to later justify use of force.

You're talking about Daniel Ellsberg?

He's also a legitimate whistleblower, for his disclosures to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2003 (which the government concedes went through proper channels).

Moreover, he shows not one whit of repentance for his crime.

I haven't looked into Sterling's own statements about the matter; but I would imagine that it had to do with his assessment that the operation he was exposing was so reckless (not just in execution; but in the very conception of the idea of attempting to spoof the Iranians with flawed weapon design plans that they can easily cross-reference with other sources) that he felt the general public had a right to know about it, which trumped the proscriptions of the various statutes which he is alleged to have violated.

You don't have to agree with with this stance. But arguably the public does benefit greatly from having this information become generally known.

I hope you change your mind one day.

So, honest question: Why does HN seem to have a consistent morbid curiosity, regarding the CIA?

I count at least one post a month, in the front page, in which the CIA is the main focus and topic.

Given the regularity of recurrence, I question whether it's honest intrigue, or something more subversive, like a an informational recruitment and promotion campaign, complete with informational reinforcement components.

(in this example, we find out what happens to employees and entrusted individuals who spill the beans, or whatever, who cares, big deal...)

It's funny how they say "these disclosures put lives at risk", and put him into prison. Because prison is itself risky and torturous.

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