NSA Watchdog Removed for Whistleblower Retaliation | Hacker News Reader

NSA Watchdog Removed for Whistleblower Retaliation

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212 pointsrosser46 comments

So the Watchdog RETALIATED against some one who brought wrongdoing to light... Isn't this jokers Job Description pretty much the protection of exactly these whistle blowers ?

The cognitive dissonance here is almost too much to bear

> The cognitive dissonance here is almost too much to bear

The cognitive dissonance is now everywhere. It permeates our systems.

The Greatest Country on Earth (tm) looking to crucify the defender of democracy and freedom and effectively forcing him into finding protection in a communist regime.

Approximately 50% of American citizens are made to believe Snowden is a traitor.

The list goes on. And the situation has literally reached biblical proportions. Signs are now on the wall.

> And the situation has literally reached biblical proportions.

Not sure what part of the bible is literally in proportion here.

J on the cross.

Did you just say Snowden is equivalent to Jesus?

We're crucifying democracy. Is it really that hard to see?

Trying to establish an equivalence between a man and a political system seems a _touch_ cult-of-personality-like don't you think?

I think there are plenty of defensible arguments one can give to say that Edward Snowden is not a traitor, but pearl-clutching hyperbolics leave me completely unconvinced.

I don't think it is necessary for Snowden to be "equivalent to" democracy for his treatment to be seen as akin to the crucifixion of democracy. He did bring to light one of the worst subversions of democracy we've ever known. He is being crucified for aiding democratic institutions reestablish their will, including by those very institutions he aided.

This can quite reasonably be interpreted as democracy being crucified, without Snowden himself "being" Democracy.

Why should anyone need to convince you of it? You're an adult, you can read and write. Own your own progress, or lack of it.

What does democracy have to do with Jesus? Like most monotheistic religions, Christianity is incredibly authoritarian. Christians don't vote on what God does. He does what He wants, and it's beyond even the comprehension of mere mortals, much less our control.

Because it's not literally, it's figurative.

It has been always like this, it's just now harder to sip the koolaid.

I almost resisted making this comment because it's not directly on topic, but I feel compelled to say that the notion that present-day Russia is in any way communist is just laughable.

> Approximately 50% of American citizens are made to believe Snowden is a traitor.

He took highly-classified information to China & Russia. What other word than 'traitor' applies?

He's not 'the defender of democracy and freedom'; he's a criminal, a spy and — yes — a traitor.

Nothing he has alleged is illegal or unconstitutional (the Constitution does not mandate all good things, nor does it forbid all bad things). He didn't expose massive wrongdoing: he exposed lawful, constitutional intelligence operations.

I know I'm going to get downvoted to hell, but honestly I don't care: it is both correct and should not be forgotten that Mr. Snowden broke the law and violated the trust which his nation put in him.

I would be careful to separate out exactly what trust he violated. He certainly violated the trust of his superiors. He certainly upheld the trust of his nation - that is to say, all of us being spied upon by those superiors.

Remember, it is up to us citizens to tell our government what we will or won't accept as proper behavior, no matter what legal framework the government tries to surround us with.

> He took highly-classified information to China & Russia. What other word than 'traitor' applies?

Do you guys keep repeating falshoods over and over again even in the face of evidence to the contrary for a reason? Do you think if you keep spouting lies they will somehow become true?

He leaked the information to journalists globally. He didn't hand the information over to China or Russia. Whatever information they might have on US surveillance operations came from the same leaks the journalists have chosen to release. Snowden was not in possession of any documents by the time he arrived in Russia.

> he's a criminal, a spy and — yes — a traitor.

A criminal under the espionage act yes, but he's also a whistleblower that is being denied whisteblower protections.

A spy? I assume you have some proof of this otherwise you are talking out of your ass.

A traitor? A traitor to his superiors maybe. His loyalty was to the American people first and foremost, not the government. As yours should be. He betrayed a secretive, undemocratic practice by an unaccountable government. The people should be singing his praises because he acted in the very interests of the Republic and its people, you know that thing you all claim to love and protect in your weird, cult-like pledges of allegiance that you force your kids to recite? The fact that you have been convinced by those that don't have your interests at heart that a man that was trying to help you is your enemy is the ultimate fucking tragedy here.

he broke the law, but he didn't bring the classified info to those governments. by all accounts he has shielded that info from them, that he did share with journalists. I can't understand why you make these mis-statements.

> Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do.

I think this says it all. Even if you don't retaliate, if the way you deal with a whistleblower who brings illegal activity to your attention is to explain to them why it's okay rather than do something about it, then you shouldn't really be surprised if whistleblowers lose trust in the organization's ability to police itself.

> Even if you don't retaliate, if the way you deal with a whistleblower who brings illegal activity to your attention is to explain to them why it's okay rather than do something about it, then you shouldn't really be surprised if whistleblowers lose trust in the organization's ability to police itself.

You're begging the question by assuming that the activity a whistleblower reports is illegal. He could actually be mistaken; in that case explaining to him why it's okay to do something is precisely the correct action to take.

Generally speaking, a whistle-blower will be probably want to report something that he or she believes to be somewhere between blatantly unethical and morally questionable, and illegality will only come into play under the assumption that an illegal act is automatically dubious, at minimum.

It could be something like "Mr. X is submitting exactly the same report with only the dates changed on subsequent days to meet his analysis quotas". That's legal, but unethical.

Now, the whistle-keeper should be expected to at least investigate the facts as reported by the whistle-blower, rather than say, "You didn't really see what you saw. Maybe Mr. X actually did redo the analysis work on subsequent days and just coincidentally got the same results? Nothing to see here; case closed."

The whistle-keeper has a duty to anonymize the source by independently investigating, then to determine whether the complaint is actionable, escalate appropriately, and then tell the original source(s) what was done and why. If you aren't doing that, you're at best a black hole for complaints, and at worst a honeypot for snaring employees that won't "go along to get along". Then potential whistle-blowers will recognize your disingenuous uselessness, and route around it by going further up the chain of command or leaking to an outsider.

In order for whistle-blower protection to work, the ethics hotline has to do its freaking job and be trustworthy.

>You're begging the question by assuming that the activity a whistleblower reports is illegal.

In this particular case, we know that (some of) the activity reported was illegal. The fact that, even with this being known publicly, the "watchdog"'s response is still to explain why the activity is okay is a problem.

It is generally accepted that at least some of the activities Snowden was concerned about were in fact illegal.

Now, Snowden isn't a judge, nor would he have had complete knowledge of what was going on. He couldn't have known for sure that the activities were illegal.

But, unless you take the view that Snowden maliciously revealed activities he actually believed were legal, he at least had reasonable suspicions that they weren't. The job of somebody to whom whistleblowers report is to take that seriously.

Perhaps, in many cases, the reasonable suspicions are unfounded. Perhaps there is a byzantine legal framework in place that makes apparently illegal activity technical legal. Perhaps Snowden's concerns had already been raised by others through the proper channels, investigated, and found to be unfounded.

Regardless of that, we know that in this case some of the things Snowden reported on were illegal, and that going by the "proper channels" did not result in illegal activity being detected and stopped.

Unless we imagine that Snowden is lying about having tried to report it to the agency first, and that nobody else amongst the hundreds of thousands - speculatively: the true number is classified - of NSA employees and contractors had both the knowledge of illegal activity and enough concern about it to report it through the proper channels.

Whatever the case. The part of the NSA that is tasked with detecting and preventing illegal operations hasn't done that for what appear to be some pretty big operations.

Either it didn't care that the operations were illegal, it didn't know they were illegal, or it didn't even know they were happening. None of those possibilities reflect well on the watchdog.

I sometimes forget that the wheels of government often turn slowly, but they do turn.

It's unfortunate that so much damage was caused by the time this took (and the lack of trust from the lower ranks of the leadership), but it sounds like (at least to some degree) things are improving. I know Im often one of the harshest critics of the NSA (and related agencies), but it's important to acknowledge when things are well handled.

I just wish they would help us play a little defense. The nation needs leadership in transitioning the infrastructure of democracy -- media, information, social ties, and speech -- to resilient digital platforms. The military has long produced leaders on which the country could rely, and we're sorely in need of their service to counter the influence of those who seek to weaken democracy using technology.

When the military is willing to whip the public into a media-fear-frenzy about terrorism, rather than speaking about the real numerical size of the risk and why we should focus on any things, they deserve no credit.

I just don't remotely agree.

Firstly, the military isn't one homogenous organization, and can be sharply internally divided in a way they don't often expose to the public. And to a large extent, their message is set by partisan civilian leaders.

Secondly, failures in one area doesn't negate progress in another -- and that the leader of the NSA immediately fired their IG when other IGs found an issue with performance is a big deal. That's a fundamental change in policy and accountability to civilian authority.

We can't be purely antagonistic to the military. We demanded they change course, and a few years later, they've clearly changed how they handle these matters.

For a bureaucracy the size of the DoD, that's lightning speed.

> That's a fundamental change in policy and accountability to civilian authority.

It doesn't sound like a change in policy; it sounds like it's been the policy for quite some time (proposed on 2012, implemented in 2013).

These changes had been ordered but not implemented by the time of the Snowden leaks. The current head of the NSA was appointed in 2014, after both the policy implementation and Snowden leaks had happened. Within two years of his appointment, the IG was being investigated for whistleblower retaliation.

I don't know what you expect, but getting a large bereaucratic organization to have a major shake-up like that within a few years is fast, and so far as I can tell, the NSA has made major changes in the last few years, for the better.

Even if you dont believe in the rest of it, the behavior of the admiral sends a message to those serving under him: "I took on the IG, a career politician, to defend this change in policy, and I expect similar performance from my staff." The military fundamentally operates on such acts of leadership and direction, and that alone can have a huge impact on how they operate.

The whistle-blower is still working at some app store, and the administrator who illegally crucified him is still on payroll. Meanwhile, thousands of reports of wrongdoing are "resolved" quietly by that office. What exactly is getting better?

Lots of wrongful terminations end with the wronged employee still working elsewhere. There's limits to what we can do to fix that.

Similarly, the guy is still technically on the payroll pending an appeal to the head of the DoD, which is a fair procedural step because we don't want military heads to simply can IGs they don't like.

However, having a high-level civilian panel investigate the behavior of their IG and having the military head of the agency immediately fire him based on their report is a serious turn-around on how much of this has been handled to date.

Even if the civilian authority ultimately reinstates the IG, I suspect that the same admiral who fired him is making quieter moves to shake up the military command, who form the backbone of NSA operations.

For a group who used to be referred to as "No Such Agency" to publicly fire their IG after inviting civilian oversight and inspection is a signal of an internal shift in policy.

> Ellard declared, arguing that the leaker, now a fugitive in Russia, would have received the same protections as other NSA employees, who file some one thousand reports annually to the agency’s hotline.

Am I misunderstanding this line? It sounds like the NSA is constantly doing some stuff that many of its own employees find horribly abusive, and then sweeping the reports under the rug as "resolved". How the hell was this information meant to engender confidence?

That a thousand reports are filed doesn't mean that a thousand issues are found, and even where actual issues are found that doesn't mean that they are all 'horribly abusive.'

The mere fact that someone reports behaviour doesn't mean that a) the behaviour is criminal or b) the behaviour exists. No doubt people file false reports, and true reports of legal actions, all the time. Individuals can be incorrect: that's why there are processes in place to take a clear look at allegations and determine their veracity.

How many organizations do you know that have a thousand whistleblower issues a year?

It's a pretty interesting number, and worthwhile comparing to organizations of similar size.

I'm no fan of the NSA, but the number of reports means nothing if a large percentage of them don't actually involve them doing anything "wrong."

A friend is a regional HR director at a large corporation I used to work for (120k employees). There was an ethics hotline to report bad behavior, and he saw most of the complaints that came through for his region. Most were groundless.

In fact, one was a report on me because I wouldn't exclude a poor customer survey score for one of my indirect reports. That score affected her ranking for raises, etc.

When that went nowhere, she reported me to the FBI. Not even kidding. Some people are nuts, and some nuts file lots of reports.

On the other hand, a large number of whistleblower reports is an interesting signal. You can probably do a rough comparison with other organizations (even spook orgs) and use that to get a sense if things are going sour; order of magnitude matters.

Yes, but what does the number mean? Indeed my reaction would not have been much different if the number of reports had been 100, or 10,000 - adding and/or dropping a zero and seeing if your reaction changes is a good test to see if you've really learned anything from a number - a Feynman trick, I think?

So to ground my sense of scale I looked at Wiki. Wiki tells me the NSA has 30-40,000 employees (accurate? who knows). So apparently about 2-3% annually use this "hotline", whatever it is.

Is that a big amount or a little amount? Hard to tell without knowing the culture around using it. Are there forms to fill in, do you speak to an operator, what? What range of things does it cover - everything from "I think PRISM is unconstitutional" to "I caught coworker Bob stalking his ex on XKeyscore"? If not everything, then where do you complain about the other things? What, exactly, are the "official channels"?

<meta>

Pardon me for going meta for a minute here.

The parent comment was downvoted.

Yet it is entirely correct, civilly worded, and contributes to the discussion.

I hypothesize that this is because it is not a productive place to end the thought. I don't think a comment deserves to be downvoted for that. The right response isn't "no", it's "yes, but...". That "yes" should mean an upvote, if we are trying to form a collaborative thought process here rather than each individual simply leaving their mark.

</meta>

On a tangential note:

> Meanwhile, the ICIG’s handling of what began as a whistleblower complaint against Ellard sends an encouraging signal to those who may report wrongdoing at 17 US intelligence agencies

We have 17 intelligence agencies?!??

Wikipedia only reports 16 [0], but you're looking at each of the armed forces separately having their own, as well as the DIA, plus departments like State and Energy, the FBI, and the CIA. Each has their own particular remit, but among other things, this is why we created a Director of National Intelligence after 9/11 to (hopefully) better coordinate among them.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Intelligence_C...

The 17 count probably includes ODNI itself sitting atop the other 16.

You would think it is the NSAs best interest to treat people who report issues within the organisation well, so that they don't go externally.

Not just treat the people well, but address the problems exposed. The NSA shouldn't really address problems with the NSA, whistleblowers should report to Congress.

Seems like a damned if you do, damned if you don't type of situation. One wonders if the guy's job description basically contained, "Stop leaks of NSA overreach, while advocating for those who have concerns about NSA overreach."

Kind of like how the NSA's job description is "Guard the security of communications technologies and encryption standards. Also, hack everyone."

Sounds to me like he was a honeypot.

Sure, keep your job or uphold the fundementals of democracy. Although he lost his job explicitly for optimizing towards the former. If he instead did the latter he would be less likely to be fired, because that would have looked as bad as the leaks he tried to contain.

If I'm not tripping anywhere, the only sound choice is the latter, both morally and professionally.

I cannot but read this: > Ellard declared, arguing that the leaker, now a fugitive in Russia, would have received the same protections as other NSA employees,

as "the same protection as", i.e. none.

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