The FBI tried to ambush my source
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
From personal experience being targeted with harassment and vexatious litigation by a fantasist conman, many of his victims and enablers will sometimes admit he often lies or 'exaggerates', but the reality is that he virtually always lies, that his documents are either completely uninteresting but misrepresented or interesting but obvious forgeries. When confronted with irrefutable proof of his deception his victims and enablers make excuses or treat it as a one or few time issue, failing to accept that it's just another example out of thousands. Risen's description-- including features like the corrupted USB stick-- resonate for me.
Except that Risen said he already met the source. The ambush was for their follow-up meeting.
If they'd met in person why were they traveling to a far off country?
People seem to do this with a lot of things. Their favorite pop stars, companies, countries, ideologies, etc.
The FBI could have known who the source was, confirmed that he would have access to the kind of data being discussed, but couldn't show he had taken classified information so needed to catch him in possession of illegal documents to arrest him.
I love that movie, too, but wouldn't it make more sense to fly into Schiphol with a Brompton and pedal up to Haarlem to meet the source? It seems like it'd be a lot harder for the FBI guys to track you, and it'd be a lot quicker, too, and you'd still get to see the canals and old cobble streets and buildings and all that.
> The FBI team in Bruges waited and waited, according to the lawyer, frustrated and in vain.
More seriously, what appeals to me about films like that is how 'real life' crime (as far as I can know) is not like a glamourised action movie. It is more haphazard, and contingent on personal decisions and people's character flaws.
For me, the line 'I am sorry I called you an inanimate object. I was upset' is more real than any number of Godfather movies.
>The lawyer seemed to be an adrenaline junkie, someone who had found a home on the dark side of international intelligence.
one can do it only while working on some US intelligence service.
>the then-attorney general denied the request and was furious that it had been put in writing
beautiful. Looks like somebody in FBI nicely covered their own bottom with the Attorney General himself - " ... as was previously discussed the USB drive containing data dump from the broken in computer of the journalist trying to report on the NSA illegal spying ..." or something like that :)
There doesn't seem to be any reason to credit any particular novel detail in this... whatever this is. The details already related in Schmidt's book could be believed, I guess, but basically just amount to "FBI boondoggle to Europe". Wow that's news. We're not told who the go-between was, who the various parties in Belgium were, anything at all about why anyone believed "the source" was worth thinking about or even existed.
It almost seems intended to embarrass Grayden Ridd, since his is the only name mentioned. [EDIT: removed dumb question] At the time he may have been an FBI agent, though he also appears to be a documentary filmmaker and lawyer. DDG seems to believe he is associated with various IMDB entries, but that association has been deleted from IMDB. Risen's relationship with FBI is not as adversarial as portrayed here. No matter how he deflects, it seems unlikely to distract from the poor publicity FBI have recently. One suspects the real news, which if anything about this is true we'll learn years from now, is the identity of the go-between.
There's a reference to court testimony by FBI agent Grayden Ridd in this 2013 story about Robert McFarlane (of Iran-Contra infamy). https://www.cnn.com/2013/03/21/us/mcfarlane-sudan/index.html
(I somehow didn't see in the news that McFarlane died last month.)
Still, I am not sure if it is a good sign that the story presented, if true, seems more intriguing than average "Blacklist" episode. I would normally default to blaming X ( in this case Holder, Pompeo and Trump as they are named in the story ), but the reality is those are just people, who just happened to use that power.
The issue is that unchecked power apparently will exist until a truly unscrupulous man uses it to his advantage ( if that did not happen already ).
Your point still stands though regardless
The linked article, however, does list the following paragraph:
"The Trump administration went to even greater extremes than its predecessor to target the press. In 2017, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo reportedly considered kidnapping WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who at the time was living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Yahoo News reported last September that former President Donald Trump even raised the possibility of assassinating Assange. Pompeo was reportedly obsessed with targeting Assange after a massive leak of CIA hacking tools, known as Vault 7. WikiLeaks published Vault 7 documents in 2017, revealing that the CIA had the ability to hack the computer systems built into a wide range of consumer products, including cars, televisions, and home appliances. In April 2017, Pompeo labeled WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service.”"
I don't think it reads as made up, but it really does seem like there's not really anything there.
A meeting that did not happen with someone that may or may not have had something....
A separate issue mentioned, but was a completely separate event, was the DOJ trying to force the journalist into revealing a different source in a different leak. This does not seem fine, but it also failed
I don't doubt that most folks at these agencies are hard-working Americans who believe they're doing what's best for our country. Having said that, this kind of unchecked power is dangerous.
Its as valid of a stance, for an individual, as a different individual choosing to privilege a way in which one party is different.
The duopoly doesn't benefit from making a more fair and inclusive system that allows for a greater diversity of political involvement.
"It's a big club, and you're not in it." -- George Carlin
Established elites make a show of opposing IRV/AV/RCV because centering the debate on that focusses attention there rather than on real reform, which requires systems that produce proportional results.
What systems would you prefer?
I'm straight up against any methodology that blunts the sting of no confidence in the two big parties. They should absolutely have to react to shifting priorities. That means, no safety net. Otherwise, you're handing them the same election advantage they've always enjoyed and just handwaving the entire issue.
It sounds more to me like we need to start tracking negative votes (not this person) as well. It's bollocks that no confidence is treated as "I have no opinion".
FTA:
> The practical consequences of the theorem are debatable: Arrow has said "Most systems are not going to work badly all of the time. All I proved is that all can work badly at times
Followed by:
> Although Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, it is often expressed in a non-mathematical way with a statement such as no voting method is fair, every ranked voting method is flawed, or the only voting method that isn't flawed is a dictatorship.[11] These statements are simplifications of Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true.
Bottom line - this seems interesting, but is hardly as simple as "all ranked voting systems can be gamed".
It is almost that simple. Every deviation from the unattainable ideal in Arrow’s theorem corresponds to one or more ways that the system:
(1) can be gamed, or
(2) is insensitive to voter preferences, or
(3) changes outcomes in the opposite direction of changes in expressed voter preferences.
(And usually several from multiple categories.)
There are whole catalogs of these and enumerations of which ones apply to each voting system.
Arrow’s Theorem applies to unforced preference ranked voting systems (with or without limited numbers of preference ranks) the same way as it does to forced preference ranked systems.
This isn't necessarily intuitive, and our immediate impulse might be to object that 2^n-1 is less than n!, but as a quick informal illustration, note that the voting system where each voter assigns each candidate a score in [0,1] and selects the candidate who earns the highest sum from all voters fairly straightforwardly violates Arrow's theorem. Now, consider an approval vote where each voter rolls a single random number in the range [0,1) and vote for each candidate whose score exceeds their random number, and we get asymptotically the same result (but with some error bars). It turns out that scoring, even on a 2-point scale, is just a better primitive operation than ranking!
(Also, it helps that 2^n-1>n! for n=2,3, which covers a surprisingly large proportion of interesting elections.)
Single member districts are a disgusting thing for a society that claims to be a representative democracy. As a very simple example, rural liberals and urban conservatives effectively never get represented in our government, and that's still within the context of the false dichotomy of left/right.
But single winner ranked choice voting is still important for elected positions that necessarily must be one person, like executive seats.
Executives are neither necessarily single seat nor necessarily directly elected. When indirectly elected, the electoral body that is itself directly elected need not be elected with single-winner methods. The US, in fact, uses multiwinner elections for electing the electoral college now, though mostly using the specific method (multiseat plurality winner-take-all) whose manifest unfairness and utility in excluding minority voices is the specific reason for the existing statutory ban on multiwinner elections for Congress.
No, they wouldn't, as the problems (including duopoly) predate the changes you would reverse.
To the extent those are relevant, they magnify the problems now (with or without more districts), rather than mitigating them.
> It would be a lot harder for two parties to completely control an 8000 member congress or gerrymander that many districts.
More districts make gerrymandering easier, not harder. As does more information.
Sure, there'd be more independents (absolute count), and at least one more often, in an 8000 member House, but proportionate to the total, there'd probably be fewer, on average, than there have been with the 435 member House.
Given that, I still believe ranked choice voting is the first baby step toward more representative politics.
You could change my mind by showing that ranked choice voting systems can be taught to even the most common of midwits.
There are municipalities and states that have implemented both. Voters handle them fine.
More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair, so why are you afraid RCV will make it worse? I think it will be the opposite, since it is likely to cool the political polarization and encourage the election of more moderate politicians that a larger majority are ok with.
Yes, I like this one a lot more.
> There are municipalities and states that have implemented both.
I think for low-stake elections that most people don't vote in anyway, experimentation is relatively safe. But I wouldn't want to try anything new with fiery federal elections, particularly not the presidential election. The risk of confusion resulting in costly civil unrest is too high.
> More importantly, a large minority of people in the US who already believe the current voting system isn't fair
Yes, but they tolerate it for the most part.
Arguable after the 2020 election.
Another important aspect: if the public isn't sufficiently intelligent, or isn't interested in such things, how did that state come about? Does the government play any role in setting educational curriculum? Does the media play in any role in what the public focuses on, considers important, etc?
A large minority of them are, yes. There's millions of people in this country that flunked their way through 12 years of math class and never retained anything more than basic arithmetic. 4% of Americans are classified as "functionally illiterate", that's 13 million people who effectively can't even read.
The point of democracy is to placate everybody, not just the smarter portion of society, so the mechanisms of democracy should be simple enough for somebody with a simple mind to understand. "Count votes and pick who got the most" is generally such a system.
For the US, districts with e.g. 5 seats would be very interesting. The effect would be two-fold: first, more distinctiveness between candidates of the same party. Extreme example: a prolife Democrat, a gun-regulation Republican running alongside more traditional candidates. Secondly, at least some candidates outside the 2 major parties will get a seat. This probably means no more majority in House/Senate, but a need to form a coalition. That means talking with each other and reaching agreement would no longer be the newsworthy exception it is today, but would be part of the very fabric of the House/Senate.
I don't see how a different counting mechanism could lead to the same effects.
There's no "unchecked" power here. The details are complicated because the meeting was international (so presumably there was some coordination with local police), but there's no court in the nation that wouldn't immediately stamp a warrant based on the straightforward facts alleged here.
Just like the saying that a "federal prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich" like wise the FBI could get a warrant for anything they desire at any time
The warrant requirement is a not a check on power, and has not been for decades, the courts and our legal system is no longer a protector of rights, or justice and has not been for a long long long time.
But the crime is "release of classified material". That's not a rubber stamp, it's a clear allegation of criminal activity. I think your real feeling is that this material "shouldn't" have been classified (based on what you believe it contained -- the reporter never got it). And maybe that's true!
But the facts in this article are just OBVIOUSLY probable cause for a warrant, nonetheless.
The fact of the matter is the warrant system, a non-adversarial system based on flimsy assertions and often out right lies by police and agents is not now, and likely never has been a check on government power
But in this case, as I mentioned, the fourth amendment is silent. This arrest was totally OK (or would have been, had it not been spoiled) and doesn't represent any kind of government overreach at all.
Your belief that we have powerful checks on government power is clear you support a much larger and more intrusive government than I ever would, I see the government today as an unchecked dystopia novel, you think it is perfectly fine and balanced, that is more scary to me than government power. That we as a society have lost the very notion of what freedom actually is, that we has a society have come to accept the gilded cage as "freedom"
Beyond that, It comes down to the question of constitution interpretation as well. You believe the 4th amendment is silent here, you believe the FBI is operating under authorization of the 4th amendment because a law was violated, a law that seems to be protecting people that are violating the 4th amendment wholesale (the nsa), and ironic twist if I ever saw one.
You believe this because our Supreme Court has been derelict in the duty at uploading the plain and true meaning of the US Constitution for decades, you like many look to the Supreme Court for the meaning of the constitution, you have outsourced your thinking to this body, these people for whom we in society have placed on pedestal, and ironically in practice have given a title of nobility, something forbidden in the constitution.
“You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”
― Thomas Jefferson
Uh... yes? If a law was violated, that's probable cause. It's sort of a definitional thing. What legal regime do you desire that manages to pre-decide on which laws are OK to violate before the collection of evidence occurs?
This sounds like an argument against the whole idea of law enforcement, I guess? You don't think that police should have the power to seize evidence or arrest people at all? (Because before they do that, we need to decide whether the laws they're trying to enforce are acceptable to the target of the investigation, right?) I mean, that's a position. Libertarians and anarchists occasionally say stuff like that. But it's absolutely not the legal framework we live under, and I doubt you'll find much support for it among the broader electorate.
If you don't like the laws we have, then the remedy available to you is to elect a government to change the laws. You don't get to demand that we enforce them differently for the laws you don't like.
This is a specious appeal to an abstract concept, that in this case justifies autocratic power. The entire run-amok surveillance industrial complex exists precisely due to such selective enforcement. If the FBI were actually interested in achieving justice, they would be going after the highly organized traitors systematically undermining our freedoms rather than small isolated cases of individuals committing a crime while trying to expose those larger crimes. Instead we see this exact "different enforcement", but with the opposite prioritization.
And yes, the people deciding en masse to elect different representatives would be one way to fix the problem. But there are many such ways, and general normative condemnation is the way to maintain and build support for any/all of them rather than getting focused on a specific approach which may or may not work.
Using "State Secrets" laws to cover up constitutional violations is also somewhat dubious so then one has to ask what law is more important, a Federal Statute of Secrecy or the Constitution, clearly you think Federal Statute over rides the Constitution, I dont.
>>You don't think that police should have the power to seize evidence or arrest people at all?
Seize Evidence... Sure
Pre-trial confinement should be exclusively reserved for cases where there is clear and convincing evidence of a danger the individual poses to the wider public, i.e a rapist or murder...
Innocent until proven guilty right? Or do you reject that fundamental provision of the law as well, I am not sure because you seem to have a very cozy relationship with structures of authority.
We're not talking about a jury trial here! It's an arrest (attempt). The ability to detain people suspected of crimes and search their papers and persons is a core part of law enforcement. So much so, in fact, that the fourth amendment specifically calls it out and places limits on the ability. And to say it again: it is abundantly clear that those limits were not crossed in this case.
I've never been one to put full trust in any politicians or bureaucracy but the balance of value is still overwhelmingly towards democrats. The odd botched investigation is a small price for supporting democracy, human rights and climate justice.
Really? Wouldn’t most people think a Department of Justice should be actively hunting down and prosecuting those who illegally spy on US Citizens?
I mean they’re supposed to work for us, uphold our laws and constitution etc. If employees of executive branch agencies conspire to defraud citizens of the United States of their most basic rights (4th amendment?) isn’t that a crime they should be pursuing?
Instead they seem far more interested in suppressing evidence of the crime.
States, counties, for some - districts. Thirty years and I've met one representative.
America wasn't designed to operate at the current scale and it's causing considerable strife internally and externally. We're effectively the de facto world sovereign, and at the same time we the people and the collective will is so contrived as to be totally incomprehensible, largely, I would posit, as a product of federal overreach and inertia. We'd do well to refederate - California's America is not the same as Texas' nor is Florida's the same as Michigan's. It's kind of an absurdity to indicate we're a nation at this point, there are really no points of unity which bond us in this era, and that's what defines a nation. That is to say there are no more Americans.
I think we’ll come through it intact. Hopefully.
It's weird how this wasn't the case prior to 2016. Like, I distinctly recall there being a unified American culture and identity. Even between California and Texas, both considered themselves (and one another) Americans despite their differences.
Viola! Schismogenesis. Erstwhile we're competing inside of a relatively inert system with intractable inertia, and the pressure builds.
Of course the economics of the individual are poorer and poorer, as well, and at what appear to be increasing costs and that is a considerable portion of what the government ultimately does - enable commerce. And we're finding out, perhaps, that we're running on fumes.
I hope any employees of the above that read my post understand that you’re working for the wrong side.
Absolutely none of their justifications hold water, and it doesn’t matter that they catch a few bad guys. Their very existence is antithetical to a free and open society.
Edit: To expound upon this further, I believe it’s a fundamentally American viewpoint to prefer freedom over security. We can debate where those lines are all day, but the heuristic should always favor freedom/lack of control over totalitarian surveillance. This unfortunately means that some bad things are effectively “allowed” to happen, because the trade off required to eliminate them is too severe.
Edit 2: I can’t reply to any of you anymore due to the rate limit soft ban. I wish you all well. I’ll try and reply later.
Real reform has many avenues, but none of those include becoming like your own enemy, and vilifying the job. I am not a fan and not making excuses, but the wording here is impossible to agree with, except to start some kind of riot?
Why? You haven’t disagreed with my argument, only argued instead that winning against them is impossible so our only path is to submit and hope for incremental improvements by submitting extra hard.
These agencies only exist and operate (in theory) with the consent of the governed. In reality almost no one consents to this, so these agencies rely on mass apathy and ignorance. If we talk about what they’ve done wrong, and how they actively harm America a few things happen:
1) it becomes less socially acceptable to work for them, and they struggle to attract talent
2) it becomes more politically feasible to argue for their removal
The us-vs-them language is a feature, not a bug. People in large groups are (mostly) incapable of being both passionate and nuanced on the same subject. So sure, bringing up the children murdered by FBI and ATF at Waco doesn’t directly relate to ending mass illegal surveillance but it does help achieve the goal.
that is most definitely not what I said at all
Hmmm, I'm not convinced. I would have had no problem agreeing with that sentiment over two decades ago, but some extremely bad actors have made it clear that "allowing a few bad things to happen" can be orders of magnitude more brutal than I once thought possible.
You could argue you disagree with the concept, but I don’t think you could honestly argue it’s not a traditionally American position.
Honestly I think trying to suggest anything is "an American viewpoint" dismisses too much nuance. We're neither all cut from the same cloth nor are our origins similar.
Of course there is always a balance to be found, and everyone’s perspective is different, but personally I’m a 1 or a 2 in the `freedom |—————| safety` scale.
I am personally not worried about my own safety at all. Or maybe it's more fair to say that I worry no more about my safety than anyone would living under the nuclear sword of Damocles (never mind an environment out of kilter) — or that I worry no more about my safety than I would about any other's safety.
If I am older I suspect it has given me the perspective to see that we live in a time when people can do horrendous things on a scale where thousands die in a single evil event and that we should not accept this as a society — we should not hold instead to some hard-line idealism of requiring everything to be free and open.
Again, I am not personally afraid of being the target of some sort of random act of terror, nor am I naive to think that a secretive government organization given a blank check could completely eliminate such a threat. But when something horrible happens again, if our leaders were asleep at the wheel and did nothing, we could be well expected to be also enraged with them, to have expected more from them.
I don't think I even agree with your continuum of "freedom <-> safety". We're never truly "safe". To allow for bad actors to do harm is more an affront to justice if you ask me.
it makes sense when you consider that TLAs basic function is to preserve the status quo for wall street. we subvert democracy overseas to preserve corporate profits and have been doing so for many generations a la United Fruit Company, selling weapons to saudi arabia, etc.
Either way hard to not notice that cries to ‘f the man’ tend to die out as income and age rise.
With a history like that the whole agency should be disbanded. But, power will find another way to legally spy on opponents. Before the FBI it was secret service agents that were loaned out for that kind of work.
It's best explained by looking at the behavior of the US pharmaceutical corporations relative to outfits like Mexican and South American drug cartels. Both engage in the same business: selling drugs to consumers, but one is extremely violent, one is not. Most of the violence in the illegal drug trade is cartel-on-cartel violence, with a fair amount of innocent bystanders. Imagine if say, Purdue Pharma or Gilead were conducting armed raids on each other production lines, hijacking each others shipments, etc. Similarly, what if a mid-level manager at Johnson & Johnson were to abscond with millions of dollars in product and set up a rival operation?
These corporations are all ultimately owned by Wall Street investors, by and large. This is who the FBI is there to serve and protect, a lot of people misunderstand that. They prevent such shenanigans as the drug cartels get up to (wholesale murder I mean) by investigating internal corporate crimes of that nature. Otherwise, the CEOs would be hiring private security (like cartel enforcers) to crack down on such things, in a extrajudicial process. The FBI also covers for the crimes of the mighty and powerful, too - HSBC laundering $2 billion in Sinaloa cartel drug money comes to mind, and then future FBI Director James Comey went to 'advise' them. No criminal charges were brought.
If we look at Wall Street as a kind of white-collar organized crime ring, the FBI is basically their enforcement arm. This is why so many top top-level FBI types 'retire' to lucrative positions in Wall Street firms, as Mueller did. It's a rather telling trend.
I suppose the kind of political operations they get up to are also in service of this general agenda, i.e. going after politicians who threaten Wall Street interests, covering up certain outrageous crimes that would reflect badly on the pillars of society, and so on. Overall, rather similar in function to the Soviet NKVD and the German Gestapo (and later, STASI), although not quite as powerful (they still can be embarrassed in legal proceedings, see the Steven Hatfill case, the Leonard Peltier case, etc.).
So, they serve a particular function for their Wall Street masters, but it's a pretty sleazy world they live in, and nobody should trust them anymore than you'd trust some STASI operative.
Idk part of my is still convinced that the Chauvin decision was in part a way to placate the absolute destruction proceeding it. Particularly as much more cut and dry cases that don’t attract as much of a visocus response end with the cops getting away with gunning people down who we’re even criminals
All the evidence suggests Obama was Their Man from the beginning. (E.g. expanding "death from the sky" program -- even against a US citizen and his children, weaponizing Espionage Act against reporters & whistleblowers.) Most interesting to me is how They arranged to get him a Nobel Peace prize for nothing. (They got one for Kissinger, too!)
what do you suggest we do about it? We have no meaningful recourse against the myriad of government abuses.
Unorganized, uncoordinated complaining on various internet forums, it seems not much comes out of this.
In the end the only people being held responsible for anything seem to be the people who warn us and let us know.
Second biggest is what it was about.
It was a PSY-OP against the US public. The stories, about e.g. spying via ESP, were false. They are still believed by most who have heard of the code name and supposed investigation. So, a successful operation against us.
Risen has long been a mouthpiece for military industrial complex CIA-esque talking points, and nobody should trust anything he says. I wouldn't be surprised if this story is some strange cover for him designed to make him seem like a "real" journalist, but even in this story he admits he used this dubious lawyer frequently. He says he doesn't know when the lawyer started informing on him, but an educated guess would say he always was! Was the source ever even real, or a honeypot in the first place? (source didn't go to this meeting why?) Risen fails to do even fundamental reporting on how he got the information in this story (he obtained audio recordings... how?!)
Risen says this lawyer gave a masterful performance to the FBI. Risen could at least try to do the same when trying to blow smoke at the public. This story makes no sense and Risen should be considered useless as journalist.
For what it's worth, I've been reading The Intercept since it started and he was always raked across the coals in the now disabled-unless-logged-in comments for methods like this since he came over from the NYT. The Intercept itself is now barely even a shadow of it's former self.
1. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-nyt-now-admits-the-bide...
Why protect this asshole? Because he got cold feet and gave warning? This guy seems like 'quite a character' and the story unresolved without knowing who it was.
Because future sources need to trust you. Protecting sources needs to be absolute, or some of them will wonder what it takes to constitute “betrayal” in the future.
Not betraying a source that has wronged you is fantastic signalling to future sources.
The lawyer introduced the journalist to the source. So at the very least, the source seems to have trusted the lawyer too.
It also sounds like the lawyer provided the journalist with the audio recordings of phone calls about the ambush.
> Eventually, he confessed to me that the FBI had been waiting in Bruges to trap my source. He said that the FBI knew about the meeting because he had told them about it, and that he had also told the FBI that the source wanted to provide me with NSA documents. He admitted that he had been informing on me.
The journalist has spooks all over him. Whatever you think of the journalist's intentions, you'd have to be a complete fool to get near him. At least he's been honest about this much, so future leakers will be forewarned.
Not sure what this is supposed to mean exactly. It's pretty much a given that if you're reporting on national security, the government has its eyes on you.
"In January 2014 — just as the FBI was planning its ambush operation — the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to hear arguments over my subpoena in the leak case involving the mismanaged CIA program. At the time, I was facing the possibility of going to prison for refusing to reveal my sources if the Supreme Court did not rule in my favor."
Makes sense in principle, but who would ever trust James Risen after his reporting on Wen Ho Lee?
I mean let’s see, Taiwanese person is going to spy for mainland China? Really? And the evidence for this is that blueprints not available to the suspect, generated well downstream from where the suspect works or has access, are leaked to China… Right, let’s sensationalize some bs theories in the NYT even though there is nothing there, at the expense of a man who, oh well, is Taiwanese, so who cares? Not James Risen.
I don't understand the controversy.
That's kind of the issue though. We don't in fact know what the source really had. Was it legal or illegal? Who knows?
Maybe they tried that already and the reporter was a last resort. That's still a criminal act and it's the FBI's job to go after these things.
I just don't see what the big deal is.
Instead, this story alleges: (1) the reporter planned to meet with a source to get a classified leak, (2) the FBI got wind of it, and (3) they planned what amounts to a sting operation (I guess, it's complicated because this was in France) to catch the leaker.
That's... I mean that's the FBI's job. That leak is clearly illegal, it's a crime. Their job is to enforce the law.
Beyond that there's some juicy details about the lawyer who originally ratted on the source and then got cold feet and warned the reporter. And that's interesting.
But... there's no government abuse angle here, not without knowing the contents of that leak that didn't happen.
Ask yourself if the FBI is investigating the NSA. Did the FBI investigate the NSA before Snowden? You can enforce the law very selectively, prosecuting whistleblowers who are trying to reveal evidence of crimes committed by the government itself.
I’m not sure this is true, considering the programs in the “leak” might themselves be illegal.
The problem with your position is it allows the following loop:
Government makes it illegal to report government crime, then government commits crime.
You can’t report the crime without breaking the law, so the government effectively is bound by no law. How do you break this cycle?
The only solution is to have it such that reporting a crime cannot itself be a crime, classification or otherwise.
In theory.
That someone has to resort to leaking to the press to achieve accountability is a bug in the system, it's not how things are meant to work.
Leaking to the press is not a bug. Seeking maximum distance from what you denounce is sane. You have the same problems in the private sector, where you are directed to voice your complain to HR.
Secrecy is a poison.
You can't write a law that gives journalists special access to classified information and giving them arbitrary information is ok, how would that even work? (That's without getting in to the complications of defining 'journalist').
If you wanted to argue that leaking information of illegal government activity in certain circumstances is an affirmative defense I could possibly get behind that, the devil would be in the details.
what would you do in this situation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_scandal
In this case the legal avenues were followed, yet the Director of National Intelligence decided not to inform Congress of the whistleblower report, despite being legally required. The administration could have squelched the report if Michael Atkinson hadn't informed Congress himself, and of course Atkinson was later fired by the President.
Why should a whistleblower trust the very administration they're ratting out?
Do these ever work?
The people you are blowing the whistle to are the same ones doing the shady illegal stuff.
If it happened. None of that stuff is substantiated, it's just the reporters guesswork based on circumstantial evidence.
It's a good story. It's an interesting story. It's not "news". And it's absolutely not something interesting or notable about the FBI (the entity that appears in the headline), which was just doing exactly the thing the FBI was created to do.