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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I'm not really understanding what the newsworthy bits here are. There's an implication that this source had some kind of huge trove of data, but the reporter never got it and that's not what the story is about.

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.

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> 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.

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.

> 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.

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 a person who believes that the NSA is engaged in illegal activity can, rather than laking classified information to the press, take evidence of the wrongdoing to the FBI. Inspectors General are also a thing. They can also go to their congresspeople.

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.

The press and government are two distinct powers. All that you listed, FBI, attorney, Congress, are all part of the government, which is the one which controls and directs what the NSA does.

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.

There are legal avenues for whistleblowing through IGs and/or Congress.

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.

Is there evidence of such avenues being effective, specially within the US Intelligence Community? I can’t find any.

if those legal avenues are implemented/neutered by the same people who implement the illegal programs for the purpose of mitigatingthe actions of whistleblowers can you really say that theyre legal avenues?

what would you do in this situation?

> There are legal avenues for whistleblowing through IGs and/or Congress.

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?

> There are legal avenues for whistleblowing through IGs and/or Congress.

Do these ever work?

The people you are blowing the whistle to are the same ones doing the shady illegal stuff.

My understanding is that the legal system figured out a compromise for this type of issue during the Nixon trials. A leaker who signed NDAs and clearance forms and doesn't go through the proper whistleblowing channels (possibly for good reasons) is still legally on the hook. However, the compromise is that the people they leak to are legally in the clear, which would (theoretically) prevent the government using security to silence the free press.

No, Bruges is in Belgium

Must a story break new ground and change our understanding of things to be interesting and worth reading?

My word was "newsworthy", and that's a rather different standard than "interesting and worth reading". This article is a gossip piece about (mostly) a self-absorbed FBI informant who danced too close to the fire, may have fabricated evidence, seems to have gotten cold feet and burned an investigation, and made an enemy out of both the reporter and the FBI. And... sure, that's interesting!

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.

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