Pentagon leak leads to limits on who gets access to military’s top secrets
cnn.com
cnn.com
When you restrict access to this stuff, you do it by creating a registration list that inevitably takes weeks to get on, because someone at the requesting command has to get three people, one of whom is probably out for a few weeks, to approve the request and then approve it at the controlling command in a similar process. If you're lucky, the systems are all working and that's all the wait there is, but a person can easily spend dozens of hours of work getting to the point where he can wait several weeks for access. Repeat that excessively, and people just stop using the best intel because it's a pain. Repeat that for a few years and no one at the command even remembers where to get good intel, if they even recall its existence.
Cross-org collaboration is a fragile beast in the absence of sales, marketing, profits, etc.
At its heart, this most recent problem of insider attack is the same problem as Snowden, and most people reject outright the idea that Snowden was wrong.
Anyway, I liked being able to read these; it was nice while it lasted.
People "in command" regularly fall prey to the fallacious idea of knowing better than anybody else. In particular, they believe to know who should know what.
Regarding Snowden to be wrong in revealing the US surveillance is an example of this fallacy. In essence, you discount human rights to knowledge about reality in favor of petty, self-serving and short-sighted convenience.
If they are leaking information every day, they have bigger things to worry about than some guy leaking some documents on Discord. They should be worried about the leaks they don't know about, since the perpetrators could get away with it indefinitely.
edit: OK, I was wrong here with my priorities.
I do feel it's significant that it took about a month from the sharing on that minecraft server for these leaks to be recognized. I'm surprised no one on the server flagged it, or it wasn't picked up by some intelligence program. That's where my shock came from. It feels like a deeper problem. Maybe I'm naive in believing the military/intelligence community didn't know before this news broke.
This adds credibility to the position that it was intentional imho.
The other data that may hint at this is ammunition distribution. Depending on how Ukraine’s attack goes we may be able to infer the intention.
You should spend some time in Bellingcat’s discord server if you are interested in this.
Do I need clearance for this?
[1] https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
Second, I doubt that the private gun owners of the United States consume as much 5.56/.223 as the entirety of NATO. The cartridge is widely available, popular, and comparatively inexpensive because of the large military demand for it.
I'd be further very surprised if the combined US private consumption of all other centerfire[0] rifle cartridges adds up to the private US consumption of 5.56. The economies of scale behind 5.56 are huge. 5.56 can be had for under $1/round in bulk. Most other centerfire rifle cartridges aren't commonly sold in bulk (.308/7.62x51 being the only other one that comes to mind, which is also a NATO round). Basically anything that you might reasonably hunt deer[0] with is around $2/round.
The takeaway from all this should be that if NATO went to war, we might have to worry about the supply of 5.56. While there's a very visible part of the US gun culture that's dominated by the popularity of 5.56 and AR-pattern weapons, I don't think we can "thank" it for the abundance of 5.56 relative to the shortage of everything else that's being used in Ukraine.
[0] The .22 S/L/LR variants and the .17 derivatives are rimfire, which are entirely different from a manufacturing standpoint.
[1] I'm not going to get into the debate of whether 5.56 is suitable as a deer cartridge. I don't know. 5.56 is in broadly the same class of cartridges as the classic deer cartridges, at least from a manufacturing standpoint.
That being said, I'd honestly be surprised if private consumption wasn't within an order of magnitude.
When the classification system balloons like this, inevitably the number of people with access rises as well. And, the seriousness with which they regard classification plummets.
What I've seen in busy headquarters, dealing with a mix of classified and unclassified material, is also something like decision fatigue. Like there are multiple required drop-down menu selections and free text fields for classification and caveats every time someone sends an email in Outlook, and most people are kind of guessing about what's really SECRET vs. CUI vs. whatever else, never mind caveats for specific allies and partners. So what prevails are simple rules-of-thumbs like "just send all email on SIPRNet, marked SECRET, but not NOFORN because that will piss off the Australian deputy commander" until someone more senior says otherwise.
Discussing leaked material isn’t a crime. Leaking material is.
(edit - was)
It's not exactly the same thing, but similar things happen in private industry. If an employee of a company posted a trade secret the employee had agreed to keep secret, that's legally actionable, while others sharing it without any agreement with the company generally can't be sued.
That said, IANAL. If you need legal advise, I'm not it :-).
He did however skip bail, and rightly paid for that.
I was disappointed by the high court's view to allow extradition, especially given the one-sided approach to extradition that US takes with its citizens, but it was hardly surprising given how far up the US's ass the UK is. Of course a decade ago it was all "I don't want to go to Sweden because I'll be extradited", despite that easily being the case from the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
The UK at least follows their own legal system for such matters.
Hell nowadays the UK would not just allow, but probably pay the US to take asylum seekers somewhere else
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/iraq-war-tor...
That particular rendition didn't rely on UK refueling the planes; the CIA's planes don't need to be refueled from somewhere as close as Sweden. And it was a minor scandal when it came out that the UK even allowed rendition flight refueling on one of it's territories in the Indian ocean. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/22/ciarendition.f...
> Seems a very tenuous link to me - the idea that the US would illegally kidnap someone from the streets in Sweden but not do the same thing in the UK
Then you should be able to produce an example of this happening. The big difference is that for western Europe, the US gov generally requires that the host country cooperates with renditions. Sweden cooperates with renditions, the UK requires the normal extradition process.
Reporting on it after the fact when you had nothing to do with the removal of classified material in the first place is not.
Suffice to say, that without the intense high-level political pressure being constantly applied Assange would not be incarcerated today as he would either have won in court or convicted on a substantially lesser crime. Thus, I don't think it matters much whether he's technically guilty.
To me, the key meta-point is that the things Assange leaked weren't of much actionable value to the military enemy. Most of what Assange (and Snowden) leaked were already known or reasonably assumed by military adversaries.
The reality is that he is officially being charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for coaching Manning on how to get around the military's encryption.
https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali...
Or is this leak another operation?
Years ago, I heard a detailed and all-too-credible account of some serious US secrets being regularly leaked - to an Average Guy, whose (reasonable and innocent) domain name was the ".com" version of an important ".mil" domain. Supposedly, he tried to report the problem to the US govt - and got some pretty nasty push-back, from officers whose only priorities seemed to be denial and butt-coverage. After that, he just deleted the ongoing emails.
Pentagon official sounds more concerned with "killing trees" than the concerns of American taxpayers over waste, abuse, and fraud.