The Secret to Getting Top-Secret Secrets
medium.com
medium.com
"It’s a letter from the Postal Inspection Service. He asked them for… something. “To be honest with you, I don’t remember,” he says. “This was not even that long ago. Um.”"
This guy appears to be wasting bandwidth of the people and indirectly causing bureaucracy he is so hellbent on fighting against. I do agree that we should have more open government, but I think he is going about it in a wrong way.
Government operates by different rules than the rest of society. In business, if something is taking up a lot of resources, that means it's a hog and you have to figure out how to get it to stop consuming so much.
In government, using lots of resources is the hallmark of a thriving and publicly useful program. We need a hundred guys like Leopold making the FOIA people look more and more important, making the politicians that protect and support FOIA look more and more right, giving them the power to dramatically expand the bandwidth available.
The US government is not a constrained resource-poor embedded device, it's a massive datacenter where every cabinet and area and floor has to fight for its existence, and increased traffic is the goal, not the enemy.
If the program isn't used, it'll get downsized or shut down and they'll give the money to military contractors, who know exactly how the game is played.
The media has a habit of seeking out young, naive Soldiers and soliciting their opinions on a wide variety of issues. When unsuspecting Soldiers comment on these issues, the media will then present that individual Soldier's opinion on the topic as the United States Military's official opinion. In the worst cases, they will actually edit the interview to take the Soldier's statements out of their original context in order to give his words whatever meaning the media finds most interesting.
They particularly enjoy asking very awkward, politically charged questions, even though they are aware of the fact that Soldiers aren't allowed to be seen promoting any sort of political viewpoint. For example, they might ask a Soldier what his opinion is on the United States' drone warfare program. While there's a good chance that the Soldier agrees that the program is out of control, if he says as much on camera he's probably going to end up getting demoted for damaging the state of "good order and discipline" of the U.S. Military. To a civilian, all the Soldier did was express an idea, yet when you analyze the situation from the viewpoint of the military, what he actually did was call into question the decisions made my our military and political leaders, which violates military law.
The bottom line is that the smart cards exist to keep Soldiers that are inexperienced in dealing with journalists from getting themselves into trouble. There isn't anything nefarious about it at all.
Its important to note that not all journalists conduct themselves in a dishonest manner, but the practice is prevalent enough to warrant attention from the military.