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How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers

177 points by Udo_Schmitz 10y ago

wayneotau 10y ago
Not surprising. All these guys want to protect their own fiefdoms.
Bahamut 10y ago
This was my main concern about how Snowden approached the whistleblowing - it seems that in practice, the whistleblowers got punished heavily for doing their job, so I have to say that I was wrong to question Snowden's methods, and the government needs to reform how it handles whistleblowing.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Yes, we need to punish people trying to bring systemic wrongdoing to light, and protect poor innocents like Ollie North from the consequences of their choices. /s
revelation 10y ago
it didn’t have to be a problem if everyone was a good team player. The eternal line that makes law inefficient, and "government secrets" or "spy agencies" utterly untenable.
pdkl95 10y ago
Whenever a story about Snowden is in the news, some people complain that some of the documents he released were "off topic". They accuse Snowden of releasing too much[1]. I agree, in an ideal world Snowden's bulk-copy methods shouldn't have been necessary. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the "proper" methods of whistleblowing didn't work. When the proper methods fail, fallback methods are used. When legitimate channels fail, whistleblowing has to appel directly to the people. This is practically guaranteed to have collateral damage. Anyone who is angry with Snowden's methods should work hard to create safe and effective whistleblower mechanisms. [1] The cutoff point for "too much" varying with personal opinion.
- MajesticHobo 10y ago
  > Whenever a story about Snowden is in the news, some people complain that some of the documents he released were "off topic". Which is odd, because I personally have not found any of the Snowden publications off topic or unnecessary. When I press these people about what they think shouldn't have been published, they always give me vague answers about "military secrets" and the like without citing anything specific.
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    There's a stage of disclosure prior to publication, where Snowden gave the documents to journalists. So it isn't necessarily possible to evaluate what he leaked by looking at what has been published. It's a problem that the internal whistleblowing mechanism isn't working, but contractors shouldn't be picking reporters that then filter national secrets.
    - nitrogen 10y ago
      Why not? You use the word "should" without a good counterargument to the parent's point, that there was no other way to blow the whistle.
      - maxerickson 10y ago
        I don't see where they made that point. Anyway, Snowden could have made sure to personally review everything he turned over. It's certainly an open question if such a leak could have been as effective, but it would obviously be an improvement in some ways.
        AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        And how is it that Snowden is more qualified than reporters to do that? The implication behind your argument is that giving the information to the likes of Glen Greenwald was dangerous. Are you asserting that it was plausible Greenwald would have sold it to Al Qaeda?
appleflaxen 10y ago
That it's unconstitutional is bad enough. But the ineffectiveness of the NSA is the most damning aspect of all: > Drake had discovered a shocking example while researching his postmortem report on the September 11 attacks. Months beforehand, the NSA had come into possession of a telephone number in San Diego that was used by two of the hijackers who later crashed planes into the World Trade Center. But the NSA did not act on this finding. > As Drake later told the NSA expert James Bamford, the NSA intercepted seven phone calls between this San Diego phone number and an al-Qaida “safe house” in Yemen. Drake found a record of the seven calls buried in an NSA database. > US officials had long known that the Yemen safe house was the operational hub through which Bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, ordered attacks. Seven phone calls to such a hub from the same phone number was obviously suspicious. Yet the NSA took no action – the information had apparently been overlooked. If you are going to shred the foundation of jurisprudence, you should get something for your trouble.
- pdkl95 10y ago
  > the ineffectiveness^Wincompetence of the NSA The NSA used to understand concepts like compartmentalization ("need to know"). Their OPSEC shouldn't have allowed a single contractor to access so much data.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    One suspects that such practices were always tools used more to escape responsibility for heinous decisions than to secure the nation. Representative governments don't have "secrets".
- superobserver 10y ago
  Everyone seems to presume the NSA has one overarching goal in what it does, but I thought it was obvious that it answers to the demands of the POTUS. Shouldn't conclusions about "effectiveness" and "competence" stem from what a POTUS's intent is when employing it? These aren't going to be satisfactory arguments against it (viz., "ineffective" or "incompetent").
willholloway 10y ago
> "Hillary Clinton argue that Snowden broke the law when he should have trusted it. “He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower,” Clinton said in the first Democratic presidential debate last October. “He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that.” Tell that to Thomas Drake. Tell it, for that matter, to John Crane."
- 58028641 10y ago
  Not to mention that Hillary also improperly handeled classified documents.
  - superobserver 10y ago
    But she's on the side of the MIC, so she'll always be treated with kid's gloves about that. Proof? She's still running for office, not being pursued for law violations.
    - willholloway 10y ago
      If you live in CA, NJ, Peurto Rico, ND, SD, MT, the Virgin Islands or New Mexico, and are eligible to vote in the Democratic primary you can still vote against her and vote for Bernie Sanders, a man who once called for the abolition of the CIA just prior to the Church committee. Contrary to media meme, it is not mathematically impossible for Bernie Sanders to win the majority of pledged delegates, he would just need around 68% of the remaining vote. It would take a decisive swing in the polls for sure, but not impossible. There are two weeks left and with Trump beating Hillary in many national polls, perhaps enough Democratic voters will see that a vote for Hillary is almost the same as a vote for Trump. The FBI investigation is yet to have concluded as well. And if that decisive swing doesn't come, I hope that the superdelegates, who will be the deciding vote in any event, will do what they were put in place to do in the 80's, and that is prevent the nomination of a candidate that would lose in the Fall election. Are they undemocratic and a disgrace to the party? Yes. But the rules are the rules, and the process is the process. They were made unbound delegates by the party for this exact reason. Make no mistake, if Bernie Sanders was ahead in pledged delegates, but behind in head to head polling with Trump, the superdelegates would not hesitate to deny the will of the majority of voters, that is why they were there in the first place. They are also there to create a psychological advantage to the establishment candidate, who gets to include over 500 delegates in their count based on a poll of super delegates, who don't even vote until the convention. The unwritten rules are different for the connected elite than they are for outsiders and whistle blowers. My analysis is that at this point Trump is the heavy favorite to win the Fall election. Trump's negatives are already known and baked in, and enough people just don't care, while Hillary's negatives have not yet hit a floor. Trump has not even begun his attempt to define her. Trump is about to bring up in an unavoidable way her ME intervention as Secretary of State, questionable Clinton Global Initiative deals, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, her paid Goldman Sachs talks, as well as comments made against women who accused Bill of misconduct. Trump will continue to be an asymmetric opponent, with tighter OODA loops than Hillary. She will try to define him, and he will morph. She will make an attack, and he will dominate the next news cycle with an expertly planted submarine. She won't be able to pin him down, and she will be constantly on the defensive. Hillary's best and only hope is demographics and identity politics, but my bet is that Trump shaves off enough economically aspirational voters that identify or want his success to win.
TeMPOraL 10y ago
I've learned about US's Office of Special Counsel - an agency that's tasked to protect government whistleblowers - from an episode of Person of Interest. In it, a low-ranking NSA worker tried to ask his employees about what he discovered, only to get terminated and framed for drug use; he called the OSC and in response to that the OSC sent his coordinates to a squad of black-ops hitmen. While obviously work of fiction, it somehow feels like an accurate description of how this works, and this article only confirms it. If you stumble upon a secret that could endanger important people in the government, the government ain't gonna be helping you. I think Drake and Crane are lucky to be alive today.
tptacek 10y ago
I don't have a strong opinion on the whole article, but almost from the beginning it's less than honest. Of all the whistleblower cases of the last 10 years, Thomas Drake has the most sympathetic. The conventional narrative about Drake appears to be mostly correct. But there are two very important details that this story not only leaves out, but implicitly contradicts. 1. Drake did not follow NSA whistleblower protocol in revealing details about Trailblazer. Unless NSA whistleblower protocol includes "create a Hushmail account and then send classified documents to journalists over it". 2. Drake was concerned about dragnet surveillance. But his concern wasn't "why" or "whether". It was "how". Drake blew the whistle on Trailblazer after a program he sponsored, ThinThread, was pushed aside for Trailblazer. ThinThread sounds a lot better in magazine articles, but it too was a large-scale dragnet surveillance system. The differences were that ThinThread was less expensive, and that ThinThread had better technical controls. But nobody on HN would be OK with ThinThread either. For pretty much all of the whistleblower cases, you can go to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS.org) to get the original case documents.
- marricks 10y ago
  Ah, I see, the agency which appears to not protect whistleblowers at all and fabricates information has official documents which claims he didn't follow protocol, which is probably because he was never taken seriously. It seems with every agency with poor oversight finds some important reason to punish whistleblowers for some comparatively trivial infraction to the one they reveal. The information they reveal rarely leads to punishment but thr small (possibly made up) transgression ruins there career and gets them crucified. By all accounts this belies a broken system.
  - tptacek 10y ago
    You've missed my point. I'm not litigating Drake. I'm criticizing the article. Again: the documents on FAS suggest that he created a Hushmail account and used it to send classified documents to reporters. "Not following protocol" doesn't capture that.
    - 10y ago
shit_parade2 10y ago
Just a reminder from a banned account that mods ban accounts which are critical of the government while allowing government shills to control the thread.
Animats 10y ago
Maybe if the whistleblowers hook up with the militia movement...
johan_larson 10y ago
The larger lesson of stories like this is that trying to fight the system is mostly not worth it. Even if you in the end "win", it will have been at the cost of your career and life savings. And if you lose, you're in prison for a long time. If you uncover something that seems very wrong, you are probably safe pushing back a little and making the matter known to your superiors. But if that isn't working, the best course of action is to get out. It won't stop the crap from happening, but you did all you could do without taking some very big personal risks, and at least the blood won't be on your hands.

177 points by Udo_Schmitz 10y ago

Not surprising. All these guys want to protect their own fiefdoms.

This was my main concern about how Snowden approached the whistleblowing - it seems that in practice, the whistleblowers got punished heavily for doing their job, so I have to say that I was wrong to question Snowden's methods, and the government needs to reform how it handles whistleblowing.

Aelinsaar 10y ago

Yes, we need to punish people trying to bring systemic wrongdoing to light, and protect poor innocents like Ollie North from the consequences of their choices. /s

revelation 10y ago

it didn’t have to be a problem if everyone was a good team player. The eternal line that makes law inefficient, and "government secrets" or "spy agencies" utterly untenable.

pdkl95 10y ago

Whenever a story about Snowden is in the news, some people complain that some of the documents he released were "off topic". They accuse Snowden of releasing too much[1]. I agree, in an ideal world Snowden's bulk-copy methods shouldn't have been necessary. Unfortunately, we don't live in an ideal world, and the "proper" methods of whistleblowing didn't work. When the proper methods fail, fallback methods are used. When legitimate channels fail, whistleblowing has to appel directly to the people. This is practically guaranteed to have collateral damage. Anyone who is angry with Snowden's methods should work hard to create safe and effective whistleblower mechanisms. [1] The cutoff point for "too much" varying with personal opinion.

MajesticHobo 10y ago
> Whenever a story about Snowden is in the news, some people complain that some of the documents he released were "off topic". Which is odd, because I personally have not found any of the Snowden publications off topic or unnecessary. When I press these people about what they think shouldn't have been published, they always give me vague answers about "military secrets" and the like without citing anything specific.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  There's a stage of disclosure prior to publication, where Snowden gave the documents to journalists. So it isn't necessarily possible to evaluate what he leaked by looking at what has been published. It's a problem that the internal whistleblowing mechanism isn't working, but contractors shouldn't be picking reporters that then filter national secrets.
  - nitrogen 10y ago
    Why not? You use the word "should" without a good counterargument to the parent's point, that there was no other way to blow the whistle.
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      I don't see where they made that point. Anyway, Snowden could have made sure to personally review everything he turned over. It's certainly an open question if such a leak could have been as effective, but it would obviously be an improvement in some ways.
      - AnthonyMouse 10y ago
        And how is it that Snowden is more qualified than reporters to do that? The implication behind your argument is that giving the information to the likes of Glen Greenwald was dangerous. Are you asserting that it was plausible Greenwald would have sold it to Al Qaeda?

appleflaxen 10y ago

That it's unconstitutional is bad enough. But the ineffectiveness of the NSA is the most damning aspect of all: > Drake had discovered a shocking example while researching his postmortem report on the September 11 attacks. Months beforehand, the NSA had come into possession of a telephone number in San Diego that was used by two of the hijackers who later crashed planes into the World Trade Center. But the NSA did not act on this finding. > As Drake later told the NSA expert James Bamford, the NSA intercepted seven phone calls between this San Diego phone number and an al-Qaida “safe house” in Yemen. Drake found a record of the seven calls buried in an NSA database. > US officials had long known that the Yemen safe house was the operational hub through which Bin Laden, from a cave in Afghanistan, ordered attacks. Seven phone calls to such a hub from the same phone number was obviously suspicious. Yet the NSA took no action – the information had apparently been overlooked. If you are going to shred the foundation of jurisprudence, you should get something for your trouble.

pdkl95 10y ago
> the ineffectiveness^Wincompetence of the NSA The NSA used to understand concepts like compartmentalization ("need to know"). Their OPSEC shouldn't have allowed a single contractor to access so much data.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  One suspects that such practices were always tools used more to escape responsibility for heinous decisions than to secure the nation. Representative governments don't have "secrets".
superobserver 10y ago
Everyone seems to presume the NSA has one overarching goal in what it does, but I thought it was obvious that it answers to the demands of the POTUS. Shouldn't conclusions about "effectiveness" and "competence" stem from what a POTUS's intent is when employing it? These aren't going to be satisfactory arguments against it (viz., "ineffective" or "incompetent").

willholloway 10y ago

> "Hillary Clinton argue that Snowden broke the law when he should have trusted it. “He could have gotten all of the protections of being a whistleblower,” Clinton said in the first Democratic presidential debate last October. “He could have raised all the issues that he has raised. And I think there would have been a positive response to that.” Tell that to Thomas Drake. Tell it, for that matter, to John Crane."

58028641 10y ago
Not to mention that Hillary also improperly handeled classified documents.
- superobserver 10y ago
  But she's on the side of the MIC, so she'll always be treated with kid's gloves about that. Proof? She's still running for office, not being pursued for law violations.
  - willholloway 10y ago
    If you live in CA, NJ, Peurto Rico, ND, SD, MT, the Virgin Islands or New Mexico, and are eligible to vote in the Democratic primary you can still vote against her and vote for Bernie Sanders, a man who once called for the abolition of the CIA just prior to the Church committee. Contrary to media meme, it is not mathematically impossible for Bernie Sanders to win the majority of pledged delegates, he would just need around 68% of the remaining vote. It would take a decisive swing in the polls for sure, but not impossible. There are two weeks left and with Trump beating Hillary in many national polls, perhaps enough Democratic voters will see that a vote for Hillary is almost the same as a vote for Trump. The FBI investigation is yet to have concluded as well. And if that decisive swing doesn't come, I hope that the superdelegates, who will be the deciding vote in any event, will do what they were put in place to do in the 80's, and that is prevent the nomination of a candidate that would lose in the Fall election. Are they undemocratic and a disgrace to the party? Yes. But the rules are the rules, and the process is the process. They were made unbound delegates by the party for this exact reason. Make no mistake, if Bernie Sanders was ahead in pledged delegates, but behind in head to head polling with Trump, the superdelegates would not hesitate to deny the will of the majority of voters, that is why they were there in the first place. They are also there to create a psychological advantage to the establishment candidate, who gets to include over 500 delegates in their count based on a poll of super delegates, who don't even vote until the convention. The unwritten rules are different for the connected elite than they are for outsiders and whistle blowers. My analysis is that at this point Trump is the heavy favorite to win the Fall election. Trump's negatives are already known and baked in, and enough people just don't care, while Hillary's negatives have not yet hit a floor. Trump has not even begun his attempt to define her. Trump is about to bring up in an unavoidable way her ME intervention as Secretary of State, questionable Clinton Global Initiative deals, Whitewater, Filegate, Travelgate, her paid Goldman Sachs talks, as well as comments made against women who accused Bill of misconduct. Trump will continue to be an asymmetric opponent, with tighter OODA loops than Hillary. She will try to define him, and he will morph. She will make an attack, and he will dominate the next news cycle with an expertly planted submarine. She won't be able to pin him down, and she will be constantly on the defensive. Hillary's best and only hope is demographics and identity politics, but my bet is that Trump shaves off enough economically aspirational voters that identify or want his success to win.

TeMPOraL 10y ago

I've learned about US's Office of Special Counsel - an agency that's tasked to protect government whistleblowers - from an episode of Person of Interest. In it, a low-ranking NSA worker tried to ask his employees about what he discovered, only to get terminated and framed for drug use; he called the OSC and in response to that the OSC sent his coordinates to a squad of black-ops hitmen. While obviously work of fiction, it somehow feels like an accurate description of how this works, and this article only confirms it. If you stumble upon a secret that could endanger important people in the government, the government ain't gonna be helping you. I think Drake and Crane are lucky to be alive today.

tptacek 10y ago

I don't have a strong opinion on the whole article, but almost from the beginning it's less than honest. Of all the whistleblower cases of the last 10 years, Thomas Drake has the most sympathetic. The conventional narrative about Drake appears to be mostly correct. But there are two very important details that this story not only leaves out, but implicitly contradicts. 1. Drake did not follow NSA whistleblower protocol in revealing details about Trailblazer. Unless NSA whistleblower protocol includes "create a Hushmail account and then send classified documents to journalists over it". 2. Drake was concerned about dragnet surveillance. But his concern wasn't "why" or "whether". It was "how". Drake blew the whistle on Trailblazer after a program he sponsored, ThinThread, was pushed aside for Trailblazer. ThinThread sounds a lot better in magazine articles, but it too was a large-scale dragnet surveillance system. The differences were that ThinThread was less expensive, and that ThinThread had better technical controls. But nobody on HN would be OK with ThinThread either. For pretty much all of the whistleblower cases, you can go to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS.org) to get the original case documents.

marricks 10y ago
Ah, I see, the agency which appears to not protect whistleblowers at all and fabricates information has official documents which claims he didn't follow protocol, which is probably because he was never taken seriously. It seems with every agency with poor oversight finds some important reason to punish whistleblowers for some comparatively trivial infraction to the one they reveal. The information they reveal rarely leads to punishment but thr small (possibly made up) transgression ruins there career and gets them crucified. By all accounts this belies a broken system.
- tptacek 10y ago
  You've missed my point. I'm not litigating Drake. I'm criticizing the article. Again: the documents on FAS suggest that he created a Hushmail account and used it to send classified documents to reporters. "Not following protocol" doesn't capture that.
  - 10y ago

shit_parade2 10y ago

Just a reminder from a banned account that mods ban accounts which are critical of the government while allowing government shills to control the thread.

Animats 10y ago

Maybe if the whistleblowers hook up with the militia movement...

johan_larson 10y ago

The larger lesson of stories like this is that trying to fight the system is mostly not worth it. Even if you in the end "win", it will have been at the cost of your career and life savings. And if you lose, you're in prison for a long time. If you uncover something that seems very wrong, you are probably safe pushing back a little and making the matter known to your superiors. But if that isn't working, the best course of action is to get out. It won't stop the crap from happening, but you did all you could do without taking some very big personal risks, and at least the blood won't be on your hands.