
How the Pentagon punished NSA whistleblowers - Udo_Schmitz
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/22/how-pentagon-punished-nsa-whistleblowers
======
appleflaxen
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.

~~~
superobserver
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").

~~~
maxerickson
I bet it is just the opposite. The likely problem is that it exists beyond
purpose. The middle managers that would be the people proposing and creating
the structures that would notice and utilize the 9/11 intelligence are focused
on their careers.

~~~
specialist
I've started using the phrase The Silent State for that phenomenon.

[http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7755493-the-silent-
state](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7755493-the-silent-state)

To see this in action, pick a hot topic, and watch any public hearing where
our representatives are trying to get straight answers from department heads
and middle management. It's infuriating.

Effective governance, transparency, accountability are still unsolved
problems. Meanwhile, more eyeballs and fact checking can help, given enough
effort and endurance.

------
willholloway
> "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
Not to mention that Hillary also improperly handeled classified documents.

~~~
superobserver
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
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.

~~~
jessaustin
_If you live in CA, NJ, Peurto Rico, ND, SD, MO..._

I already voted for Sanders in Missouri, over two months ago. I hope that no
Bernie supporters in this state thought they could wait until now, because he
only lost by 1500 out of 620k votes cast.

I do agree with you that at this point Trump is certain to beat Clinton by
wide margins in the upcoming general election. She will attempt the same
tactics that already failed for the Republicans. They'll fail for her too. I
suppose I'll vote for Gary Johnson again. He might have more of a chance this
time around, but mostly I don't want to waste a vote on the _status quo_.
(Don't kid yourselves, Trumpets, Comb-over Donnie is as inside as inside
gets.)

"Super"-delegates are kind of awful, but they would be less awful if they
didn't declare their preferences until after the final state primary.

~~~
willholloway
Corrected to MT.

And superdelegates change their preference, as they did in 2008, so there is
no reason to include their numbers in media graphs until their vote is cast at
the convention.

~~~
jessaustin
Well yes "media graphs" are _part_ of the problem but we have social media now
so any "super" who wants to make her choice known to the public can do that
without help from traditional media outlets. The Democrats really should
impose this silence on themselves. I can see exempting e.g. governors from the
gag, but others who are only "super" by dint of their positions as associate
assistants to state committeepersons should just be quiet until the voters are
done speaking.

------
pdkl95
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
> 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
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
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
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
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?

~~~
maxerickson
It's plausible Greenwald could have lost control of the documents (read
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-
sno...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-
snowden.html?pagewanted=all)). Snowden is hopefully more qualified along those
lines.

And yes, I do think that the person with security clearance minimizing their
leak is a better than a reporter doing it.

~~~
MaysonL
Do you really think that Snowden could have kept unencrypted documents secret
while still avoiding arrest? Would he have been able to keep them away from
the Russians, and been able to transmit them to trustworthy reporters?

~~~
nickpsecurity
He did long enough to read and organize all them per interviews. All tgat's
needed to filter it down to only illegal stuff withoug blowing ops.

Further, argument falls apart when he hands it over to journalists clearly
unable to stop nation-state opponents per the very leaks. Of course someone
hacked into them or bribed/coerced a copy. It should be assumed even without
evidence given what we know.

------
Bahamut
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.

------
TeMPOraL
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
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
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
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.

~~~
marricks
Perhaps for once someone is actually trying to tell his story rather than
following official documents, which as I said, seem to be prone to a lot of
bias and wrong doings.

It doesn't seem to invalidate the account, nor does it seem like the most
important comment to give to this story.

~~~
tptacek
Telling Drake's side of the story is a fine exercise, but it's not what this
article purports to do. Instead, it's loaded with copy intended to bolster
it's claims of being heavily reported and of breaking new news. But it doesn't
do that.

Here's the kernel of what seems to have happened, synthesizing both the Crane
reporting from the Guardian today and the Drake indictment:

1\. Drake favored a competing dragnet surveillance system that was pushed
aside in favor of Trailblazer.

2\. Drake lodged a complaint with the NSA IG that Trailblazer was a waste of
money with inadequate technical controls. He is joined in his complaint by
William Binney and several other former NSA employees.

3\. Concurrently, Drake began leaking to reporters --- presumably, James Risen
and Eric Lichtblau, who broke the first major NSA surveillance story for the
NYT --- using Hushmail.

4\. In handling Drake's formal complaint, the NSA managed to leak Drake's
identity to DOJ. The article is fuzzy about exactly which law this violates
(it refers to the Whistleblower Protection Act, much of which does not apply
to national defense and classified information, and not the ICWPA, which has
different procedures and protections). Either way: the White House is
apoplectic about the Risen/Lichtblau scoop and uses the leak to raid Drake.

5\. In the course of investigating Drake, DOJ discovers (perhaps by first
ruling out Binney and the other original complainants) Drake's Hushmail leak.
Drake is prosecuted.

The Guardian article would have you believe that Drake was prosecuted directly
for blowing the whistle through formal channels. But that is not at all what
seems to have happened. Yes, in the process of investigating Drake's
complaint, there was a procedural foul (Drake's name shouldn't have ended up
at DOJ). But it wasn't Drake's formal complaint that got Drake in real
trouble!

Again: I think Drake has the most sympathetic case of all the NSA
whistleblowers. His leak was extraordinarily targeted, not particularly
political, and clearly in the public interest. I'm not writing to litigate
whether Drake was right. I'm saying: the Guardian did a poor job of reporting
this story.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
You're also incorrect on many points here.

1\. You're making Trailblazer sound similar to Drake's favored system. This is
extremely misleading, and is a long discussion on its own. But making this
claim paints Drake's motives as career politics and seeks to diminish his
character by inferring ulterior motives. If nothing else, that isn't a
productive debate.

2\. Drake's complaint was not merely that it was a waste of money with
inadequate technical controls. He was also not joined in his complain by
William Binney.

Binney made the initial complaint, and it was to the Pentagon Inspector
General, not the NSA Inspector General (if that is a thing), and he was
anonymously joined by Drake and 3 others. This was in Two of the other
complainants were former NSA employees who worked on the original program, and
one was Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, who had been trying to investigate the NSA on these matters
(which is her job), and was getting stonewalled. Drake was still an NSA
employee and did not want his career to be impacted, so his name was left off.
Others, including Binney, who originally made the "competing system" initiated
this because they felt that TrailBlazer was a modified version of ThinThread
with all of the privacy protections removed and deployed domestically.

3\. Drake did not concurrently leak to reporters. His contact with reporters
was several years later. The first report was internally, then he went to
congress, then in 2005 he finally went to the media. The Binney complaint was
filed in 2012, and the internal escalations within the NSA and Congress had
already been happening for years before (ultimately leading to Binney's 2001
resignation in protest).

Drake's hushmail communication was to Gorman of the WSJ about Trailblazer, not
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of NYT, who instead had a totally different
story, which was the AT&T warrantless surveillance issue. He set some ground
rules for his communication with Gorman, one of which was that he would not
reveal anything classified. He maintains that he never did. The outcome of the
trial was that he never did. Yes, this contradicts the indictment, for very
obvious reasons.

Risen/NYT on the warrantless AT&T issue was a totally different story and in
fact had nothing to do with Drake! The investigators of the leak thought the
sources might have been the same, and they were wrong.

~~~
tptacek
No, that's not what I believe. As I keep saying: Drake has the most
sympathetic of all the NSA leaker cases. What he revealed was very targeted
and motivated by the public interest (something you cannot say of some other
leakers who, for instance, leaked counterproliferation secrets, or details in
preparation for a book they were promoting). I do not believe Drake's leak was
careerist.

I bring up ThinThread because the article paints Drake as someone who was
motivated to blow the whistle based on the same concerns Snowden had. But
that's not what happened. Both ThinThread and Trailblazer were in large part
motivated by concerns that more and more SIGINT had a nexus in the US, and
that large-scale systems needed to be implemented to capture intelligence that
had a US nexus.

When you look at the Drake complaint to the NSA IG through the lens of
Snowden, your natural reaction is that the NSA was pushing the concern aside
out of C.Y.A., to prevent the public from learning that it was monitoring US
comms. But in fact, Drake's complaint is about _how_ Trailblazer was
monitoring US comms; the privacy concerns it had were procedural and not
substantive. It wasn't stark, the way the article makes it out to be.

I was imprecise about the word "concurrent". My frame of reference was
"between the numbered steps in my outline". You're right to correct me. Either
way, the point I'm trying to make is that it isn't the IG complaint that got
Drake in trouble; it was the communication with reporters.

You can believe that the communications with the press were proper (I don't
agree) or in the public interest to the extent that they overrode "proper" (I
do agree). But either way, you should be able to agree with me that in an
article that is entirely about what happens when insiders at NSA raise
concerns through official channels, the fact that Drake got in trouble
primarily for what he did through _unofficial_ channels is important to the
story, and should have been prominently included.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
Considering that you conflated the Risen/NYT leak with the
Drake/Binney/ThinThread/WSJ story, I am not sure how you feel comfortable
enough to say that Drake got in trouble for doing things through unofficial
channels. If that is your central point, you got the most important detail
here completely mixed up with another case. I charge that it is _you_ who is
doing a poor job of reporting (to say nothing of the Guardian).

~~~
tptacek
That's an association the article made, not me. The indictment and court
filings aren't specific about which reporters were involved. Either way, can
you rebut the argument I actually made?

I agree that if we're going to hold Guardian stories to the standards of
Hacker News comments, I have much less of a case. That article would make a
fine Hacker News comment.

------
Aelinsaar
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
_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.

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

------
johan_larson
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.

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

