More of our precious deficit-swelling tax dollars well spent on literary critiques. From the NYTimes, “Secrets in Plain Sight in Censored Book’s Reprint“:
… The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.
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A supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.” Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”
[…] __
[I]n the case of Colonel Shaffer’s book, uncensored advance copies — possibly as many as 100 — were distributed by St. Martin’s Press before military officials found what they thought were security lapses. The New York Times bought an uncensored copy online this month, and on Friday got the redacted version from the publisher…
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The Pentagon’s intervention has greatly increased interest in the book: one uncensored copy sold for more than $2,000 this week on eBay, and when the story broke last week, preorders for the new edition pushed the book as high as No. 4 among best sellers on Amazon.
[…] __
A Pentagon spokesman, Colonel David Lapan, said he could not discuss specific redactions “because the information in question is considered classified.” Colonel Shaffer said Friday that his Army bosses asked him not to discuss his book for now. In a statement released by St. Martin’s Press, he suggested that the changes inadvertently offered some insight.
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“While I do not agree with the edits in many ways,” Colonel Shaffer wrote, “the Defense Department redactions enhance the reader’s understanding by drawing attention to the flawed results created by a disorganized and heavy handed military intelligence bureaucracy.”
That’s Wikipedia for you — just one unpatriotic spoiler after another!
JGabriel
Admittedly, that’s kind of embarrassing. They couldn’t give him a cool Hollywood name like Morpheus or Neo? Or Aragorn?
If I were in the CIA, I wouldn’t want our enemies to know we were still using WWII flicks for our code names. They might not think we were serious.
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NobodySpecial
Reminds me of a story from the Cold War.
Seems the Party didn’t want the scientists talking to each other about nuclear tech and used to read their mail and stuff to keep them from revealing secrets.
Oddly, a bunch of them also began dabbling in astrophysics, and publishing articles in the astrophysics periodicals that generally had a section that read ‘Imagine a star with properties X, Y, Z, and AA.’ Of course, the apparatchik reviewing the articles would glaze over and pass them right on by, never realizing that the conditions they were describing were, in fact, common parts of nuclear reactions, which they would then discuss openly in said periodicals.
When did the Bolsheviks take over the Pentagon, and can we stop them before they come up with a military Lysenko?
jimBOB
One of the main functions of National Security censorship is to hide how valueless the National Security bureaucracy is.
It’s not all that hard to understand. With no one in a position to call BS on them, they become a BS factory. Hell, if I could collect a good living by pretending my playing computer games all day was valuable (and censoring anyone who pointed out it wasn’t), then I’d probably do the same thing.
JGabriel
NY Times (via Anne’s Spoiler link):
That’s only because Holmes doesn’t want anyone to find out that Dil’s junk turns out instead of in.
,
jimBOB
@JGabriel:
Chris Stryker? Surely, didn’t they mean Ted Stryker?
Dennis SGMM
@jimBOB
No, I’ll never get over Macho Grande.
JGabriel
On the other hand, maybe the Pentagon is purposefully blacking out a bunch of random unimportant shit in the book, just so people won’t know which pieces of information they were worried about.
From their POV, it’s better to have people mocking them for censoring CIA training facilities and abbreviations that everyone knows about, rather than letting people compare the inevitable uncensored copy with the censored copy and know exactly whose identity, or exactly which operation, they were trying to protect.
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ed drone
@NobodySpecial:
Before I was born, and no.
SATSQ
Ed
Amir_Khalid
From the NYT story, it looks like a case of the US military’s censorship process tripping over its own foot more than anything else. In this case, since the “secrets” weren’t all that secret anyway, the DoD might be better off allowing the first printing to be sold to the public.
It would be nice if the DoD had some kind of open review of how secret its secrets really are, and how it protects the actual secrets, with a view to avoiding blunders like this (with hilarious or even tragic consequences). But is there even a way to have such a review without discussing specific cases, and thus revealing those very secrets? I’m not so sure there is. It might be that protecting secrets is a job inevitably done half-blind.
mellowjohn
one of the contestants on “wait, wait” just said that – as long as the pentagon is buying up all the copies of the first printing – st. martin ought to keep right on printing it… over and over and over and over.
BGinCHI
Any comment from Jeff Stryker, gay porn star?
Seriously, what a 1950s sounding FAIL.
We spend this much on the Pentagon and they can’t even censor properly? Hell, People magazine knows how to do this shit.
cat48
I’m really torn about Defense leaks; but I used to work with Top Secret/Classified Documents in an administrative sense & didn’t want to be fired for breach, plus I try to obey the laws normally.
At a point, it becomes ridiculous when we have troops in combat. Do you want them to be successful or not? Should’nt they be given a wide berth if they’re risking their lives? Also, intelligence work is very risky to the person’s life. It’s a sticky question in my mind.
Linda Featheringill
This “top secret” stuff is such a game!
Unless you are talking about operations that are scheduled to take place tonight or tomorrow, with names, times, and locations . . . .
Every secret is known by every intelligence service in the world.
All pertinent information is probably known by the enemy.
And probably half of Europe and a quarter of the Asia know all these details, too.
The only folks kept in the dark by US secrets are the US citizens.
[which, of course, was the way it was in the USSR]
Linda Featheringill
@cat48:
I appreciate your desire to protect the troops. Still, most of the secrets you were protecting were already known by lots and lots of different people.
Davis X. Machina
@jimBOB: No they didn’t.
And don’t call me ‘Shirley’.
jwb
@JGabriel: According to this logic, they should leave the top secret bit uncensored and censor random, useless shit as shiny objects to hide the important stuff in plain view. Actually, given that it had already gone through clearance and the author himself had no particular desire to reveal top secret information, I doubt there really was anything important, but that’s another issue.
Citizen Alan
@JGabriel:
For me, the biggest spoiler was finding out that Rupert Holmes was still alive — although apparently at an advanced age and crippled with senility if he thinks the “shocking twist” at the end of the Pina Colada Song is worthy of a spoiler alert.
Citizen Alan
@jimBOB:
Stryker? Stryker?!?!? (Man in background shrugs and then slugs nearest woman.) … Ted Stryker?
And don’t call me Shirley!
Update: Dammit! Partially ninja’d by Davis X Machina!
Corner Stone
@Citizen Alan: There has never been a day that was not immediately improved by an Airplane! quote or reference.
Corner Stone
@Citizen Alan: Oh, btw, it’s the “shrug” that absolutely sells that bit.
If he had just stroked her on command it would have been funny.
But the little, “Eh, if you say so I guess.” turned it into eternal gut wrenching hilarity.
cleter
So, it’s like that time in the 1980s when the CIA had to buy all those Rogers and Clark albums?
MikeJ
@cleter:
If you admit that you can play the accordion,
No one’ll hire you in a rock ‘n’ roll band.
ericblair
@mellowjohn:
Got funnier. The next business opportunity was, of course, to release the back catalog with some new material, like Pride and Prejudice and Nuclear Launch Codes and wait for the 10,000 unit order to come in from Amazon.
I heard the same story that this had already gone through the normal clearance channels, and then Joint Special Operations Command had a shit fit and somehow managed to convince the higher-ups to consider this bizarre strategy. Internal Pentagon politics.
JGabriel
MikeJ:
That joke’s been dead since The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash.
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JWL
National security deputy dogs still cite information collected about John Fucking Lennon as worthy of classification. What else does anyone need to know about those clowns?
bago
At least clowns show up to work, drunk, covered in slapdash makeup, and leering at the youth.
Uncle Clarence Thomas
I don’t understand why they don’t let President Obama order the Commander in Chief to fulfill Obama’s fierce urgency for transparency.
cleter
@MikeJ: Telling the truth can be dangerous business. Honest and popular don’t go hand in hand.
grumpy realist
Oh, the tendency of any military to “classify” stuff that’s already in the public domain has been an unending source of giggles.
And the ability of the NSA to trip over its own feet was historically a constant source of merriment at MIT. (If you want to eavesdrop on a finite computer network, don’t act like a black hole. )
daveNYC
I think the problem was that Ghostface Killah is already taken.
maya
Jeebus, wouldn’t it be a lot cheaper and more secure if DIA just hired some Navajos?
As long as they’re in WWII mode.
Martin
For the sake of my retirement portfolio, I hope the DOD decides to buy and destroy every iPad that Apple can produce to head off distribution of all of those electronic versions of the book.
Mike in NC
I used to drive by Camp Peary every month on my way from DC to Norfolk. Virtually everybody living within a hundred mile radius knew who owned the place, and had for many years.
Church Lady
@Citizen Alan: I hate that damn song.
Martin
@Church Lady: Everybody hates that damn song.
JGabriel
grumpy realist:
That said, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that the NSA invented public-key encryption a few years before it was (re-)invented by non-spooks. And they kept it secret for quite a while.
Kind of makes you wonder what other tech secrets the agencies might keeping. I suspect, for instance, that the NSA is farther along in the field of quantum computing than the public/academic world, but only because they mention quantum computing in their current charter/statement of purpose/whatever it’s called.
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jimBOB
Question: What public interest was served by having public-key encryption unavailable for whatever time period that the NSA had it and everyone else didn’t?
Having this technique publicly available has probably been an annoyance to the NSA, but obviously they deal with it. Is saving the NSA from a few years’ annoyance a more important public good than having a decent encryption method available to those who want it? My guess is no.