I’ll probably get clipped for saying this — I may even deserve it! — but after reading Kerry Howley’s NYMag profile, I think Reality Winner and Heather Heyer (killed by a Nazi in Charlottesville) would’ve been friends. “Not every leaker is an ideological combatant like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. Reality Winner may be the unlikeliest of all”:
Reality Winner grew up in a carefully kept manufactured home on the edge of a cattle farm 100 miles north of the Mexican border in a majority-Latino town where her mother, Billie, still lives. From the back porch, a carpet of green meets the horizon, and when a neighbor shoots a gun for target practice, a half-dozen local dogs run under the trailer to hide. Billie worked for Child Protective Services, and in Ricardo, Texas, the steady income made her daughters feel well-off; the fact that they had a dishwasher seemed evidence of elevated social standing. Billie, a chatty redhead with the high-pitched voice of a doll, supported the family while her husband, Ronald, she says, “collected degrees.” It was Ronald who named Reality. The deal had been that Billie got to name their first — Brittany — but their second was his to choose. He noticed, on a T-shirt at their Lamaze class, the words I COACHED A REAL WINNER. He wanted a success story and felt that an aspirational name would increase his chances of producing one. Billie did not object; a deal is a deal.
Ronald was intellectually engaged, though never, during his marriage, employed, and Reality’s parents separated in 1999, when she was 8. Two years later, when the Towers fell, Ronald held long, intense conversations about geopolitics with his daughters. He was careful to distinguish for them the religion of Islam from the ideologies that fueled terrorism. “I learned,” says Reality, “that the fastest route to conflict resolution is understanding.” She credits her father with her interest in Arabic, which she began studying seriously, outside school and of her own accord, at 17. It was this interest in languages that eventually drew her into a security state, unimaginable before 9/11, that she chose to betray. Fifteen years after those first conversations with her father, Reality’s interest in Arabic would be turned against her in a Georgia courtroom, taken as evidence that she sympathized with the nation’s most feared enemies…
No one was surprised when Reality’s sister, Brittany, went on to college, absurd amounts of college, such that she walked out of Michigan State with a Ph.D. in pharmacology and toxicology last year. But Reality had then, and has now, a skepticism of academic degrees, which she recently described to me as “hundred-thousand-dollar pieces of paper that say you’ve never had a job.” (“It’s interesting,” her mother notes, “because of her father?”) She wanted her life to start. She wanted to make the biggest difference she could, as soon as she could. It wasn’t until she was getting on the bus for basic training that she told her mother she’d applied to engineering school at Texas A&M–Kingsville, received a full scholarship, and turned it down.
Based on her test scores, Reality was selected to be a cryptolinguist, which is to say she was tapped to help the military eavesdrop on people speaking languages other than English. She wanted Arabic, but the ones assigned to her were Dari and Farsi — languages of use to a military vacuuming up conversations from Afghanistan and Iran. She would spend two years becoming fluent and another year in intelligence training before she was sent to Maryland’s Fort Meade. Along the way, she’d be one of a few students admitted to a selective program in Pashto, yet another language in which she would become fluent.
In Maryland, her life, according to those closest to her, involved an exceptionally punishing exercise regimen, volunteer work, and 12-hour shifts listening to the private conversations of men and women thousands of miles away. There was also anxiety. Reality worried about global warming. She worried about Syrian children. She worried about famine and poverty all over the globe. Highly critical of her carbon-spewing, famine-ignoring fellow citizens, she nevertheless thought her humanitarian impulses were compatible with the military’s mission, and wished her fellow Airmen were not just more competent in their jobs but more motivated to do them well, to save the vulnerable from acts of terror…
Reality would later tell the FBI that she worked in the drone program; as a cryptolinguist, her job would likely have been to translate communications so that drone operators would know whom to target. “It was definitely traumatizing,” says Boyle. “You’re watching people die. You have U.S. troops on the ground getting shot at, you miss something, a bomb goes off, and you get three people killed.”As a matter of record, she helped kill hundreds of people. A commendation she received in October 2016 praises her for “assisting in geolocating 120 enemy combatants during 734 airborne sorties.” She is commended for “removing more than 100 enemies from the battlefield.” She aided in 650 “enemy captures” and 600 “enemies killed in action.”…
By December 2016, when Reality returned to Georgia, it was common for a certain class of educated and politically sophisticated people to refer to the “deep state,” a term that conjures dark-suited men self-satisfied in their grim capacity for discretion. This image fails to account for the fact that those 1.4 million hold top security clearance; that most of the intelligence budget now redounds to private contractors employing tens of thousands of middle-class Americans; that armies of security-cleared analysts are required to sift through all the data the state collects. If your definition of “deep state” cannot accommodate an idealistic 25-year-old CrossFit fanatic with unmatched socks, you’ve underestimated both the reach and scope of American surveillance…
Reality was searched for thumb drives and cell phones every morning as she walked into the Whitelaw Building; her lunch, security guards noted as they pawed through it, was very healthy. She translated Farsi in documents relating to Iran’s aerospace program, work for which she had no particular affinity and which seems to have bored her. For those mornings when she did not feel like reading more documents about Iran’s aerospace program, she evidently had access to documents well outside her area of expertise. She had access, for example, to a five-page classified report detailing a Russian attempt to access American election infrastructure through a private software company. This would be, ultimately, the document she leaked. According to the analysis in the report, Russian intelligence sent phishing emails to the employees of a company that provides election support to eight states. After obtaining log-in credentials, the Russians sent emails infected with malware to over 100 election officials, days before the election, from what looked like the software company’s address…
In those first months on the job, the country was still adjusting to Trump, and it seemed possible to some people that he would be quickly impeached. Reality listened to a podcast called Intercepted, hosted by the left-wing anti-security-state website the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill and featuring its public face, Glenn Greenwald, and listened intensely enough to email the Intercept and ask for a transcript of an episode. Scahill and Greenwald had been, and continue to be, cautious about accusations of Russian election meddling, which they foresee being used as a pretext for justifying U.S. militarism. “There is a tremendous amount of hysterics, a lot of theories, a lot of premature conclusions being drawn around all of this Russia stuff,” Scahill said on the podcast in March. “And there’s not a lot of hard evidence to back it up. There may be evidence, but it’s not here yet.”
There was evidence available to Reality.
The document was marked top secret, which is supposed to mean that its disclosure could “reasonably be expected” to cause “exceptionally grave damage” to the U.S. Sometimes, this is true. Reality would have known that, in releasing the document, she ran the risk of alerting the Russians to what the intelligence community knew, but it seemed to her that this specific account ought to be a matter of public discourse. Why isn’t this getting out there? she thought. Why can’t this be public? It was surprising to her that someone hadn’t already done it…
Adam L Silverman
I read this profile article when it came out. I agree with your comment
However, what Ms. Winner did was make the worst possible choice about what she needed to do and how she needed to do it. You will get no argument from me that the official processes we have established for whistle blowers and the manner in which they’re handled is at best poor and at worst completely broken. But she had other options. There are national security law practices that specialize in handling these types of things. I get that Ms. Winner is young and despite all of her experience and expertise working with the US Air Force is poorly educated, quite sheltered, and very naive. But she made risky decision and then chose the worst possible way to execute that decision: contacting Glenn Greenwald under the assumption that he is trustworthy.
Ms. Winner is now going to receive the maximum punishment possible. Not just because she accessed classified information she didn’t need to know. And not just because she then released it to people that aren’t cleared at all, let alone had a need to know what she sent them. And not just because she had a completely mistaken and foolhardy belief that Greenwald could be trusted and works in good faith. She is going to be buried by the prosecution because what she leaked seems to run counter to the President’s, the Attorney General’s, the administration’s, and the GOP’s narrative that the Russian active measures and cyberwar interference in the 2016 US elections didn’t actually impact the actual election systems in any states. An example is going to be made. And Ms. Winner is going to be that example.
schrodingers_cat
Greenwald is a Putin stooge and delivered Snowden to Putin. How do the Russian trolls know which buttons to push on social media. They certainly have had help from those who know inner workings of the politics of this country.
laura
@Adam L Silverman: Winner is now going to receive the maximum punishment possible.
And because she’s a woman.
There’s never been a time in all of history that the finger of blame hasn’t been pointed at a woman.
Baud
Worth noting that Snowden remains a hero, while she is barely a blip. I guess the people she thought were on her side weren’t interested in evidence about Russian interferences in the election.
I hope the Dem president in 2021 grants her a Manning like reprieve. I will if it’s me.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Sure. But that’s the story with Scahill?
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: This illustrates the value of education and understanding the system you’re working with. Winner, like Edward Snowden, is largely self-educated. It’s easy to get an idiosyncratic view of things, which leads to bad judgments about what is going on and the feeling that one needs to make that public, along with ignorance about the best strategy to get the information out. So both have made themselves targets rather than doing good, which was their intention.
Part of a conventional education is learning to work through the system. If the education is good and the student smart, she will figure out that there are times to stick with the system and times to go around it. A conventional education can also indoctrinate against seeing anything outside the system. I’m not advocating that, just saying that there are some interesting lines that one needs to know about crossing before one takes the steps that Winner and Snowden did.
Adam L Silverman
@laura: To be honest, in this case if she was a man they would still be pushing for the maximum punishment possible. I understand and largely agree with what you’re saying, but in this case I think it is tangential as best.
debbie
@Baud:
Hero to who, aside from Vlad and GG?
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: No argument here. With the exception that it appears that Snowden was a directed op from get go, while Ms. Winner was simply idealistic, fed up, and naive.
Baud
@debbie: The tech bro set.
Marcopolo
@Adam L Silverman: Acknowledging everything you write here is true, in the spirit of an optimistic 2018 I’ll hold out the hope that at some point in the next few years we’ll elect a President who’ll make a decision to pardon her or commute her sentence.
Lyrebird
@Baud:
Build a platform with that and, say, inviting the wrongly-convicted Central Park Five to head up your sentencing & prison reform commission and I’m on board 150%
Adam L Silverman
@Marcopolo: It will be her only hope unless the prosecution really screws up their case and she has really good defense counsel.
Cheryl Rofer
@Adam L Silverman: Even if Snowden was co-opted, my comments at #6 still apply.
Jay S
@Cheryl Rofer: I think I side with Adam, FWIW, which is little. While your general observations are probably true, the motivation for Snowden is less clear. I tend to believe the arrogance of ignorance drove both to fail to understand the consequences of the actions they took.
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer: Yes they do.
Major Major Major Major
Lock her up!
guachi
I’m a linguist like Reality Winner. I’ve served at Fort Gordon and Fort Meade like her. I’m not at all surprised at the profile of her. At least half a dozen of my linguist friends marched in the Women’s March. I drove up from Georgia to meet a linguist friend stationed at Fort Meade.
But contacting Glenn Greenwald was just stupid as hell.
Kay
@Cheryl Rofer:
It’s a really interesting take. I read quite a bit about Bowe Bergdah. My sense was he missed basic context- essential things, like “what is my job” and “what are we doing here”- really smart but self-educated so there were no “checks” on what he thought, no one with organizational/institutional understanding to put him inside some larger context, show him that these things he was “discovering” about the military are things everyone knows. I think his educational isolation coming up really hurt him- he would have benefited from some exposure to conventional structure. Someone to tell him “no this is NOT a new idea, plenty of people are disappointed in leaders or organizations, it’s NOT as noble as you thought it was”.
The romanticism is there too, the cloak and dagger stuff, the urge to seek some extraordinary special and personal mission inside the group mission. They seem younger than they are, these people- almost as if they see their lives as fictional accounts of heroes.
Major Major Major Major
@guachi: I have little doubt that her autodidact crypto-minded peers are also Greenwald fans.
Major Major Major Major
And I’m off to Lisbon! ????✈️ ??
Gretchen
@Adam L Silverman: so what would the punishment be if they throw the book at her?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Does being a tech bro make you stupid? I am reading mind-numbingly stupid conversations by Indian tech bros lashing out at immigration lawyers on Twitter etc and being seduced by all the empty talk of “skilled immigration” by the lying liars in this administration.
ETA: Don’t know much about Scahill.
Kay
@Cheryl Rofer:
And then there’s the hard landing, because what they do DOES fall within the existing structure and they’re punished within the existing rules, and the specialness of their situation or motives doesn’t matter. I know they feel it’s unfair – the sentences are too draconian in my view but I think all US sentences are too draconian, not just this one. But I get it, I really do. They felt they were somehow outside the system, an exception, extraordinary, and they never really were. That’s the hard landing. They run up against the same black and white statutes everyone else does and they’re in real trouble.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Wow. Enjoy.
@schrodingers_cat: I tend to think it’s about having only one good skill but thinking you have many. Like Dr. Ben Carson or Tom Brady.
Ella in New Mexico
Adam and Cheryl are right: regardless of her obvious naïveté and idealism, what she did was dumb and wrong and should be punished.
However, that does not make the issue of finding out how far Russian meddling actually got into actual voting systems moot. For all we know, it was far more sinister and could have actually changed voter tolls. How will we know, given the immense national security pressure to keep the truth secret from the American people?
This country is so fucked.
rikyrah
@Major Major Major Major:
Have a safe trip ?
Tenar Arha
I sometimes think that making an example of Thomas Drake should now be considered a bad tactic that encouraged the things it was meant to prevent.
ETA And this is from someone who knows they don’t understand enough how this stuff works. Just seems obvious that this was part of the reasoning that Winner & Snowden used to convince themselves they were doing the right thing.
Kay
@Ella in New Mexico:
Well, we could seek information at the state level, as far as “voting systems”. States have a lot more election law than the federal government does and they can absolutely investigate their own systems. No one is stopping state level leaders from looking at this- this is one area where they can operate completely independently of the federal apparatus. It was always one of the arguments AGAINST a federal voting scheme- that if voting systems were centralized then any problem would be hugely magnified. This would be the time to use federalism as a shield rather than a sword. It’s just a tool. It works when liberals use it the same as when conservatives use it. Go to the states. Demand they look into it.
Yutsano
@Cheryl Rofer: @Adam L Silverman: To wit: I have direct access to Dolt45’s tax returns. I could recover account transcripts going back for years showing how he works the system. I can show open and concluded audits, If I were to do so I would be heavily prosecuted and made an example of. Yet the though still crosses my mind.
Current political figures are very heavily monitored. So it never goes past the thought stage. But if I had some kind of protection/avenue out of the country…
Mnemosyne
It’s interesting to see what people are saying about folks who are largely self-educated, because it’s making me think that part of our current problem is the legion of conservatives who were home-schooled. I suspect they have many of the same issues of thinking that the obstacles they’re encountering are novel or something that should be swept aside because they literally were never taught otherwise.
Jay S
@Baud: Yes. Speaking as someone who either was or skated very close to being a tech bro in a different era, it is easy to believe you have a better understanding of every thing because you have a deep understanding of a few things. Learning humility and the limits of your own knowledge takes time.
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
Which meant he was instructed to get the hell out before he was arrested, while Reality Winner idealistically believed she would be treated as the hero she actually is.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud: The tech bro set are perhaps the most ignorant idiots ever assembled. They hate the “Deep State” but the “Deep State” is largely responsible for the industry they work in.
As for Greenwald and Snowden, I look forward to their accidental deaths under a 16 ton weight.
debbie
@Baud:
Well, based on the docs each released, she’s the hero. I can believe there’s some sort of gender bias going on with those bros.
Lapassionara
@Mnemosyne: I’ve wondered about that too. Does anyone keep statistics on number/ percentage of young people who are home schooled? The ones I know were kept at home to protect their feelings. But anecdotes aren’t data.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@schrodingers_cat:
go talk to programmers. As a group, yes. My sister is a programmer and me and my brother in law have to constantly act as her intermediary between her and the rest of humanity she is so utterly clueless on what drives other people. But by all accounts she is a very good programmer. The problems is they are so specialized, so coddled in their jobs they aren’t forced to socialize like the rest of us or even understand the consequences of offending other people at the gut level like normal people. Again, my sister as an example, told a coworker he was an idiot to his face and was shocked when he got so angry he was about to assault her.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
Cheryl’s comment grabbed me because one of the things they learn in formal education is how systems and organizations work. They’re going from a small system (a family) to a larger and more diverse and more complex system (a school). She was talking about higher ed but teachers in younger grades say this- that a lot of what they do it getting children accustomed to working within a group, with rules and leaders – how to function in that, how to use it to one’s advantage. No one likes to hear it because we sort of worship the individual, the maverick, but schools are really workplaces and people have to be taught how to function in one. It’s a skill all by itself.
HeleninEire
@Major Major Major Major: Bring your walking stick. The hills are brutal.
Mnemosyne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Not to remotely diagnose your sister based on a single anecdote, but it’s quite common both for people on the autism spectrum to be drawn to programming and for women on the autism spectrum to be severely underdiagnosed because there’s still an attitude that only males are “really” autistic. Just sayin’.
Kay
@Mnemosyne:
A big part of college for me was “this thing you think you discovered? Just thought of? There’s like 50,000 experts on just that thing it has a NAME and BOOKS about it- really almost everyone knows this EXCEPT you”
Hard landing, but necessary, right ? :)
Adam L Silverman
@Gretchen: I think the maximum is life. Not sure if it is with or without parole.
matt
LOL, did Greenwald turn her in? Shouldn’t have leaked to the Intercept.
debbie
@Lapassionara:
Kay can better speak to this, but there’s very little information about anything to do with charter schools. And what is available isn’t reliable in any way—not even attendance figures. ECOT in Ohio was found to have wildly exaggerated attendance numbers and received millions in funding they didn’t deserve. Getting it back from them has been harder than getting milk from a stone, so to speak.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
I had a lot of hard landings in college, and many of them were thanks to other students who were from much different backgrounds than my sheltered suburban self. I think that kind of learning is vastly underestimated by the people who sneer at college.
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
I think there’s a certain kind of stupid overconfidence that techbros are very prone to. They have mastered a challenging and esoteric field of knowledge that gives them impressive power to do cool stuff. They think that makes them universally intelligent and capable of tackling anything. After all, they’ve mastered what they’re sure is the hardest, most esoteric field, so they must be capable of taking on any of those lesser fields. I would guess that autodidacts are especially prone to this kind of hubris because their self teaching serves as evidence of their ability to tackle complex knowledge, and because they’ve never been forced to learn those other areas and tend to underestimate just how challenging they are. Though when you think about it, “techbro” is basically a grouping of the people who see things that way; there are plenty of other people in STEM fields who manage to avoid that viewpoint.
Jay S
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Programming often encourages an extreme focus that makes exercising social contact seem unhelpful. Some introverts are attracted to that, and use it as a shield or a weapon. The punishment and reward structure for programmers can be quite dehumanizing.
Cheryl Rofer
@Yutsano: That was the kind of situation Daniel Ellsberg was faced with, and we know how he decided. On balance, I’m inclined to believe that was a good thing, but it’s not clear that the revelation of the Pentagon Papers was the most important thing that happened. The follow-on – Nixon’s deciding he needed to do something about the leaks, leading to Watergate, had so much impact that it’s hard to sort the two out.
Matt
As an American living in Canada my eyes have been opened about how overly punitive Americans are. Here she’d be punished but not put away for years. Clearly she has skills that could be put to good use for society. Instead, she’ll waste away in prison, with the hope that her example will deter other idealists. It probably won’t.
Cheryl Rofer
@Mnemosyne: Yes. I was something of an autodidact and had some hard landings in college. I also benefitted from two mentors who were something of rebels against the system but understood the system much better than I did and gave me good advice, much of which was STFU.
Cacti
@matt:
Yep.
He burned her ass.
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I some of that is because tech careers like computer programming have a tendency to attract the kind of people who never did that well at dealing with other people. If you don’t like dealing with other people because they’re crazy and unpredictable, computers seem wonderful in comparison. People often talk about it as being about autism spectrum disorders, and it does sound as if there are a lot of people with Asperger’s in tech, but I think it probably extends to people who are just antisocial or very introverted.
Chris T.
@Roger Moore: Curiously, one also sees this in surgeons (doctors generally but especially surgeons) and physicists.
schrodingers_cat
@Roger Moore: Engineering types seem to be more prone to this phenomena, than those in the sciences. There is an Indian proverb which says that some people become yellow with a half a turmeric root. ( Little knowledge is a dangerous thing).
Ladyraxterinok
@Mnemosyne: Good point about homeschooling.
Libby Ann in her blog love, joy,feminism at patheos has many posts about what she did not learn being homechooled. And the great amount of bubble fslse info she was fed.
IIRC she has links to testimonies of other homeschooling refugees.
IIRC the Patrick Henry collesge, a super conservative source of interns,etc, for DC GOPers, gets most of its students from homeschooling sources.
Sister Golden Bear
@schrodingers_cat:
Outside of a specialized set of problems, yes. (I’m a user interface designer rather than a programmer, but much of my job involves translating the outside world into terms programmers can understand.)
@Jay S:
Agreed. Especially if one tends to think in binary terms to begin with. One of my reminders to my programmers is that humans aren’t digital, they’re analog, very analog.
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Yep, especially here in Silicon Valley where programmers are treated as the Masters of the Universe and all sorts of behaviors are tolerated that wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else outside the hothouse. A big part of the tech backlash in SF is that so many techies are just plain rude and condescending.
The irony being that so many start-up fail because they’re solving a cool technical problem — but one that doesn’t solve any need out in the real world with the rest of humanity.
Gretchen
@Mnemosyne: Also underestimated by the people who sneer at diversity.
Homeschooling is heavily pushed by fundamentalists precisely because they can keep their children ignorant of things they don’t want them to know about and viewpoints their parents don’t agree with.
trollhattan
@Matt:
As the only advanced Western nation with the death penalty it’s hard to argue the point. Hell, even “blue” California lurves the death penalty, voting recently to speed it up!
Jay Noble
“But she had other options. There are national security law practices that specialize in handling these types of things.”
Was Winner made aware of these? Were they accessible without getting caught up in that whole chain of command thing? Did she feel that even going to one of these law practices would help and feared they would just turn it all back over to the chain of command again?
Obvious Russian Troll
@schrodingers_cat: No, but (in addition to attracting people with autism and other people with poor social skills as Mnemosyne said) being in tech allows people to *get away with* being socially stupid. A lot of tech bros also buy into the bullshit they hear about their own brilliance. They don’t realize that either they aren’t brilliant, or that their brilliance doesn’t mean anything outside their field.
trollhattan
@Cacti:
I’m beginning to think Greenwald maybe doesn’t like women much.
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
Yeah, I was kind of riding off on my slightly different hobbyhorse that there are still quite a few doctors out there who never bother to check women for things like autism or ADHD because there’s still an attitude that they’re male disorders and it’s unusual for women to have them. Now it’s starting to become more obvious that women have those and other disorders in similar numbers as men, but that they manifest a little differently because there are still pretty big differences in the ways boys and girls are socialized.
HeleninEire
@Yutsano: Come to Ireland. I’ll marry you.
MikeEss
@Sister Golden Bear: As a programmer (as well as a part-time UI designer) of administrative systems for my employer, one of the things I have to always remind myself is that no matter how fascinating the technology might be to me, to my users whatever I create for them is either a help for them in their job or a curse…and usually somewhere in the middle. The computer for most people is just a tool, it is not the center of their being. For a guy who’s been employed in IT for as long as I have been, sometimes it’s easy to forget these simple truths. I’m fortunate that I have never really worked in a truly hardcore programming shop like you might find in Silicon Valley or at Microsoft…
Dmbeaster
@Adam L Silverman:
First I have seen this and unaware of the details to support it.
Mnemosyne
@Dmbeaster:
Arms Control Wonk detailed it back in 2014. People who are experts in foreign affairs were suspicious of Snowden’s story from the start.
Gin & Tonic
@HeleninEire: I don’t think you’re his type.
Cacti
@trollhattan:
Especially ones who don’t toe the line for his boss in Moskva.
Gin & Tonic
@Dmbeaster: I hear you. I’m still waiting for that conclusive link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer.
Adam L Silverman
@Jay Noble: I don’t know what she did and didn’t know. I do know that the practices that handle these things take attorney-client privilege very seriously and work to try to ensure that 1) the whistle blower will be protected and 2) the material the whistle blower wishes to share will be shared with the right people in a way that will keep the whistle blower protected.
A modicum of research before taking action would have been appropriate.
Jager
I was a basic training squad leader in the 60’s, our company was a mix of RAs, Draftees, Guardsman and Reservists. We had one foreign national in our platoon. Paul was French, he spoke English, French and German, good guy, very quiet and a solid soldier who pulled his weight. He was the only guy in our company who was assigned to the US Army Language School in Monterrey. About 10 years ago I was reading an obit in the LA Times about a UCLA football player who had gone on to an academic career at Washington State. There were quotes from one of his fellow professors. I recognized the name, he had been my bunk mate at Fort Leonard Wood. I contacted him, we talked, during one of our conversations Paul came up. He had run into Paul at an academic conference in London, they went out, got drunk and talked, once they got through the Army bullshit, Paul told him he had been requited by the CIA, he had studied Farsi for two years at Monterrey and the CIA sent him to Iran posing as a French businessman, Paul spent time in Iran before and after the Shah fell and throughout the hostage crisis.. In all Paul spent 20 years working for the CIA, He went back to school after he retired and then taught Middle Eastern studies in France. My WSU friend said Paul never got into any detail about what he actually did for the CIA other than he spent 20 years working for them focused on the Middle East, He was happy to be a dual US/French citizen and his son is retired from the US Navy. Small damn world.
Gravenstone
@Kay: I went to a tiny school (< 1000 students K-12). I was an academic "big fish" in that school, including a top 5th percentile finish in a national engineering test. Once I got into college (primarily at a still small school – ca. 1000 students), I learned that I wasn't all that. Then, once I graduated and got into my degree and could compare myself against others in my professional field, reality simply got reinforced. I ain't shit in the big picture, just another cog.
Mnemosyne
@Adam L Silverman:
She trusted the Intercept because Greenwald has carefully cultivated a persona of being honestly anti-secrecy when he’s really just anti-US government secrecy.
More fool her, unfortunately. Now she’s going to pay for years for her naïveté.
Gravenstone
@matt: Published the materials she provided directly as copies, without redaction or removal of telltales that allowed the government to zero in on where the copies were made and by whom. So, indirectly, yeah the Intercept outed her.
Roger Moore
@schrodingers_cat:
I think there’s a degree of humility baked into the core of the pure sciences that isn’t there in engineering. The essence of engineering is trying to bend the world to your desires, which is an arrogant position at its core. In contrast, the sciences start from a position of acknowledged ignorance, which is an inherently humble position. That’s not to say that figuring out the secrets of the universe isn’t going to make people proud, but at least scientists are starting from a better place.
OGLiberal
RE: homeschooling. I am pretty far left, as is my wife. We home school for a variety of reasons but we are about as pragmatic liberal as you can get.
That said, in the support groups we’ve joined, the folks were fundamentalist Catholic (a Catholicism my Cathloic school raised New Orleans wife didn’t recognize), hippy unschoolers who didn’t like us for worrying about kids running into the street without looking and our current group, which is great because the current leader keeps biases in check but it is still a ver Trumpy bunch.
Homeschooling is tough for libs who wnat their kids to learn evolution, algebra, real history, but also be ready to enter public schools at any moment due to circumstances AND have interactions with otber kids
In short, not all home schoolers are Liberty University freshmen. At least, I hope not. Would be my worst nightmare if that was one or both of my kids’ choices.
Adam L Silverman
@Gravenstone: Actually he didn’t publish them. He sent them directly to someone in the US government for verification without redacting anything. Basically he gave his point of contact everything they needed to determine who had accessed the information.
MikeEss
@Roger Moore: …in pure science, if you get something wrong, you can’t get your paper published and other scientists mock you. As an engineer, if you screw up the design of a bridge, and it collapses…there are consequences. There’s little room for humility. No client is going to appreciate an engineer who says, “well, I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, I guess we’ll just have to try it hope for the best…”
But I’m a software guy, not a hardcore engineer…
Gelfling 545
@matt: Seriously. What about the way l’affaire Snowdon played out made her feel that Greenwald was the one to go to? T’is a puzzlement.
Yutsano
@Gin & Tonic: I’m not above a marriage of convenience, It would just be a matter of getting there. And I have friends in several countries in Europe I could hide with. It would just be a matter of getting it all set.
HeleninEire
@Gin & Tonic: Oh my. Clearly I missed something over the years. But, still; who cares? Getting those tax returns out may be worth it. People have married for less!
Gravenstone
@Adam L Silverman: Thanks for the correction. I misremembered and thought they’d been published in originally provided form.
HeleninEire
@Yutsano: Oh Hi.
Adam L Silverman
@Gravenstone: I have no idea what he actually published. But he basically gave the government, in an attempt to verify the document’s veracity, everything they need to identify who accessed it, copied it, and then sent it to him. It also didn’t help that Winner confessed immediately without referring with counsel or having counsel present.
Roger Moore
@Gravenstone:
Not to suggest you hold those attitudes, but I think what you’re saying there shows one of the biggest, most dangerous problems with a lot of the tech worldview. The way you talk makes it sound as if being the smartest guy in the room makes you a better, more deserving person than the people who aren’t as smart. I realize that probably isn’t what you meant, but it sadly is what a lot of techbros think. They really behave as if everybody’s human worth is determined by their intelligence, rather than everybody having innate worth just by virtue of being human. It’s a really dangerous, and unfortunately common, point of view.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodingers_cat: Most of the programmers I know are actually more Bernie-fan liberals than textbook right-libertarian techbros. But the ones who are the latter are really, really vocal about it.
There are also some who just show the basic “semi-rich professional” attitude: NPR centrists with culturally liberal attitudes, a dislike of taxes and carefully cultivated disdain for Both Sides. That’s pretty common. I think some of those people have been driven more unabashedly leftward by the past few years.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
There’s more than a bit of that behind the mindless flogging of STEM upon kids, as though cranking out armies of them will fix America against those Chinese and Indian hordes stealin’ our tech jerbs. The unstated second outcome would be purging the universities of those liberal bastards taking up valuable space with their literature, art, music and communism indoctrinations.
Roger Moore
@MikeEss:
I think that’s exactly backward. Humility is what keeps you from assuming you can do no wrong and convinces you to let other people double and triple check your work. That’s most important when the consequences for a mistake are greatest, not when they’re smallest.
Kay
@Roger Moore:
My son is in tech and he talks about this- how there’s no ethics analysis in engineering. It’s like “self-driving cars? why not!” – he says other scientific fields have this whole realm of “but how will this impact society?” He also complains that there’s no real transparency- no sort of “peer review”- it’s just throw it out there and see what happens.
He’s funny because he’s a conventional centrist Democrat. He takes that penchant engineers have for “efficiency” and turns it toward liberal ends. He doesn’t want to mess with health insurance. He wants single payer because he wants it to be EASY. NOT his concern, figuring out health insurance/systems. He has a job. Have the health systems people run that. Take it right out of his pay. Done.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: I think it varies between sciences. Physicists are notorious for assuming their expertise is the key to all sciences: they’ll sometimes do interdisciplinary work in which they blunder into some biological or social-science field applying a few ideas imported from physics, without checking hard enough to see if that’s really just a toy version of something the people there already know.
And there’s a strange tendency for elderly cosmologists of some notoriety to start making increasingly whacked heretical pronouncements about all fields of science after they hit age 60 or 70. Especially if they are British, though it also hits cosmologists of other nationalities especially if they have had sufficient contact with the British.
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Challenger was an interesting intersection of policy, politics, communication and tech coming to a very wrong launch decision.
Dmbeaster
@Gin & Tonic: Hardly a parallel. From what we do know about Snowden, he seems to have started as a right-leaning libertarian who, surprise, became much more hardened after Obama was elected, and decided he had to fight back. His seduction into Russian arms seems to be the product of reaching out to Greenwald and Assange after he had already stolen the data, and probably much more so by Assange who was a Putin sympathizer by then. Whether or not Greenwald had gone all-in with Putin love at that time is not clear to me.
There is nothing but very speculative conjecture to say that Snowden was already a Russian agent when he began copying NSA files. Its po ssible, but not plausible.
Kay
@Gravenstone:
It broke my heart a little with Bergdahl because he seemed to genuinely believe the military would appreciate his solo efforts to enact his own ideas of what they were doing there. Following the story you’re thinking “oh, you poor thing- how did reach adulthood not understanding how any of this works?” You can just see him plummeting to earth from this elaborate fantasy he constructs.
There’s definitely arrogance there, though. It comes from a naive romanticism but it’s still arrogance, because it’s the surety that your individual approach is definitely superior to all institutional intelligence and all those other people.
Sister Golden Bear
@MikeEss:
Obviously lives aren’t involved, but I work for an ecommerce company that makes the bulk of our revenue in Q4. If the website goes down, we’re talking millions of dollars in lost revenue per hour. So there’s some parallels as far as humility.
OTOH, we’ve actually had site outages in years past, and that has caused more than a bit of humility — and a lot of subsequent pre-planning, pre-testing and sweating of the details by the folks who were around then.
Villago Delenda Est
@Kay: This is an interesting take, given that my military experience was that someone already invented the wheel, I just need to find the blueprints.
Once and a while I did something semi-original, but it was always based on precedents that were already there. It was gratifying when my semi-original take on some problem became a template for those who followed behind me, though.
Citizen Alan
@debbie:
Didn’t they make a big-budget Hollywood movie starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt which portrayed Snowden as a patriotic hero to be admired? Didn’t Stephen Colbert or somebody like that go to Russia to interview him? I imagine a sizable percentage of the left still admires him in large part because of how the media has shaped him into a left-wing hero. Just like I’m pretty sure that everyone who still supports Wilmer wants Snowden to get a blanket pardon immediately.
Roger Moore
@trollhattan:
Anyone who thinks flogging STEM is going to purge our schools of liberals is in for a big surprise. Somebody posted a quip in my department at work that says
Admittedly, engineering is more conservative than science, but pushing STEM is hardly going to lead to a complete purge of liberals. Conservatives who believe otherwise are operating on severely out of date beliefs. Not too surprising, I guess.
Kay
@Gravenstone:
My father used to say “what if everyone did that?” when we cited some special dispensation to break a rule- some reason why we should be excepted. Because it’s always a personal moral judgment, right? MY motives were pure- it’s unfair or I was exposing wrongdoing or whatever it is- and the concern is if it’s up to individuals then all the motives won’t be “pure” or “right”.
It comes up for me with the transparency people on the Left all the time- “but who decides if it’s to be revealed? You? Alone? What if you’re reckless or an asshole or have some ulterior motive that is less pure?” And what about the inequity of the revelations? The randomness? We saw this with Clinton. All we had were one set of emails. We had Clinton’s and then no Trump comparison and elections are a choice of two.
It’s this review-free universe. There are no checks. One is wholly dependent on the inherent “goodness” or “rightness” of these individuals. That’s just fraught with problems, such vast potential for abuse or bad faith or just being wrong.
Roger Moore
@Kay:
It’s been a struggle to get ethics analysis included in the sciences. I’m most familiar with the biomedical field because that’s where I work, and there’s still a lot of resentment that things have to get run by a bunch of committees for approval before you can do them. I don’t think anyone wants to go back to the days where informed consent was considered unnecessary, but people resent the number of bureaucratic hurdles they have to jump to get their work done.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: Modern American “conservatives” are anything but. They’re just toadies of greedheads who want to defend their inherited privilege that actual equality would destroy.
Dmbeaster
@Mnemosyne: Interesting read. I find the more believable version to be that Assange delivered him to the Russians once he ended up in Hong Kong, and that Wikileaks got him to pick Hong Kong as his first destination. We do know it paid his hotel and legal bills in Hong Kong. The travel arrangement to Ecuador via Russia makes a lot of sense if Assange is arranging it, since both regimes are solid Assange friends.
The scenarios do not make sense if he is a Russian agent from the beginning. They would not arrange for a spy to fly to Hong Kong with hard drives, and then reach out to Greenwald, and leak the materials to the Guardian.
Roger Moore
@Villago Delenda Est:
I would argue that defense of inherited privilege is a pretty good nutshell description of conservatism. That said, I think the underlying dynamic in American politics is less about conservative vs. liberal than it is about privilege/hierarchy vs. egalitarianism.
burnspbesq
@Mnemosyne:
Before Props 187 and 209, that was one of the great things about the UC system.
burnspbesq
@trollhattan:
Ya think?
trollhattan
@Roger Moore:
Was it the Senate tax bill that would have taxed grad school assistanceships and stipends as income? That was the mask coming off in an especially shameless manner and they’re not taking the loss as the final word. DeVoss championing for-profit colleges again is a different angle altogether.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
Makes ya wonder why griftwald published evidence that would lead to her arrest.
Leads one to conclude it was to chill anti-Russia whistleblowers.
Ohio Mom
@Mnemosyne: I was thinking the same thing.
As an autism mom, I usually don’t like it when people make armchair diagnoses because all too often they mix up autistic characteristics and various personality quirks and disorders, and end up denigrating what makes autism autism. But you zeroed in on the important info here.
It is one thing to be blind to how systems and organizations work, and to be too wedded to how you think things *ought* to be. A lot of us are like that when we are young, and we mature out of it. We look back and are either mortified or amused by what were our youthful belief systems.
It is another thing all together to not be able to read and interpret the most basic things about another person who is in front of you. And to never seem to catch onto how to do that.
Very high-functioning older adult autistics who who have lived their lives wondering what was “wrong” with are generally relieved when they find out their issues and challenges have a name and a source.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: You do pay taxes on your stipend even now, Rs wanted to assess taxes on the tuition waivers etc.
Mnemosyne
@Dmbeaster:
Somebody turned Snowden while he was working for the CIA in Switzerland. Russia seems a much more plausible originator of that change than Greenwald, particularly given what we now know about the close links between Wikileaks and Russia.
My only remaining question about Greenwald is “Russian dupe or Russian agent?” but “dupe” seems less and less likely as time goes on. He wouldn’t be the first asshole with white supremacist leanings to convince himself that Russia is the future of the white race.
vhh
@Adam L Silverman: Correct as far as it goes. But what happens when Mueller et al take to court what Flynn and Papadopoulos have told them, plus what they squeeze out of Manafort and Gates and other as yet unindicted co conspirators? Presumably Sessions will set over zealous Trump-favored dogs on Reality to make the case that fake intel was released to hurt the Donald, but they could (and may inevitably) end up making something like the mistakes that Nixon’s DOJ did with Ellsberg (who came closer than is comfortable to conviction, saved only by prosecutorial misconduct) and the Pentagon Papers. Then there is Trump’s mouth and tweets. This will be a tangled story.
J R in WV
@Ladyraxterinok:
Good long-term friends of our home schooled their two sons. They were both bright educated people, and did the home school thing in almost a formal way, especially for hippies. Older son enrolled at state U in the town where wife worked most often, so some Friday evenings she would give young friend ride home on her way home.
One day young friend seemed quiet, so she asked him how thing went. He had flunked a chemistry test! Bummed out! Wife gently quized him about the test, the kinds of questions, what he hadn’t known.
Turns out he thought guessing on multiple choice when not sure of the answer was cheating. Same for True/false. So he left some questions blank where he had a good idea about the topic but not total recall of details. So for the next 45 minutes wife gave him a crash course on multiple choice, true/false modern test taking. He made an A in chem because the prof dropped the lowest score, something else that amazed young friend.
He is now a researcher in genetics in RTP, NC. He also does computer work to represent genetic strains being researched at his company. Actually he made all As and got one of those summa cum laude scarves to wear. So glad wife had a chance to teach him about taking tests in modern Universities.
So successful in so many ways. Also 6’7″… built like bull. Grew up on a farm…
Brachiator
@Kay:
Super busy today, but peeked in and saw this great thread. A quick note.
I listen to some tech podcasts and think that many tech libertarians are not easy to pin down as liberal or conservative. But quite a few of the folk I’ve listened to seem to omit the ethical analysis, as you note, or think that it is up to human beings to adjust to technology.
On a past episode of DTNS (Daily Tech News Show), one of the guests seem to imply that an occasional death as self driving cars are brought on line is okay because self driving cars will be so cool. Obviously, there may be problems and accidents and perhaps fatalities, but the bland acceptance was amazingly off-putting.
And sometimes there is this odd disconnect that believes that tech should be entirely divorced from laws and regulations because stupid rules just hold back technology.
J R in WV
@trollhattan:
You left out management. The decision was made by managers, not by engineers. The managers said delaying the launch to wait for the proper temperature conditions would be bad publicity for the Shuttle program!!
Ya think? Let me show you some BAD PR for your program, assholes!!! People should have gone to jail for that decision!
BellyCat
@Kay:
Serious question: What’s a constructive and equitable method for whistleblowers (righteous or not) to pursue?
Therein seems the challenge — the lack of an unbiased, first-step adjudicator that is an effective gatekeeper, and one who is not punitive and able to maintain anonymity.
Another Scott
@BellyCat: It depends on the context and the organization, of course. In many/most parts of the federal government there are various hotlines and inspector general offices that take anonymous tips. There are procedures and they’re written out in detail. If one doesn’t trust those management chains, there are things like sending the information to congressmen and senators that you regard as trustworthy. If one doesn’t trust those things, there are organizations like the ACLU or the EFF or any of a few hundred others.
Of course, Winner and Snowden and too many others are “contractors” and may not have the same protections and procedures that federal employees do. But they have whistleblowing options other than running to China with GB or TB of information and making up fantastical stories for the SCMP, etc., etc.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
I think there’s a largely unspoken belief in technological inevitability: if the technology is possible, somebody will make it. If you believe that, then you’re also going to accept that the somebody who makes it ought to be you so at least you can be the one to profit. They seem to accept that technology is morally neutral, which means there should be no legal obstacle to it. Of course it’s always hard for me to tell how much of this is a genuine philosophy that guides their actions and how much is a post hoc rationalization for why they should be free to do WTFTW.
mike in dc
@BellyCat: I think one problem is that whistle-blowing in the intelligence community is rather different than whistle-blowing in, say, the Department of the Interior.
Robert Sneddon
@Roger Moore: Computers come with a manual. People are weird irrational creatures with no operating instructions.
Autistic and spectrum people work well in computing and other areas where intense concentration and submersion in the subject are a win — they call it “being in the zone” where the problem and you are one and you can feel the shape of the problem/solution like a five-year-old can feel a Lego brick, they know exactly where everything goes, how everything fits. I recall zoning for as much as twelve hours when doing hardware and software development, I’ve seen others better at it than than me zone for thirty-six hours straight, sleep for twelve, wake up and drop straight back into the zone where they left off.
People punch you in the face if you give them what you think is an honest answer to a question. Computers have never told me to go fuck a pig, four-eyes.
Roger Moore
@J R in WV:
It’s a great example of how safety margins get eroded. Engineers build in a safety margin to protect against disaster. The fact that disaster hasn’t happened is used as proof that the situation is safe, which justifies riskier behavior. Nobody ever accepts that you’re eating into the safety margin until you’ve used it all up.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
Actually, I think there are anarcho-techno-libertarians. They believe in net neutrality, an open Internet, and open source technology in which no one necessarily makes a profit.
Actually, I think that they believe that technology is morally benign. Listen to Tom Merrit, Jeff Jarvis or even sometimes Leo Laporte and his guests. The presumption is that technology is always a net good, especially if stupid humans would get out of the way.
You see this sometimes in the attitude that tech people should not cooperate with Congress or other bodies because mundanes just don’t understand.
Both. Some tech people want absolute freedom and infinite funding to pursue tech dreams. This is why one fantasy is not to start a profitable company but to have your software idea bought for a billion by a venture capitalist even though it never made a dime.
Brachiator
@Robert Sneddon:
And yet a lot of tech people I know and have worked with never read the manual and pride themselves in playing with new software or hardware and in just “figuring things out.” At one company I worked for, developers hated writing manuals or even short user guides. I kept trying to tell them that customers wanted to install the product and use it in their business, not spend hours marvelling over the ingenuity of the software as they figured out how to use this.
Maybe I’m coming to your point from a different angle. The tech people I know are willing to spend time mastering software and hardware, customizing it so it is just the way they like it. Obviously, though, you cannot treat other people this way.
Roger Moore
@Robert Sneddon:
Which is nonsense on two fronts:
1) The manuals that come with computers are well known to be both incomplete and inaccurate, and an enormous number of bugs are lurking in software today because programmers acted as if they’re a reliable description of how the system works. People who rely on them without confirming their assertions are known as “bad programmers”.
2) There are manuals out there that describe how people work. They’re called psychology books. They are also incomplete and not totally accurate, but they’re way better than they get credit for.
Unfortunately, techbros are the kind of people who scoff at studying psychology, or even making a serious effort to learn how other people think on their own, but who believe what they’re told about how computers work.
opiejeanne
@Gin & Tonic: Cole Porter and Linda Lee Thomas found a way to make that work.
Chris
@Sister Golden Bear:
This seems to be common to more than just tech bros, it’s a thing about right-wingers with difficult and specialized professions in general. Right-wing doctors (hello, Ben Carson!), right-wing military personnel, right-wing engineers of all sorts, etc. They have hard jobs that require a lot of effort and skill and that much of the population just isn’t capable of. Because of that, it’s very easy to convince themselves that they’re somehow above and beyond the mere mortals, rather than just people who happen to have a narrow and deep specialization.
And then there’s this. A big chunk of this kind of arrogance simply comes from the feedback loop of a society that’s always telling you your shit doesn’t smell. Theoretically, there’s no reason that, say, school teachers or fast-food workers couldn’t have the same kind of arrogance we’re talking about here, if they were treated the same way. But instead they experience the opposite, a society that considers them parasites, nuisances, and otherwise inadequate, and never lets them forget it, so it’s a lot harder to grow that kind of ego.
Chris
@Mnemosyne:
The thing I found utterly unbelievable about Snowden’s time in Switzerland was that, IIRC, when he once discussed the moral event horizon that originally turned him off from the CIA, it was being asked to spy on a Swiss banker. Not overthrowing a democracy, not running arms to terrorists, not violating congressional arms embargos, not torturing prisoners. And not spying on Americans. He joined a spy agency, and then was shocked when it asked him to spy on foreigners (the same foreigners, incidentally, who’ve stashed the money of every dictator, terrorist, crime boss, white collar criminal, ex-Nazi and other scumbag in the last century, so kind of not people you’d want to leave uninvestigated).
Either he’s being honest and was truthfully shocked at being asked to do that, which would make him so stupid and ignorant that it really beggars the imagination, or he’s just completely full of crap which I find infinitely more likely.