I made the mistake of watching some cable news today while at Tire America getting new tires, and it made me mental watching them discuss the stolen documents. As usual, reporters are doing a shite job explaining just how fucked up possessing SAP documents is. These can be compartmentalized data that’s literally the need to know bullshit you see in every movie that people die for. This can be the kind of stuff you don’t even leave unsecured on your desk in the deepest bowels of the NSA. This is stuff that you may have the actual classification needed to see, but still are not allowed because it is on a need to know basis.
Thiscan be things like comsec at the highest levels, special operations and identities of people, the fucking B21 Raider, etc.
This is a big fucking deal. And equally nauseating is watching many of my old army buddies acting like this is nothing. These are motherfuckers that I have lined up with, arm and arm, and slowly walked across ENTIRE FUCKING TRAINING AREAS, through yard deep mud, looking for a lost .45 or pair of night vision goggles that turned up missing during a sensitive items check.
Now obviously, the government over-classifies a lot of stuff (something that the Biden admin is actually working on), so until we know for sure what was in these documents (if we are allowed to know), the text of the National Archives letter speaks for itself.
Baud
It would be wrong to speculate since the documents weren’t on a private email server.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
It especially infuriates me when you get this nonsense from people who’ve actually held those clearances and were trained in the law and the procedures.
Anyone currently holding an SCI clearance who says “it’s cool to take TS documents home if you’re a Republican” should lose their clearance on the spot. I wouldn’t even trust them with proprietary or limited-access unclassified stuff, like medical records.
People get busted for leaving a safe open in the middle of a fucking locked vault with nothing but cleared individuals around.
Damien
John, I think the problem you’re experiencing is the belief that reporters are supposed to serve us. Capitalism has honed itself to a razor’s edge, and every aspect of our society right now is dedicated to shunting us through a set of unseen gates like cows in a slaughterhouse, except that capitalist razor carves pounds of flesh from us a bit at a time until our carcass is depleted.
Reporters are there to guide the mooing horde of people to the way of thinking that will least upset this finely tuned machine. So in that case they are working exactly as intended.
HinTN
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
It’s a shame the inertia in the system doesn’t allow for this. Some highly cleared knucklehead coming home with that message for his buddies might get through.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@HinTN: I suspect if you voiced that sentiment in the hearing of a security officer, you’d find the consequences to be pretty severe and swift. Security officers don’t kid around, and the ones entrusted with TS are outright scary.
JaneE
When I worked for a defense contractor in the 70’s, even with the requisite clearance level, looking at something you did not need to know might well be a firing offense, both for you and the person who left or made it available for you to see. Supposedly it had happened once, but that could have been a story just to emphasize security.
I was cleared for a decade there, and for a year at another company, but never once had to handle a classified document. The people who did were behind locked doors.
Baud
I did not know about this. Thanks.
MattF
Highly classified documents should be protected. They should not be treated as bargaining chips. It is astonishing that people who know better can’t/won’t admit this.
Jeffery
I saw someone raised the question yesterday asking who told him what to take? He hasn’t got a clue what is going on. His handler told him what he should take.
RaflW
As I’ve said elsewhere, former Nat Sec angry guy Sen. Lindsey Graham would have shot off like a rocket to Mars if, say, PBO or HRC had traipsed off with even one compartmentalized top secret document.
But since he decided to voluntarily be destroyed by Trump, he’s abandoned even the thinnest shred of national security concerns. Literally 100s of other Nat Sec hawks both in the GOP and outside in the commentariat and think-tank land are equally as corrupted and vile.
We are indeed through the looking glass here, as Adam likes to say. Probably 1/3rd of this country now – even now as they’ve savagely rampaged Ukraine – thinks Russia should be our buddy buddy. And those same people think Trump having devastating secrets at his grifting, urgently needy fat greasy civilian post-officeholding fingertips is NBD. Fuck those fucking fuckers.
Suzanne
But Hillary emailed Huma about sharing a creme brûlée once. Maybe twice.
Baud
@Suzanne:
And now Saudi and Russia have that recipe!
Old Man Shadow
Hillary Clinton would already have been executed by firing squad or hanging if she had done this.
Old School
If something is truly sensitive, it is set to self-destruct in five seconds.
Martin
People are really overcomplicating this stuff.
Government documents, be they classified or not, be they presidential documentation, are *government* documents and owned by the government. Taking them is theft, and there are two whole fucking laws (one which is solely focused on the President and VP) making possession of those things a felony irrespective of whether they are classified or not. Their classification only adds to the felonies, but you’re already looking at felonies for stealing government documents.
When I retired, I brought home my photos of my kids, and that’s about it. Those notes I had written about how to address problems with the next project I was going to work on, those were the property of my employer, even though they contained nothing but my handwriting. I did them on the job, while I was paid by my employer, for the benefit of my employer. None of that stuff was mine.
The national archives will allow the President to keep some of this stuff if asked. There’s a form to fill out so there’s a paper trail of the change of ownership, but you have to ask, and you have to establish the paper trail. You can’t just fuck off with the governments stuff. Yeah, the government will come after you if you drive off with the latest battle tank, but they’ll also come after you if you drive off with a bog standard crown vic. It’s their shit. It’s that simple.
Trump was not the government. He was an employee of the government who spent 4 years acting as if he was the government, as a king does.
waspuppet
I’m equally pissed at reports about Trump’s “legal response” and “request for a special master” that act like it’s a real thing and not just a Truth Social post with the names of some cases thrown in to make it look like a lawyer wrote it. And that, in the process, confesses to several of the crimes he’s being investigated for.
I mean, if you wanna say “We need to talk about what would happen if a judge bought this piece of garbage, because much of the court system hates America as much as Trump does,” sure. But say that that’s what you’re saying.
Madeleine
Given the level of security and the restricted access described, it occurs to me to wonder both how and why TFG had these documents and how he managed to keep and remove them from the WH. Even if president.
RaflW
@Martin: One gets the sense that if TFG asked, the Archives would have figured out how he could keep the love note from Kim Jong-un. They might have set some standards around security, preservation, and of course making a top-quality copy for the archive in D.C.
That sort of vanity shit doesn’t seem that difficult to accommodate, even if it would be a bit of at PITA and annoy historians.
Lifting 700 pieces of paper comprising 150 nat sec documents? Yeahhh, nope.
Mike in NC
People are correct when they refer to Trump as a ‘disgruntled former employee’ capable of any misconduct. I want to see more hearings in September to reveal further criminality, followed by an indictment.
El Cruzado
One of the obvious takeaways from this is that Trump can’t actually conceive of working for other people, or being an employee. He’s run things all his life (mostly screamed at other people to run things) and he’s never been a direct report of anyone.
Suzanne
@El Cruzado: He’s also never worked within a real corporation. Just a family business.
Scout211
I am appalled at how the GOP house and senate members just make up sh*t to justify the unjustifiable with regard to Trump’s hoarding highly classified documents. This from a “top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee:” Link
Can someone revoke his committee membership, please? Because he doesn’t seem to understand matters of national intelligence. At all.
The Moar You Know
I am not sure anyone can adequately convey what it’s like, and what the rules are, about working with classified material unless you have actually worked with classified material.
Which is why the press reporting doesn’t bother me, but people like Cole’s old Army buddies do – THEY KNOW THE RULES.
RaflW
Trump’s entire life has been about evading limits and getting away with shit. His entire oeuvre.
I am so, so far beyond ready for that to crash down.
RaflW
@Scout211: And these corrupt slimeballs will have subpoena and committee investigative powers if they take the House in November.
I’m fairly optimistic about holding the Senate. I’m on pins and needles about the lower chamber (and ohhh, how much lower it can go!).
trollhattan
Is working title “Art of the Steal” too obvious?
Jackie
MSNBC has been covering the documents as STOLEN PROPERTY today on various programs. That made me happy! They’re pointing out that even if none of the boxes and boxes contained TS documents – Trump flat out stole government property and needs to be held as accountable as you or I would.
Mike E
@Mike in NC: that 2nd season, when it drops, is gonna be lit 🔥
@Damien: the media’s intent is clear, and we’re seeing the resultant wreckage of our society. Sad but true.
bbleh
@Jeffery: This may be true for some of the stuff, but I suspect that with Trump, as always, it’s stupider than that. I think he accumulated stuff because he thought he could make money off it, or it might give him an advantage over somebody, or he could use it to impress somebody, or just because he liked it or he thought it was cool and he’d hang on to it. I think he just accumulated stuff over the years, and then when he actually had to leave, he grabbed it all and stuffed it in some boxes.
Now it may be that Jared told him “hey this would be worth a fortune to MBS,” or Rudy told him “hey you better hang on to this cuz it might get you in trouble,” but I don’t give much credence to some Russian intermediary sending him a wish-list from the FSB or the GRU. That would require intelligence and planning, and he’s kinda short on both.
eversor
When I was still in the Navy one of my duties was locking all the safes up at night and signing off on that and also signing for the CRYPTO information (which is not to be fucked with, ever, at all, you don’t do it) when it was passed on from watch to watch. We extracted hard drives that were all hot swap from computers and locked those up as well. Disposing of shit involved shreding and smashing the fuck out of it and then sitting there in the burn area of of the ship watching it burn around all the toxic fumes just to be damn sure it was burned. This was before I went to the green side of the Navy (for non military this means you’re off ship and on shore bolting about with Marines). I’ve dealt with similar protocols most of my life and the jaw dropping lunacy of “walking out of an SCIF with papers” let alone walking out of the fucking building is just…. I dunno I’d have been charged and maybe hanged.
It’s just nuts. I couldn’t leave drives in my computers if I was not in the room for most of my life. I had to lock that shit up and sign it in and then back out to take a smoke. How the fuck does this happen?
bbleh
@Martin: True. That’s ONE of the statutes that the judge who granted the search warrant found sufficient cause to believe had been violated. And another is the Espionage Act, under which classification is not directly relevant but from which a jury certainly could infer that he had information he shouldn’t have had that could damage national security if it got out.
I admit I was surprised when it came out that one batch of documents from the search had TS/SI markings. I mean, they even built a SCIF at that place for him, and he had the stuff in boxes in a closet.
trollhattan
@Jackie: Did anybody count the WH silverware on 1-20-21? Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Trump didn’t make off with half of it.
bbleh
@waspuppet: The speculation seems to be that they’ve decided they don’t have a prayer legally and they’re going with a full-political “defense.” They’re trying to delay, to blow smoke, and to taint a potential jury pool.
Citizen Alan
@RaflW:
There absolutely needs to be a remake of red dawn in which the Russians invade America with the full complicity of red state state republicans and their voters only to be driven back by the heroism of liberals in blue States who may not own lot of guns but who could probably figure out how to make IEDs if we had to.
Geminid
@bbleh: There is the possibility that someone like Dan Scavino may have taken orders from a third party and then selected documents with trump’s aquiescence.
There was reporting that investigators interviewed at least four former White House employees this Spring regarding the documents, so the FBI and the Justice Department already have some idea as to how the packing went.
bbleh
@Madeleine: the Preznit gets to see pretty much anything he wants, and if he says he wants to hang onto it for a while, I’m guessing it’s logged somewhere but nobody’s gonna say no.
One report I saw said he would occasionally ask to keep stuff he was shown in the PDB.
SteveinPHX
When I was a kid in the military (late 60s), I was put into a TS project. We had to wear side arms, had a rack of M-16s behind the door AND we were in the middle of a SAC base! AND we were in the middle of the ocean!
At the end of every shift, every last, bleeding scrap of paper and anything else that could be burned, was put in a burn bag and we marched, still armed, out to a burn pit and lit it off. We could not leave until every last scrap was ash.
Those were the rules and nobody even joked about it. Scumbags like Lindsey Graham and TFG, etc. need to do some hard time.
john b
The thing that I always try to remember is that the people who talk on TV / internet about stuff like this are often the very last people you should listen to. The folks who are cleared and work with sensitive stuff want nothing less than to make that fact widely known.
eversor
@SteveinPHX:
Graham is a fucking bird colonel he fucking damn well knows better and got the same lecture the rest of us did.
Jackie
@trollhattan: It wouldn’t me, either!
I also want to know if he’s being held accountable for destroying government property – such as the WH china he shattered when having trumpertantrums.
Another Scott
@Martin: +1
I recall an old story about a government employee who stole a bunch of mostly obsolete computers that probably would have ended up in the trash or recycling.
It wasn’t his stuff. It belonged to the US Government.
Cheers,
Scott.
bbleh
@Geminid: Yeah he coulda been a dupe. Boy would THAT have been a coup for some foreign intelligence service — owning the president’s body-man or somebody like that. But I can’t imagine people who have his ear like that aren’t background-checked down to the labels on their childhood underwear.
Gravenstone
@Scout211: As someone pointed out in response to this nonsense, revealing TS or TS/SCI info within said “memoir” would have made this better, how exactly?
jonas
@Jeffery: This is something I’ve been asking, too. Trump is a fucking moron who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground when it comes to anything more complicated than flipping through carpet swatches for the hotel lobby. This suggests that either 1. somebody told him something was a really big, cool, deal and he should hang on to it (in which case what did the briefers who would have had custody of that material do?) or 2. he just saw that a paper had a cool chart or image or something that seemed badass and he wanted to keep it because it made him feel all presidenty and important to have classified satellite photos or designs for a new stealth bomber or something.
My bet’s on nr. 2, but I’d also like to know the answer to nr. 1, especially who the hell let that stuff ever leave their custody.
RaflW
@eversor: Indeed there is a rather roasty place in hades for Lindsey, given what he knows vs. what he says and does to recklessly endanger the American people.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
eversor
@john b:
Shit tons of people are cleared. I live in NOVA land of the DOD and CIA and a Top Secret with SCI is nothing abnormal here at all. It’s pretty much required to get most jobs that pay halfway well even at places like Amazon. We have cleared job fairs up here where you openly advertize what you have and the vendors will ask if you did the SCI with an SSBI or a CI or an FSBI + poly (single scope background investiation, counter intelligence, full scope background investigation and polygraph). I’ve worked at law firms that required a TS even if you never looked at the stuff because some stuff that was work on could related to it so you had to be cleared even though there was nothing classified in that building.
Anybody who has one though who is not barking mad would know “don’t take work home” is not just a rule, it should never even enter your mind.
If you haven’t been cleared it’s hard to express how normal being cleared actually is, and also how much of a lunatic you have to be to break the rules.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: But I left it out in the rain and I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no.
Frank Wilhoit
@Damien: It is more complicated, and worse, and simpler than this. Since 1916 the Anglophone countries have lived under propaganda rule. Each in a long succession of “Press barons” — the Northcliffes, the Rothermeres, Beaverbrook, Hearst, Pulitzer, Cecil King, Conrad Black, Rupert Murdoch — has set out to either control or break the Government of the day. The “conservative” parties have generally been willing to play this game, the “liberal” parties not so much. This is why nearly all of the Press barons have had the reputation of being right-wing; if the liberal parties had chosen to play along, and the conservative parties not, it would have been the reverse. But Asquith wouldn’t have bothered to scrape Northcliffe off the bottom of his shoe, and here we are.
The pattern was set in 1912-16, when Northcliffe dismissed the elected Liberal Government of the UK, mid-Parliament, and replaced it with a Tory Government headed by a figurehead Liberal Prime Minister.
Murdoch is a pathetically small and weak figure beside his predecessors, and one reason is that he seems to be a little bit of an ideologue, which they were not. At any rate, he is willing to hire ideologues, and that (from a purely business perspective) is about the worst mistake you can make.
cmorenc
@Martin:
A strong reason to charge (or seek out a search warrant on) Trump simply on the basis of unauthorized taking of government documents, rather than depend on charges based on the sensitive highly classified nature of some of them, is because of the difficulty of pursuing the latter to trial without risk of having to disclose them to prove the case (5th Amendment confrontation clause – defendant has right to be confronted and cross-examine wrt witnesses and evidence against him).
eversor
@RaflW:
Not enough blow torches and tire wrenches in the world for what he’s done.
Suzanne
@jonas:
I want to note that I work with many fine interior designers, who are very good at crafting finish palettes, including plenty of carpet samples. I can guarantee you that Trump isn’t good enough to do it.
trollhattan
Let’s not forget the little Princleling.
It’s like Oprah was handing out clearances: “You, get a clearance and you, get a clearance and you…”
trollhattan
@Suzanne: Cherubs and a can of gold sprayprint. That’s the Trump oeuvre.
khead
Forget it, Cole. It’s MAGAtown.
eversor
@RaflW:
Also I think Graham is still in uniform technically (he’s in the reserves and an officer I was active and enlisted so I’m not sure the rules on that) so what’s the protocol for a uniformed colonel excusing this shit?
Granted his current clearence is due to being a constitutional officer or some shit (you can’t not clear elected officials, big loophole) but there out to be some UCMJ thing we can shove up his ass and make him break conrete over.
Omnes Omnibus
@Frank Wilhoit: Wow, both cynical and conspiracy theory based. I presume, in this view, that voting doesn’t really do anything since the press barons have all told us what to think.
I don’t accept your premise. I guess I am just too naive and trusting.
RSA
Anyone who’s gone through the most basic security training will recognize Trump as an insider threat. And we should remember that, concerning Top Secret documents like the ones Trump stole,
Omnes Omnibus
@eversor: Graham has been retired from the AF since 2015. He hit the statutory retirement age for his rank.
Scout211
@eversor: A 2015 article from the Air Force Times says he retired in 2015. Link.
ETA: and OO got there first
Frank Wilhoit
@Omnes Omnibus: The fact of propaganda rule is way beyond dispute. If you would like to see how it came about, I gave you plenty of threads to pull. (My word need never be taken, and I will never ask that it be taken.)
Of course what matters is the situation right here and now. If I say that propaganda rule has been in place for a hundred years and more, there are others who will say that it has been much less. But it is perfectly idle to allege that any substantial portion of the population — say, enough to determine the result of an election — are immune to propaganda.
stacib
@trollhattan: Half??? He probably took it all, and then placed an order for the really “good” stuff on the government’s dime to be delivered to MAL.
Martin
@Scout211: The memoir argument is great. “Trump took these national security documents so that he could leak them in his memoir, thereby committing yet another espionage act felony.”
cwmoss
@eversor: he’s a Nasty Gal colonel. Not the same. (This is intra-branch derision toward Guard units, not a gendered insult of Graham.)
Tony G
@Damien: Please step up to the rotating knives …
cwmoss
@eversor: below , I said Graham is NG but I guess he’s reserve. But as far as active duty assholes are concerned, all them nasty gals look the same…
AM in NC
@Citizen Alan: That is brilliant. I would watch that movie for sure. And I fell asleep in the movie theater when Red Dawn came out, even though I was a teenager, because the movie was just.so.bad.
Frankensteinbeck
@trollhattan:
One of the interesting things I’ve learned in the coverage of this event is that the president is the ultimate authority on who gets to see classified material, not on how classified it is. Trump while he was president could show nuclear secrets to his gardener and say “He’s cleared” so they could talk about how cool nuclear weapons are. He could not declassify anything with just his word. Some stuff he couldn’t declassify, period.
And the instant he ceases to be president, all those documents are still classified, but he doesn’t have a rat’s poop worth of authority to decide if anyone, himself included, can see them. That’s Biden’s decision.
I doubt he’s capable of understanding the distinction. I sincerely believe he thinks the entire federal government was his property.
Ken
That’s exactly what the Grey Reptiloids who secretly run everything want us to think.
Jackie
@jonas: What really adds to the *why* is it’s now reported when the NA first contacted him, Trump PERSONALLY went through those boxes and “gave up” approximately 100 files marked TS and hid the rest. I especially want to know what TS documents he kept and WHY??? Did he plan to sell out the USA?
I really, really, really want him charged for espionage and perp-walked in front of all of America.
trollhattan
@Frankensteinbeck: So that famous pic of Trump yelling at the lawnmower boy, he’s saying, “I’m giving you top secret, tip-top secret clearance, okay? Just no money, never carry the stuff.”
CaseyL
@john b:
That’s true of ANY talking head you see on TV. They made it into someone’s Rolodex 15 years ago, and never get changed out, no matter how inaccurate (to be polite) their bafflegab is. Because, you know, they have a “relationship” with the reporter. Pfui.
One thing social media has done is, if you’re diligent about who you read, who you follow, you can get more and better information, and certainly more/better analysis, checking out Twitter…. and also *ahem* by hanging out on a nearly 10,000 ranked blog that just happens to have as Front Pagers people who really know their shit.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ken: Now, you’ve done it. The Suede Denim Secret Police will be coming for you and your uncool niece.
Spanky
@john b:
This! One million per cent. Those who know nothing are free to opine fact-free on the TV, while those in the know are required to keep their mouths shut, biting their tongues until they bleed.
geg6
@CaseyL:
That may be true for a very, very, very, very tiny amount of the information available on social media. But it’s only a small amount. The rest of the garbage to be waded through to get to the small fraction of informative information on, say, Twitter is a big enough of a problem and threat to our nation that the small number of voices with actual expertise and the ability to clearly communicate their expertise are not worth it. There are plenty of ways to get accurate information without Twitter. I have never participated on Twitter or most social media (I do use FB for keeping in touch with far flung friends and family) and I am as well informed as you are, I’m 100% sure.
I do not advocate social media for anyone, to be honest. I think it is one of the most destructive things ever to hit society. Only guns are worse and I’m not even 100% sure of that.
Baud
@CaseyL:
I rely on juicers to shift through the dreck and tell me what’s important.
Ruckus
@Frankensteinbeck:
“I doubt he’s capable of understanding the distinction. I sincerely believe he thinks the entire federal government was his property.”
In his case I believe that the words “he thinks” are doing far more work than with any normal human. But yes I believe as well that he thought that about the government, but I think he also believes that because he was once president, he always and forever holds all the rights and privilege that he had for 4 extremely long and crappy years.
NotMax
Will again posit warranted cogitation about what else may be secreted at his additional residences at Bedminster and in Manhattan.
BlueDWarrior
Reporting has suffered the same thing that a lot of other places have suffered from. The kinds of people who actually want to do the job get so fed up with the bullshit of having to navigate office and actual politics, in the news’s case, that they don’t want to be bothered and either become talking heads or write on their own terms.
While this is good for the democratization and free-flow of information. This is bad because now the only people left at most networks are what the British would call presenters, people who are just there to sit on camera, look ‘pretty’, and steer the conversation toward whatever the editors and network heads want to promote that night.
Having cogent discussion about issues is left fractured and just out of reach to the layman, because most laymen don’t know where to look for legitimate discussion.
(Also haven’t posted here in a minute, but best to save that for an open thread…)
cain
@Scout211: I think we should let the GOP have their little investigative session with the FBI as long as it is public in the house. It’ll be a great little trap that makes them look stupid as fuck. Especially, if those boxes contains names of intelligence assets around the world. Just make them watch Mission Impossible movie so they know why having such a list go public would be a disaster.
ETA HAHAHA! #80! Octo-zero people!
karensky
@Damien: Hella ya
BlueDWarrior
@geg6: Any single platform with the reach to actually ‘correct’ society ends up being a double-edged sword that could be used to further damage it.
Because we’re dumb impulsive animals in groups and a lot of people make good money appealing to our worst instinct and behaviors.
Geminid
@geg6: Good twitter accounts link to a lot of solid reporting in traditional and internet media. I don’t have to wade through anything. I just follow seven or so discerning people like Susan Vermazen and Magdi Semrau.
Citizen Alan
@AM in NC: The 1st one was a guilty pleasure. The remake with Chris Hemsworth works surprisingly well surprisingly well if you view it as a satire about the Iraq war with American high school students playing the role of Al-Qaeda insurgents and foreign invaders in place of us soldiers.
lowtechcyclist
@Martin:
This. All the classification stuff is on top of the fact that this shit is property of the U.S. Government, and not the property of Donald Fucking Trump. Once he was reminded that he had stuff belonging to the government, and was refusing to give it back, he was stealing. (So fuck all the evangelicals who are taking his side on this: Thou Shalt Not Steal, hypocritical mofos.)
But getting back to the classification stuff: I’ve never worked with any classified info, thank goodness. But in my government job, I do work with confidential information of a different sort, since I do sample design for a government demographic survey.
Fifteen years or so ago, a guy I worked with got careless and put information in a publicly accessible place that could have been used to identify individual survey respondents. When that breach was discovered, it was ‘clean out your desk while someone watches you to make sure it’s only your personal shit you’re taking,’ because the next day he wasn’t there, and I never saw him again. Boom, gone.
No nuclear secrets, no dirt on foreign leaders, just the identities of some people who answered our questions when our field reps knocked on their doors. But that’s how seriously we took (and still take) their privacy. It still takes years to fire someone at our agency for poor performance, but if they fuck up with personally identifiable information, they’re out by sundown. Even though the extent of the consequences might be that some people get embarrassed. That doesn’t sound that bad, but it’s their information, and we have a duty to protect it.
So yeah, I expect nuclear secrets and other spy vs. spy stuff to be handled with at least as much care as we handle respondents’ private information.
geg6
@Geminid:
It simply doesn’t interest me to prop up what I consider to be dangerous technology (for many reasons, not just political) because it might take me a little more time to find a good article on a subject that interests me by googling it or reading an actual hard copy magazine, journal or book. And I am only friends with relatively small number of people on FB, but I still get a lot of garbage posts littering up my feed. You are free to love it and use it as you wish. I have no desire nor do I see any utility.
Dan B
OT: Lachlan Murdoch has taken the bait from Crikey, an Australian media company. They published an article about FOX being one of the drivers of the disinformation campaign that led to January 6. Murcich threatened to sue using Australia’s serious defamation laws. Crikey said, “Please sue us.”
Discovery should be lit!
Villago Delenda Est
If it’s any comfort, John, this shit drives me crazy, too. I recall those wonderful misadventures of misplacing a CEOI, forgetting to secure a VINSON code device, an entire brigade looking for a lost M-60 during REFORGER (how one loses an M-60 baffles me to this day). This is SERIOUS FUCKING SHIT, and the vermin of the Village just pooh-pooh it because their ratings guarantee ignored process which exists for a damn reason.
Baud
@Dan B:
Cool. I hope smoking guns are found.
geg6
@lowtechcyclist:
Hell, I’d be fired if I discussed a student’s financial aid with their parents without the student’s written permission. This despite the fact that the parents are probably paying for the student to be there.
Villago Delenda Est
@AM in NC: What killed me was the total fantasy of paratroopers dropping in Colorado. This shit just stupid to anyone who has planned a military operation (I was on a division staff working on plans).
Gin & Tonic
Another ammo dump exploding in Belgorod. Local authorities are blaming the bright sun. not careless smoking. (Technically they are blaming the “lens effect”, like when you used to use a magnifying glass to fry bugs, but I’m not sure what was supposed to be the lens.)
Dan B
@Baud: Crikey has two goals. 1. Expose how the defamation laws are used by the powerful to abuse the weak and obscure truth. 2. Expose the propaganda that FOX spreads.
Discovery is very likely to achieve both.
ian
@Frank Wilhoit:
It’s like a Qanon game, pull the threads and do your own research- find the end of the videogame that you want it to be!
These media barons have existed, sure, but they do not set the reality of the world. For every action there is a reaction.
Geminid
@geg6: I’m not suggesting you try out Twitter. I’m just saying that your view of it from the outside does not resemble my experience.
Barbara
@Geminid: In truth, there should have been chain of custody documentation for any documents that have limited distribution requirements. I have a friend who never stopped going to the office during the pandemic because he not only can’t bring the documents he needs to his house, he can’t even access them electronically from another location. Anyone who pretends this is no big deal is a complete shithead. I mean, 100% acting in bad faith. No one with a job in journalism is that stupid.
lowtechcyclist
@geg6:
Yeppers. They’re legally adults, after all. In loco parentis went out the door half a century ago.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that the understanding that you only see the information you need to know permeates our organization just as much as it does for the intel and military branches. If you’re working on Survey A, you don’t even get to know which counties Survey B is sampling households from. And that’s the way it should be – what you don’t know, you can’t inadvertently share. So you only know what you need to know in order to do your job.
Bill Arnold
@Dan B:
Lachlan Murdoch is arrogant, reasonably intelligent, and more of an ideologue than he realizes.
Should be fun.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ruckus: TFG imagined that the military was his personal playtoy, that all military members were sworn to obey his orders, and not to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
sukabi
thank you John, for stating what should be obvious, but sadly eludes most of the talking heads that SHOULD KNOW BETTER…
Geminid
@Gin & Tonic: A carelessly discarded vodka bottle? Forest fires have been started by bottles left in a sunny place. Those ammo dumps need recycling bins!
bjacques
@Gin & Tonic: the spontaneously combusting daughter of a washed-up ideologue, parked too close to the storage area.
raven
@Gin & Tonic: Xin Loi mofo’s
Jeffro
I think, minus the IEDs, this is what we’ve been doing since late 2015, honestly.
Haroldo
@Dan B:
For anyone interested in Australian politics Crikey is well worth the price of a subscription.
Crikey Subscription
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I’d be inclined to agree with you except that the GOP also has the bad habit of releasing Top Secret information (e.g., Valerie Plame) when they think it gives them some political advantage.
Plame was working on nuclear proliferation, keeping nukes out of the hands of terrorists. Did that not strike a single person in the GOP as an important job that you shouldn’t wipe out just for the hell of it?
catclub
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
My understanding was it was keeping nukes out of the hands of the Iranians.
RaflW
@Suzanne: We’ve all seen TFG’s NYC condo. It’s like Liberace were straight, and stupid, and got a special on mirrors and leopard print. Hopeless kitch, and not of the self-reflexive, clever kind.
Feathers
@Citizen Alan: One of the reasons I found the Netflix House of Cards unwatchable (made it halfway through the second season) if that it so completely lacked the guts of the original. The BBC House of Cards was about the bitter fight for control of the Conservative Party after the resignation of Margaret Thatcher. It was filmed while she was still prime minister and so of the moment that her resignation came while it was airing.
In comparison, the US House of Cards made up a Democratic Senator from South Carolina with views that precluded his actually being elected there. Totally played into the bothsiderism of the MSM. Republicans could say it was about a Democrat, Democrats could see that the real life FU would be a Republican.
The brave US show would have been about a Republican of the Ted Cruz ilk, slimily fighting his way to being in the running for the Republican nomination to replace a fictional Obama figure.
Geminid
@catclub: I think Plame was outed as part of an effort to discredit husband Joe Wilson, who had expressed scepticism about the Bush administration’s claim that Nigeran “yellowcake” uranium has been acquired by Iraq.
But speaking of Iranian nukes, the new JCPOA regulating Iran’s nuclear program looks closer to signing. @Cheryl Rofer linked to some good reporting on this matter today, including details of the plan from Laura Rosen, based on a briefing by a “senior U.S. official.”
Steeplejack
@Baud:
“Mr. President, we must not allow a crème brûlée gap!”
Downpuppy
Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD on NYSE), now owner of CNN, has been in full GOP suckup mode since the latest merger.
Their stock is down 60% since February.
RaflW
@eversor: All these f**kers should have their law licenses and bar admissions lit on fire. They’re a total mockery to the concept of “officers of the court.”
Wild that I, a flaming lib, am much angrier about all this than most ‘conservatives’.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@catclub: I stand corrected.
WaterGirl
@Gin & Tonic: That is so mockable, do the power that be in Russia not see that everyone knows the emperor has no clothes?
Ken
Possibly, but the last kid who said the emperor has no clothes mysteriously fell off a balcony onto some nerve toxin and exploded. Since then everyone’s been pretty quiet.
Citizen Alan
@Feathers:
I never watched a single episode of the Netflix house of cards. In part because of the sheer preposterousness of a white democratic Congressman from South Carolina rising to the level of power Frank had even as of the pilot. And in part because I thought Kevin Spacey was unbearably unctuous even before all the truly bad stuff about him came to light.
WaterGirl
@Ken:
I laughed so loud I scared the cat!
Feathers
@Citizen Alan: I wasn’t hopeful, but my Mother was really into it and wanted to talk about it, so…
She spent almost her entire working life as a lobbyist on Capitol Hill, and hates the Republicans, but loved The West Wing and is completely falls for every claim that a Democrat is not being respectable enough.
Ksmiami
@Omnes Omnibus: Yes you are. With the current crop of MAGAs, you can’t take anything for granted. America is done. Lights out, it’s over and now we fight over the shards
Ksmiami
@RaflW: Dicktator “Chic”
Omnes Omnibus
@Ksmiami: You should probably adjust your snark meter. Or piss up a rope. Either is fine with me.
Ksmiami
@geg6: Agreed and they created this Black Mirror scenario that threatens to dissolve democracy without any testing
Ksmiami
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m not being snarky- America as an idea is running on fumes because we have allowed the ignorant and the cultish to create their own reality