Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Wikileaks Revisited

One of the earliest posts to this blog concerned WikiLeaks, the web site that posts classified information.  Here's a link to the post:  http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2010/11/wikileaks.html.  It's a short post so I can unreservedly recommend you take a look at it.

As I said then "99% of everything that is classified is not classified because it needs to be.  A large percentage of classification is CYA.  Someone doesn't want the embarrassing stuff to leak out.  Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and someone doesn't want the rottenness to be put on public display.  An even greater source of unnecessary classification is bureaucratic."  I'll leave it at that because I want to leave some reason for you to check out my previous post.

And in spite of the fact that the post was written almost six years ago, things have changed very little in the interim.  And the little that has changed has changed for the worse.  Back then I wrote "[i]t is still necessary for WikiLeaks to demonstrate that it is not just on some kind of anti-US jihad."  WikiLeaks has not done that.  Instead they have reinforced the case that all they do is engage in anti-US behavior.

And it's worse.  The jihad is more narrowly targeted than that.  They seem to be focused on embarrassing Democrats while leaving Republicans alone.  My local newspaper has a story today about a recent trove of documents posted with the obvious intent of embarrassing Hillary Clinton and her allies.  And WikiLeaks has been happy to publish material whose obvious source is the Russian government or Russian intelligence services.

Let me be clear.  Putin is a demagogue who is actively hostile to what WikiLeaks purports to support and believe in.  What the Hell does WikiLeaks think it is doing when it cooperates with these people?  And we have a candidate who is running for President that seems to be a fan boy of Putin and Putin-style government.  The WikiLeaks dumps seem to be aimed at supporting his candidacy.

When I posted my previous remarks WikiLeaks had not been around all that long.  There seemed to be a pattern to their behavior (the previously mentioned anti-US slant) but it was too soon to say for sure.  They have now been in business long enough to justify firm conclusions.  WikiLeaks' primary mission seems to be to embarrass the US and, for the moment at least, to particularly embarrass US Democratic party.

I noted then that WikiLeaks was rumored to be sitting on a large trove of data that was about the US but not about the US government.  If they actually had the data they were rumored to possess they chose not to publish it.  There are bad governments all around the world.  There are also far too many examples of good governments all around the world doing bad things.  There are also many non-governmental entities all over the world that are engaged in bad behavior.  It would be a good thing if more of this came to light.  But WikiLeaks has made little or no effort to go after these other targets.  I can't believe this due to a lack of material.  In fact, events have shown us that there is lots of other material available.

A recent example is the "Panama Papers" incident.  Panama has very lax corporate governance laws.  As a result many companies are registered in Panama so that they can be used to hide bad behavior.  Early this year millions of documents from a Panamanian law firm specializing in this were leaked.  The leaked information was quite revelatory and a useful contribution to public discourse.  These documents were not leaked via WikiLeaks in spite of the fact that WikiLeaks was the obvious channel for this information.

The Edward Snowden NSA revelations were also not disclosed through WikiLeaks.  Why?  Because careful observers have noticed the strong anti-US and, judged by their inactions, pro-everybody-else bias of WikiLeaks.

I am still strongly of the opinion that there is far too much secrecy around.  I was disappointed in 2010 with the actions of the Obama Administration in continuing or enhancing Bush Administration policies I disapprove of.  I am still disappointed.  But everybody does it.  This is not to excuse the Obama Administration in particular, or the US more generally.  It is to say that everybody's dirty laundry needs to be aired.  First, there is a lot of dirt there that needs to be exposed.  And secondarily, and ultimately equally importantly, it is important to be able to have the appropriate context within which to judge the actions of the Obama Administration and the US.  Finally, it would be nice to generate some push back on unnecessary classification and unnecessarily delayed declassification.

And that's my segue into another topic, the Hillary Clinton emails.  The discussion of this "controversy" totally lacks context.  And it is rife with exaggeration and downright lies.  Let's take a look at the actual facts.  The most damning accusation comes from FBI director James Comey in a July 5 press release and accompanying public statement.  He subsequently testified before congress but the key elements did not change.  (The press release can be found here:  https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/statement-by-fbi-director-james-b-comey-on-the-investigation-of-secretary-hillary-clinton2019s-use-of-a-personal-e-mail-system).

According to Mr. Comey, 52 out of over 30,000 email chains contained information that was classified at the time the email was sent.  How serious is this?  Well, consider that about 2,000 additional emails were subsequently up-classified. This is when information that is initially considered unclassified is later classified by some bureaucrat at some agency.  So how do we know what should be classified and what shouldn't?  The short answer is "we don't".  No individual or group of individuals knows with 100% certainty what should be classified.

Well, actually some bureaucrats think they know.  In their opinion everything should be classified and should stay classified forever.  And that's the world we live in.  Secretary of State Clinton, a very busy person, was supposed to know that some person somewhere thought something was classified.  And in this environment she was supposed to do her job.  Secretary Clinton has since remarked that a number of the questionable emails concerned drones and drone strikes.

Is a drone strike a classified subject?  You bet it is.  To this day the US rarely publically acknowledges that a strike occurred.  And they certainly don't provide any details.  ("not publicly acknowledged" is bureaucratese for "it's classified".)  And the program is run either by the CIA, a classified government agency, or highly classified parts of the Defense Department.  There is very little about drones or drone strikes that is not considered classified by somebody.  And a lot of the time one bureaucrat or another thinks that TOP SECRET, the highest level of classification, is the appropriate level of classification.

So what are you as a public official and representative of the US Government supposed to say and do when there is a strike and there are lots of pictures, video, etc. that provides absolute proof that the strike happened at a certain place at a certain time?  This is a common situation in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a number of other places in the world.  In many of these cases the US maintains total air superiority so there is no doubt as to which country is responsible for the drone strike.

Secretary of State Clinton (as she was at the time) is a public figure whose full time job is diplomacy.  People, government officials, the press, random members of the general public, are going to ask her about drones in general, US drone strike policies and procedures, and specific drone strikes.  Is she supposed to restrict her response to "no comment" or "I can't talk about that because it involves classified materials"?  And if she does is she appropriately advancing the interests of the US and its allies, her job?  If she had always gone the "no comment" route she would have been roundly and justifiably ridiculed by the very people who are now so exercised by her "sloppy" approach to classified material.

We have to depend on leaks for the most "damning" information supposedly contained in the emails.  Three of them, we are told, contained pictures that included a "c" in the caption.  Apparently this indicated that the image is classified.  Seriously?  Apparently so but still ridiculous, in my opinion.  And, again going by leaks (because the base material is, you know, classified, but no one is going after the leakers) these apparently classified pictures were not at the top of the email.  They were buried somewhere in the "chain".

We are all familiar with email chains.  Someone sends an email.  Then someone sends a reply that contains the original email.  Then someone sends a reply to the reply and it contains both the reply and the original email.  And so on.  This is a common situation and most people most of the time do the same thing.  We do NOT review the whole chain.  We just review the email on the top of the chain.  Oh, occasionally it will be necessary to dive down the chain for something.  That's the justification for the chain.

And this behavior of only paying attention to the top of the email is what people using smartphones almost always do.  You will be less than totally surprised to know that I sometimes write long emails.  Now I am NOT talking about a chain, just a single long email.  And I have long since lost count of the number of times it has become obvious that the person replying did not read the entire email.

And this is most common with people who use a smartphone to deal with their email.  They pay attention to what's on the screen of their phone and rarely scroll down to see what else might be there.  We know that the most common method Secretary of State Clinton used for dealing with emails was by using her Blackberry.  So in all likelihood she never saw the pictures because they were off screen.  And she most likely did not see the "c" that indicated they were classified.

I am just having a lot of trouble getting exercised about this.  If there was anything that was really serious in any of the "inappropriately handled" emails we would know about it because someone would have leaked it in an effort to damage Ms. Clinton.  It is telling that "charges" are based on the level of classification of one or another piece of material and not on the contents.  This is the kind of technically wrong behavior that conservatives accusers are exercised about when they start talking about "political correctness gone awry".  Is the behavior a breach of the letter of the law or regulation?  Yes.  Is it a serious or important breach?  No.

And then there is FBI Director Comey.  Mr. Comey first attracted widespread attention as a special council to the Ken Starr Senate Whitewater Committee.  That operation was famous for a number of things.  But one of them was that it leaked like a sieve.  All investigations and internal deliberations are supposed to be kept completely secret until they are presented in public sessions of the committee.  But the Starr investigation leaked prolifically.  Apparently key people had absolutely no respect for the rules of secrecy they were supposed to maintain.

The Committee operated for years.  The rampant leaking was noticed quickly and the committee was made aware of the problem.  But the leaking never stopped.  It didn't even slow down.  And the leaking was biased strongly against Preident Bill Clinton's interests.  So it was politically motivated.  During this period Mr. Comey, who must have known what was going on and why, could have done the right thing.  He could have exposed who was leaking or at least resigned.  He did neither.  And he was eventually rewarded with the directorship of the FBI by the George W. Bush administration.

Mr. Comey's remarks on Secretary Clinton's emails fall into two broad categories.  Those that are essentially opinion and those which are grounded in regulations, policy, and law.  The damning part of what he said all fell into the opinion part of what he had to say.  When it came to regulations, law, and policy he was much more measured and had much more positive things to say about Secretary Clinton's actions.  This behavior, going all in on the political stuff and taking a measured approach on the legal side, was entirely predicted by his history.

So what do we have?  We have an environment where vast over classification is the norm.  And when bureaucrats are put into the spotlight their instinctive, and from their perspective reasonable, response is to classify and up the security level of anything for which there is the tiniest shred of justification.  So they did.  And a political hack makes a lot of insinuations before rendering a "not guilty" verdict.  And the press covers all this ad nauseam because that's what they do. And, because no one sees it in there interest or as their jobs (hello press!) to provide context, no context is provided.

If Mr. Trump's remarks about women are "locker talk" then Ms. Clinton's email activities are the actions of a saint.