No one is faulting employees. That’s just an odd thing to say.
I think reasonable people understand that when one says “The NSA decided” that this refers to those in the NSA with the executive decision making authority to make such a decision and not the in-the-trenches employees.
Not being able to fathom your intent for such a reply to my post, I can only take a guess and based upon your general tone as that of an apologist for the NSA, I can’t agree with your sentiment. I still feel like what we have here is a barely accountable signals intelligence agency that has decided to place the safety and secrecy of its assets above the sanctity and integrity of our democracy and I can’t for the life of me see how such a position could be defended.
I only know about RW from what I’ve read, but she sure seems like a happy mutant to me. The descriptions make me think of her as a hero for the Spectrum Nation.
So are you suggesting that the decision to release raw intelligence should rest on any junior analyst who comes across it in the course of their duties?
The report details the russian methods used to attempt to influence US elections. There is nothing in that report that alleges the russians had any success using those methods, and the report explicitly states that the methods attempted did not involve vote tallying.
If the report stated that HRC would have won, except for fraudulent votes added by russian hackers, it would be a completely different story. Especially if suppressed by the government. That is not the case.
What? You mean “evidence that a foreign power attempted a phishing attack”.
If people are seeing this report as proof that the russians interfered with the election, you misunderstand the issue. It certainly proves that they are willing to attempt to interfere, but that should already be common knowledge. I am sure that lots of countries do small or large things to influence the elections and policies in other countries, as do we.
The danger in releasing the raw intelligence is that it gives our opponents details of what we know of their methods, and also gives them clues about how our system of detection works. Doing so negatively affects our national security. I guess part of the disconnect here is that people do not see that as a big deal.
The danger here is that a foreign government/crime syndicate has attmpted to interfere with our elections in order to their ensure the election of their compromised asset/crime syndicate.
Do you really believe that the Russians don’t know how we can tell they are fucking with us? The Russians installed their asset, RW tried to point out that the Russians installed their asset and the said asset was loudly disclaiming any Russian invlovment. Your vaunted NSA etc. I’m sure were valiently struggling to do something. But as long as the compromised asset was the chief executive, any discussion of Russian involvement would be ruled out-of-bounds.
This is the “opposite” argument again, isn’t it? With Clinton and the Podestas up to their eyeballs in Russian payoff money, their natural response is to claim that Trump is a Russian stooge.
There is a guy in my home town that does that. He gets drunk, picks a fight with some random person, then quickly files a police report claiming he was the one attacked. It works sometimes.
I am not any kind of Trump supporter, but the tactic of just claiming that “Trump is …”, and repeating it over and over again is not the same as providing a coherent argument using evidence.
“This is my last election … After my election I have more flexibility.”
“I will transmit this information to Vladimir,”
Go back and reread the subthread. You thought the NSA should have released the information. @Erin_Schram pointed out that nobody at the NSA has that authority. You ignored that point in your reply (as you continue to do here), so I just reiterated it.
“those…with the executive decision making authority to make such a decision” are not in the NSA, as ES clearly indicated in his post.
As for your imputation of my “intent” as an “apologist for the NSA”, that is a violation of BB policy.
I believe his point was that the lower level operatives do not have such authority and not that no one with executive authority over the NSA has the power to release information vital to well being of our nation but rather than treat his comment as unassailable fact as you seem want to do, I’ll simply point out that within the bureaucracy you will find someone on the chain of command who does have such authority. That they may ultimately be attached to some other agency is beside the point and to pick that nit is little more than pedantry as the point remains despite the designation of whomever might be in power to make that call.
As for your suggestion that I’ve violated BB policy by making a good faith guess as to your intent based upon your writing, I don’t see it.
Thanks to the Panama Papers, we know that the Podesta Group (founded by John Podesta’s brother, Tony) lobbied for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank. “Sberbank is the Kremlin, they don’t do anything major without Putin’s go-ahead, and they don’t tell him ‘no’ either,” explained a retired senior U.S. intelligence official. According to a Reuters report, Tony Podesta was “among the high-profile lobbyists registered to represent organizations backing Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich.” Among these was the European Center, which paid Podesta $900,000 for his lobbying.
That’s not all: The busy Podesta Group also represented Uranium One, a uranium company acquired by the Russian government which received approval from Hillary Clinton’s State Department to mine for uranium in the U.S. and gave Russia twenty percent control of US uranium. The New York Timesreported Uranium One’s chairman, Frank Guistra, made significant donations to the Clinton Foundation, and Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for one speech from a Russian investment bank that has “links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock.”
That’s a sensible position. If there was no harm done than the danger of releasing the knowledge of the attempt may outweigh the danger of keeping it secret.
Given ongoing investigations into internal collusion (and the history from the Clintons), I’m not sure that the danger of releasing it outweighs that of keeping it secret, but it is a reasonable argument.
Initially, Winner had pled not guilty convinced that a jury would decline to find her guilty given the broader context. But the government removed the option of a jury trial by prosecuting her under espionage laws. She changed her plea to guilty.
Someone’s constitutional right to a trial by jury was nullified? That’s fishy.
And apparently even if there was a ‘proper’ trial, the defendant wouldn’t be allowed to testify. Sounds like it would go similar to the descriptions of other cases. That should just be thrown out on appeal due to the first judge’s failure to follow due process. But it probably wouldn’t be.
A big part of the decision to release the info, or to release it with some areas redacted, Depends on the person with the authority to do so, who also has the details of how the intel was obtained, and through which sources. If a public release reveales the details of any investigation, it could compromise it. If our methods and sources are so far undetected, then the value of making the info public has to be weighed against the likelihood of that method, and any people associated with it would be burned. And thus not available to detect the next big piece of data that might come into the system.
Whatever her reasons, she took actions that potentially endangered national security, and every American at home or abroad.
She did this without understanding/caring about the risks of her actions
Clever. But even if Trump snuck photocopies of secret documents out of the White House and mailed them to reporters, it would not bear on RW’s case. For one thing, POTUS has the authority to declassify documents. RW did not even have the clearance to see the documents she stole. She had clearance to be in the facility, which she misused.
National Security is a big deal, and a lot of people who have not worked in that area do not understand the risks involved. I think people get caught up in some sort of romantic vision of people like her being brave resistance fighters, and don’t comprehend the larger implications. Hating Trump, even hating him a whole bunch, is not an excuse to weaken the security of the US. Once again, the secrets she leaked were not about anything Trump is alleged to have done or known about. So releasing them does not hurt him personally. They reveal sources and methods of US intelligence gathering to our opponents, and harm the nation as a whole. Maybe that does not matter to you. I don’t know.
It matters to me.
