I understand your viewpoint and accept it. I may not agree with some of the details, but you are right conceptually.
It’s pretty clear that our goals are aligned - you want security and I do too; our security was violated; the question is whether the security was violated by the actions reported or by the reporting of them.
I think that the actions themselves are the bigger danger. You think that the reporting of the actions is the bigger danger.
I’m trying, really I am, but I just can’t reconcile that.
From the point of view of national security I’m also ok with this outcome. She violated the law to expose something that the “president” and his supporters and useful idiots have been denying, was given a fair and public trial, took public responsibility for her actions, and entered into a reasonable plea agreement with the prosecution that balanced national security against a lighter sentence than she might have otherwise been given.
The only participant in the incident that comes off looking bad is The Intercept, which all but identified Winner as its source in its poor handling of the story. This should serve as a lesson for future whistleblowers to leak to reputable and professional news outlets, or at least ones that aren’t pretending that Russian hacking of the DNC and voting software suppliers was no big deal.
Well, it is a potential danger, as far as we know. When sources and methods are revealed, smart opponents take steps to ensure that their next action would not be detected by those same methods.
So it is hard for us to quantify the damage done. If the next 9/11 would have been detected in time to stop it by those same methods and sources, had they not been compromised, then some responsibility for the people jumping out of those windows belongs to those who compromised the system. But that has to remain hypothetical. We cannot really know what future valuable intelligence we might have gained.
But that is the purpose of the laws regarding the handling of classified material. They were not enacted in order to allow Trump to get away with shenanigans. To me, this is bigger than him.
From my perspective, having worked within that system, and knowing the toll in human lives that failures and leaks in the system have caused in the past, I see her actions as very reckless and dangerous.
I did mention that there is a mechanism within the system to report illegal, fraudulent, or abusive acts, if noticed by anyone handling the documents. I can be pretty confident that RW did not attempt to use that system, because the documents in question were not part of her duties. She was not authorized to access them. So reporting the contents would have alerted the recipients that she was using her access to sneak looks at things that she was not supposed to. Also, what would she report? There is still no reason to believe that those whose job is to detect and prevent such attacks did not see the data, and were not acting on it appropriately.
Unless RW had access and special knowledge of the actions of those teams and agencies, she could not have known what actions were being taken by them to address the attacks.
So she could not have been motivated by dissatisfaction with the actions of those agencies regarding the documents.
I can understand your POV as a current or former member of the U.S. intelligence community, but if you or anyone in the CIA, FBI or NSA have criticisms about how the (undeniably) stolen information was exposed to public view they should be focused mainly on The Intercept, which did not handle the leaked documents in a responsible manner (e.g not redacting names and other identifying details).
Winner was trying to provide proof of Russian malfeasance that the regime itself was denying or underplaying (including by attacking your colleagues) and sometimes publically inviting. She pleaded guilty to breaking the law but seems content to do the time if it meant exposing the lies of a “president” in regard to Russian hacking.
