Given how incredibly stupid the leaker seemed to be (chatting in fucking Discord server with Russians about very secret material), I have to wonder: did they really have no limits before?
Not "no limits"...but "reasonable", "prudent", and "need to know" seem to be missing from their de facto rules & reg's.
Years ago, I heard a detailed and all-too-credible account of some serious US secrets being regularly leaked - to an Average Guy, whose (reasonable and innocent) domain name was the ".com" version of an important ".mil" domain. Supposedly, he tried to report the problem to the US govt - and got some pretty nasty push-back, from officers whose only priorities seemed to be denial and butt-coverage. After that, he just deleted the ongoing emails.
Part of the problem is the "War on Terror" led to dramatically expanded inter-agency intelligence sharing, which dramatically expanded the number of people with access to a lot of that material - often in organizations with different access policies than you'd probably prefer.
If you're going to essentially integrate intelligence agencies from a data standpoint, storage and access protocols should probably be standardized (including with expanded SCI classifications/restrictions).
My guess at your tone is smugness, but please know that these are totally different things. As the article hints, there are significant costs to limiting distribution. They don't do the problem justice in the slightest.
When you restrict access to this stuff, you do it by creating a registration list that inevitably takes weeks to get on, because someone at the requesting command has to get three people, one of whom is probably out for a few weeks, to approve the request and then approve it at the controlling command in a similar process. If you're lucky, the systems are all working and that's all the wait there is, but a person can easily spend dozens of hours of work getting to the point where he can wait several weeks for access. Repeat that excessively, and people just stop using the best intel because it's a pain. Repeat that for a few years and no one at the command even remembers where to get good intel, if they even recall its existence.
Cross-org collaboration is a fragile beast in the absence of sales, marketing, profits, etc.
At its heart, this most recent problem of insider attack is the same problem as Snowden, and most people reject outright the idea that Snowden was wrong.
Anyway, I liked being able to read these; it was nice while it lasted.
As you notice yourself, there are serious costs associated with limiting intel.
But the downsides of overclassification are much more encompassing than what you described.
People "in command" regularly fall prey to the fallacious idea of knowing better than anybody else. In particular, they believe to know who should know what.
Regarding Snowden to be wrong in revealing the US surveillance is an example of this fallacy. In essence, you discount human rights to knowledge about reality in favor of petty, self-serving and short-sighted convenience.
Why? There was a RUSI article last year that looked at it. The one area that was in good shape was 5.56 production, the US "assault rifle" gun culture takes care of that.
Couple of points: 5.56x45 is a NATO caliber. Historically, the AK-47 used 7.62x39, and the more modern AK variants use 5.45x39. I'm sure the Ukrainians are happily taking anything that they can get at the moment, but I'd be surprised if their small arms at the start of the war were chambered for 5.56.
Second, I doubt that the private gun owners of the United States consume as much 5.56/.223 as the entirety of NATO. The cartridge is widely available, popular, and comparatively inexpensive because of the large military demand for it.
I'd be further very surprised if the combined US private consumption of all other centerfire[0] rifle cartridges adds up to the private US consumption of 5.56. The economies of scale behind 5.56 are huge. 5.56 can be had for under $1/round in bulk. Most other centerfire rifle cartridges aren't commonly sold in bulk (.308/7.62x51 being the only other one that comes to mind, which is also a NATO round). Basically anything that you might reasonably hunt deer[0] with is around $2/round.
The takeaway from all this should be that if NATO went to war, we might have to worry about the supply of 5.56. While there's a very visible part of the US gun culture that's dominated by the popularity of 5.56 and AR-pattern weapons, I don't think we can "thank" it for the abundance of 5.56 relative to the shortage of everything else that's being used in Ukraine.
[0] The .22 S/L/LR variants and the .17 derivatives are rimfire, which are entirely different from a manufacturing standpoint.
[1] I'm not going to get into the debate of whether 5.56 is suitable as a deer cartridge. I don't know. 5.56 is in broadly the same class of cartridges as the classic deer cartridges, at least from a manufacturing standpoint.
Private gun owners don't need to consume a number on par with NATO to help keep capacity up. They just need to consume enough that maintaining said capacity is profitable.
That being said, I'd honestly be surprised if private consumption wasn't within an order of magnitude.
Ammunition shortage has been discussed for a long time and can be deduced independently from the Western production capabilities. It depends on the weapon's system, of course, but is certainly nothing new or unexpected. I've seen Sky News report about the expected shortages with nice infographics around Christmas. It's still less problematic for Ukraine than what the Russians are facing (except for dumb artillery shells).
> many Pentagon officials are also given binders of printed intelligence daily, said two senior US officials
If they are leaking information every day, they have bigger things to worry about than some guy leaking some documents on Discord. They should be worried about the leaks they don't know about, since the perpetrators could get away with it indefinitely.
Yup, IMHO what was leaked in this case is not so important. What is important is how it was leaked, how long it was leaked for, and how long it took to notice.
How many people would need to be killed for you to consider the leak important? How many friendly countries involved in an ongoing war with your number one adversarial nation for the last 80s have to have their spring offensive plans impacted in the middle of a war would make this 'important' to your mind?
Yes, you're right. I failed to keep a full perspective when I wrote that. I won't defend that.
I do feel it's significant that it took about a month from the sharing on that minecraft server for these leaks to be recognized. I'm surprised no one on the server flagged it, or it wasn't picked up by some intelligence program. That's where my shock came from. It feels like a deeper problem. Maybe I'm naive in believing the military/intelligence community didn't know before this news broke.
Anyone close to the US security establishment recognizes the widespread abuse of the classification system. It becomes the default stance, to slap a “SECRET” designation on something. Just like how, in the old days, “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM,” today we nights say “nobody ever got reprimanded for classifying documents.”
When the classification system balloons like this, inevitably the number of people with access rises as well. And, the seriousness with which they regard classification plummets.
After 9/11 there was a notice that went out to not use the most restrictive portion markings, unless truly necessary, in the interest of promoting information sharing between silos. In particular the NOFORN being applied excessively, limiting sharing with foreign allies.
There are still periodic reminders about this but, to the parent's point, it's still the case that nobody gets fired for erring on the side of prudence. You might get a few stern words from someone senior to you, but won't get wrapped up in a criminal investigation.
What I've seen in busy headquarters, dealing with a mix of classified and unclassified material, is also something like decision fatigue. Like there are multiple required drop-down menu selections and free text fields for classification and caveats every time someone sends an email in Outlook, and most people are kind of guessing about what's really SECRET vs. CUI vs. whatever else, never mind caveats for specific allies and partners. So what prevails are simple rules-of-thumbs like "just send all email on SIPRNet, marked SECRET, but not NOFORN because that will piss off the Australian deputy commander" until someone more senior says otherwise.
>“Colonels and generals have their staff killing trees because they like paper, want to hold it closer with their reading glasses on, want to take it to in-person meetings or to read in between meetings,” said a former US official familiar with the Pentagon’s classified system.
Pentagon official sounds more concerned with "killing trees" than the concerns of American taxpayers over waste, abuse, and fraud.
It's remarkable that so many news outlets are permitted to discuss the content of these obviously actively strategically important leaks while assange rots in solitary for revealing war crimes.
> remarkable that so many news outlets are permitted to discuss the content of these obviously actively strategically important leaks while assange rots in solitary for revealing war crimes
Discussing leaked material isn’t a crime. Leaking material is.
My understanding is that there are big differences. Manning was an Army Private First Class, that is, enlisted military, who had specifically signed agreements to not disclose classified information.
It's not exactly the same thing, but similar things happen in private industry. If an employee of a company posted a trade secret the employee had agreed to keep secret, that's legally actionable, while others sharing it without any agreement with the company generally can't be sued.
That said, IANAL. If you need legal advise, I'm not it :-).
Assange presumably hadn't signed anything like that, nor is he a US citizen.
He did however skip bail, and rightly paid for that.
I was disappointed by the high court's view to allow extradition, especially given the one-sided approach to extradition that US takes with its citizens, but it was hardly surprising given how far up the US's ass the UK is. Of course a decade ago it was all "I don't want to go to Sweden because I'll be extradited", despite that easily being the case from the UK.
I don't think he was scared of the normal extradition process in Sweden, but instead how in the past Sweden has just straight up assisted CIA operatives in kidnapping Swedish residents, contrary to their own legal system.
That particular rendition relied on the UK refueling the planes. Seems a very tenuous link to me - the idea that the US would illegally kidnap someone from the streets in Sweden but not do the same thing in the UK
Hell nowadays the UK would not just allow, but probably pay the US to take asylum seekers somewhere else
> That particular rendition relied on the UK refueling the planes.
That particular rendition didn't rely on UK refueling the planes; the CIA's planes don't need to be refueled from somewhere as close as Sweden. And it was a minor scandal when it came out that the UK even allowed rendition flight refueling on one of it's territories in the Indian ocean. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/22/ciarendition.f...
> Seems a very tenuous link to me - the idea that the US would illegally kidnap someone from the streets in Sweden but not do the same thing in the UK
Then you should be able to produce an example of this happening. The big difference is that for western Europe, the US gov generally requires that the host country cooperates with renditions. Sweden cooperates with renditions, the UK requires the normal extradition process.
The documents are still classified even if they’re public now. For example, people with clearances can’t technically read these. They’d lose their jobs lol
The key distinction for reporters is that conspiring with someone before the fact to remove classified material is a crime. This includes giving advice to someone considering leaking on how to circumvent access controls.
Reporting on it after the fact when you had nothing to do with the removal of classified material in the first place is not.
I agree that Assange has been subject to "aggressive targeted prosecution" (at the very least), he was repeatedly playing close to the edge and intelligence community bureaucrats were threatened by politically embarrassing info appearing in western media and decided to make an example of him. IMHO, determining whether he was actually guilty of the crimes he was charged with isn't all that clear since it depends on some fairly subtle interpretation.
Suffice to say, that without the intense high-level political pressure being constantly applied Assange would not be incarcerated today as he would either have won in court or convicted on a substantially lesser crime. Thus, I don't think it matters much whether he's technically guilty.
To me, the key meta-point is that the things Assange leaked weren't of much actionable value to the military enemy. Most of what Assange (and Snowden) leaked were already known or reasonably assumed by military adversaries.
I agree with you, but this is also just an opinion.
The reality is that he is officially being charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for coaching Manning on how to get around the military's encryption.
I would think that they are. That’s how they got Reality Winner. I wouldn’t be surprised if watermarking is part of the story when they end up catching the guy.
59 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 141 ms ] threadOr is this leak another operation?
Years ago, I heard a detailed and all-too-credible account of some serious US secrets being regularly leaked - to an Average Guy, whose (reasonable and innocent) domain name was the ".com" version of an important ".mil" domain. Supposedly, he tried to report the problem to the US govt - and got some pretty nasty push-back, from officers whose only priorities seemed to be denial and butt-coverage. After that, he just deleted the ongoing emails.
When you restrict access to this stuff, you do it by creating a registration list that inevitably takes weeks to get on, because someone at the requesting command has to get three people, one of whom is probably out for a few weeks, to approve the request and then approve it at the controlling command in a similar process. If you're lucky, the systems are all working and that's all the wait there is, but a person can easily spend dozens of hours of work getting to the point where he can wait several weeks for access. Repeat that excessively, and people just stop using the best intel because it's a pain. Repeat that for a few years and no one at the command even remembers where to get good intel, if they even recall its existence.
Cross-org collaboration is a fragile beast in the absence of sales, marketing, profits, etc.
At its heart, this most recent problem of insider attack is the same problem as Snowden, and most people reject outright the idea that Snowden was wrong.
Anyway, I liked being able to read these; it was nice while it lasted.
People "in command" regularly fall prey to the fallacious idea of knowing better than anybody else. In particular, they believe to know who should know what.
Regarding Snowden to be wrong in revealing the US surveillance is an example of this fallacy. In essence, you discount human rights to knowledge about reality in favor of petty, self-serving and short-sighted convenience.
[1] https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentar...
Second, I doubt that the private gun owners of the United States consume as much 5.56/.223 as the entirety of NATO. The cartridge is widely available, popular, and comparatively inexpensive because of the large military demand for it.
I'd be further very surprised if the combined US private consumption of all other centerfire[0] rifle cartridges adds up to the private US consumption of 5.56. The economies of scale behind 5.56 are huge. 5.56 can be had for under $1/round in bulk. Most other centerfire rifle cartridges aren't commonly sold in bulk (.308/7.62x51 being the only other one that comes to mind, which is also a NATO round). Basically anything that you might reasonably hunt deer[0] with is around $2/round.
The takeaway from all this should be that if NATO went to war, we might have to worry about the supply of 5.56. While there's a very visible part of the US gun culture that's dominated by the popularity of 5.56 and AR-pattern weapons, I don't think we can "thank" it for the abundance of 5.56 relative to the shortage of everything else that's being used in Ukraine.
[0] The .22 S/L/LR variants and the .17 derivatives are rimfire, which are entirely different from a manufacturing standpoint.
[1] I'm not going to get into the debate of whether 5.56 is suitable as a deer cartridge. I don't know. 5.56 is in broadly the same class of cartridges as the classic deer cartridges, at least from a manufacturing standpoint.
That being said, I'd honestly be surprised if private consumption wasn't within an order of magnitude.
This adds credibility to the position that it was intentional imho.
The other data that may hint at this is ammunition distribution. Depending on how Ukraine’s attack goes we may be able to infer the intention.
You should spend some time in Bellingcat’s discord server if you are interested in this.
Do I need clearance for this?
If they are leaking information every day, they have bigger things to worry about than some guy leaking some documents on Discord. They should be worried about the leaks they don't know about, since the perpetrators could get away with it indefinitely.
edit: OK, I was wrong here with my priorities.
I do feel it's significant that it took about a month from the sharing on that minecraft server for these leaks to be recognized. I'm surprised no one on the server flagged it, or it wasn't picked up by some intelligence program. That's where my shock came from. It feels like a deeper problem. Maybe I'm naive in believing the military/intelligence community didn't know before this news broke.
When the classification system balloons like this, inevitably the number of people with access rises as well. And, the seriousness with which they regard classification plummets.
What I've seen in busy headquarters, dealing with a mix of classified and unclassified material, is also something like decision fatigue. Like there are multiple required drop-down menu selections and free text fields for classification and caveats every time someone sends an email in Outlook, and most people are kind of guessing about what's really SECRET vs. CUI vs. whatever else, never mind caveats for specific allies and partners. So what prevails are simple rules-of-thumbs like "just send all email on SIPRNet, marked SECRET, but not NOFORN because that will piss off the Australian deputy commander" until someone more senior says otherwise.
Pentagon official sounds more concerned with "killing trees" than the concerns of American taxpayers over waste, abuse, and fraud.
Discussing leaked material isn’t a crime. Leaking material is.
(edit - was)
It's not exactly the same thing, but similar things happen in private industry. If an employee of a company posted a trade secret the employee had agreed to keep secret, that's legally actionable, while others sharing it without any agreement with the company generally can't be sued.
That said, IANAL. If you need legal advise, I'm not it :-).
He did however skip bail, and rightly paid for that.
I was disappointed by the high court's view to allow extradition, especially given the one-sided approach to extradition that US takes with its citizens, but it was hardly surprising given how far up the US's ass the UK is. Of course a decade ago it was all "I don't want to go to Sweden because I'll be extradited", despite that easily being the case from the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repatriation_of_Ahmed_Agiza_an...
The UK at least follows their own legal system for such matters.
Hell nowadays the UK would not just allow, but probably pay the US to take asylum seekers somewhere else
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/editorials/iraq-war-tor...
That particular rendition didn't rely on UK refueling the planes; the CIA's planes don't need to be refueled from somewhere as close as Sweden. And it was a minor scandal when it came out that the UK even allowed rendition flight refueling on one of it's territories in the Indian ocean. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/22/ciarendition.f...
> Seems a very tenuous link to me - the idea that the US would illegally kidnap someone from the streets in Sweden but not do the same thing in the UK
Then you should be able to produce an example of this happening. The big difference is that for western Europe, the US gov generally requires that the host country cooperates with renditions. Sweden cooperates with renditions, the UK requires the normal extradition process.
Reporting on it after the fact when you had nothing to do with the removal of classified material in the first place is not.
Suffice to say, that without the intense high-level political pressure being constantly applied Assange would not be incarcerated today as he would either have won in court or convicted on a substantially lesser crime. Thus, I don't think it matters much whether he's technically guilty.
To me, the key meta-point is that the things Assange leaked weren't of much actionable value to the military enemy. Most of what Assange (and Snowden) leaked were already known or reasonably assumed by military adversaries.
The reality is that he is officially being charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for coaching Manning on how to get around the military's encryption.
https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali...