A mensagem de Trump foi uma variação, direcionada em grande parte a seus eleitores brancos, da retórica do tipo vocês-não-serão-castigados-novamente de Slobodan Miloševic que teve consequências terríveis durante a queda da Iugoslávia. Trump não é Miloševic, e os Estados Unidos não são a Iugoslávia, naturalmente, mas os paralelos entre esses paradigmas de falta de vergonha nacional revelam os métodos e a fragilidade subjacentes às manobras de Trump.

Em 1987, Miloševic foi enviado para o Kosovo para acalmar sérvios nervosos, que se sentiam ameaçados pelo domínio dos albaneses sobre a província. Ainda um oficial comunista de baixo escalão à época, Miloševic visitou um gabinete municipal e se dirigiu a uma multidão de sérvios insatisfeitos que se reuniam do lado de fora. Durante o discurso, Miloševic não estava seguro quando se dirigiu a eles, mas tudo mudou quando usou um tom nacionalista que nunca havia sido ouvido antes: “Ninguém poderá castigar os sérvios novamente, ninguém”, exclamou.

A multidão começou a gritar seu nome. Ainda que tenha permanecido frio (o líder não tinha praticamente nenhum carisma), o momento foi decisivo para perceber a utilidade política de explorar os ressentimentos de sérvios que se sentiam menosprezados por outros grupos na Iugoslávia. Isso era um tabu, e ele o quebrou. Quando Miloševic retornou a Belgrado, adotou a bandeira do nacionalismo sérvio e dispensou seu nada energético mentor, Ivan Stambolic. Ele provocou a separação de outras repúblicas que faziam parte da Iugoslávia, o que causou anos de guerra e diversos crimes de guerra.

Miloševic criava sua própria realidade. Eu nunca entrevistei Donald Trump, mas tenho memórias inesquecíveis de como é se sentar em uma sala com um líder gaslighter e questioná-lo. Fui dos poucos jornalistas americanos que conversaram com Miloševic antes que ele fosse destituído e extraditado para ser julgado por seus crimes de guerra em Haia, onde morreu de ataque cardíaco em 2006.

Slobodan Miloševic é recebido por apoiadores em frente à sua casa em Belgrado, durante uma reunião do Partido Socialista da Sérvia, em 2001.

Photo: Couple/Globalphoto.com/Liaison via Getty Images

Minha visita ao líder aconteceu em um dia ensolarado de primavera enquanto o poder de Miloševic ainda florescia. Seu gabinete era no centro de Belgrado, em um antigo palácio que havia sido talhado com um toque sombrio de arquitetura austro-húngara. Guardas à paisana me pediram para passar por um detector de metais que apitava alto, levando um dos guardas a perguntar com um sorriso no rosto, “Alguma arma?”. Ele me deixou passar. Uma mulher então me conduziu através de saguões vazios a uma sala de espera. “Sente-se aqui”, disse.

Ela retornou em um minuto e abriu uma porta dupla que dava para um escritório com uma longa fileira de janelas permitia que a luz do sol entrasse. O escritório estava vazio, exceto por Slobodan Miloševic, que estava de pé, próximo às janelas. Suas primeiras palavras foram: “por que escreve mentiras a respeito do meu país?” Agora, me dei conta de que essas palavras poderiam facilmente vir da boca de Trump ou de sua conta no Twitter, quando ele fala de veículos de mídia de que não gosta, ou seja, a maioria deles.

Miloševic não teve vergonha de mentir sobre as mais óbvias verdades. “Somos acusados de uma política nacionalista, mas não acho que nossa política seja nacionalista”, disse. “Se não temos uma igualdade nacional e uma igualdade entre as pessoas em geral, não podemos ser, como se diz, um país próspero e civilizado no futuro”. Enquanto conversávamos, as forças militares  organizadas por ele continuavam a assolar a Bósnia, cercando Sarajevo e outras grandes cidades no melhor estilo medieval.

Passamos uma hora e meia juntos, sem mais ninguém na sala. Apesar de não ter a petulância de Trump — Miloševic falava baixo e de forma controlada, com ocasionais momentos de raiva, de caráter mais tático que impulsivo —, era mestre dos fatos alternativos, mesmo estando cara a cara com alguém que sabia que eram mentiras, já que eu havia escrito sobre os crimes cometidos por seu exército na Bósnia. Algum tempo depois, quando escrevi um livro sobre tudo isso, descrevi a relação de Miloševic com a verdade de uma forma que, agora percebo, também se aplica a Trump.

Seria mais fácil acertar um soco em um holograma. Miloševic vivia em outra dimensão, em um crepúsculo de mentiras, e eu fuçava na dimensão dos fatos. Ele tinha passado toda sua vida no mundo do comunismo e tinha se tornado um mestre, um verdadeiro mestre da fabricação de fatos. Evidentemente, meus socos verbais o atravessavam sem atingi-lo. Era como se eu apontasse para uma parede preta e perguntasse a Miloševic qual era a cor dela. “Branca”, ele responde. “Não”, eu respondo, “olha para ela, aquela parede ali, ela é preta, está a dois metros da gente”. Ele olha para a parede, vira para mim e diz: “a parede é branca, meu caro, você precisa fazer um exame de vista”. Ele não grita com raiva. Parece preocupado com minha visão. Eu sabia que a parede era preta. Eu podia ver a parede. Eu tinha tocado na parede. Tinha assistido aos pintores usando a tinta preta.

Presidente Donald Trump levanta o punho após seu discurso de posse no Capitólio dos EUA. Washington, 20 de janeiro de 2017.

Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP

O modo bufão de Trump estava presente, entretanto, em outro protagonista da carnificina nos Bálcãs — Radovan Karadžic, o líder sérvio que começou como marionete de Miloševic. As fábulas de Karadžic eram ainda mais ousadas que as de seu parceiro sérvio, talvez porque, assim como Trump, ele adorava os holofotes e falava muito. Karadžic era notívago e, uma noite, compareceu a uma coletiva de imprensa que foi iniciada após a meia-noite no quartel general de sua pequena cidade, próxima a Sarajevo. Os muçulmanos estavam se bombardeando, disse Karadžic. A mídia inventou as histórias de sérvios maltratando prisioneiros. Não havia limpeza étnica — os muçulmanos deixaram suas casas voluntariamente.

A performance de Karadžic era trumpiniana em seu audacioso faz de conta e passa uma lição útil para os dias de hoje. Tiranos não se importam se você acredita neles, querem apenas que você se sujeite à dúvida. “Suas ideias eram tão grotescas”, escrevi a respeito de Karadžic algum tempo depois, “sua versão da realidade era tão distorcida que eu estava prestes a concluir que ele estava drogado, ou quem sabe eu. Eu conhecia bem a Bósnia e sabia que Karadžic dizia mentiras, e que essas mentiras estavam sendo transmitidas diariamente em todo mundo, diversas vezes por dia, e estavam sendo levadas a sério. Não estou dizendo que as mentiras eram encaradas como verdade, mas suspeitava que estivessem obscurecendo a verdade, fazendo com que observadores externos ficassem por fora, o que representava uma grande vitória para Karadžic. Não era necessário que os observadores externos acreditassem em suas versões dos acontecimentos, bastava que duvidassem da verdade e permanecessem inertes.

No entanto, a terrível experiência nos Bálcãs oferece um pouco de esperança: Miloševic foi deposto. Seu mundo de realidade paralela levou a um desastre que gerou níveis de inflação equivalentes aos da República de Weimar, o que desgastou o apoio popular a seu regime. Em uma das vezes em que me hospedei no Hotel Hyatt de Belgrado, cada noite custava mais de quatro milhões de dinars, sem taxas. O momento mais importante de sua deposição ocorreu quando trabalhadores da cidade operária de Cacak invadiram Belgrado com uma escavadeira ao perceber que seu herói os havia enganado.

Não foi a inércia que derrubou Miloševic, nem progressistas e alunos que fizeram oposição desde o primeiro dia de seu governo. Democratas bem comportados tiveram um papel fundamental, preparando o terreno para a queda de Miloševic, no entanto, foram seus principais eleitores, a classe trabalhadora e os serviços de segurança que deram o golpe final. O papel de Brutus foi assumido por infiltrados que se cansaram da demagogia malsucedida. É apenas o começo da era Trump, mas se o destino de Miloševic funcionar como guia tanto quanto sua retórica, Trump será derrotado quando a resistência se aprofundar e os eleitores e partido que o elegeram virarem-se contra ele.

Foto principal: Slobodan Miloševi? em transmissão de discurso. 1999.

The post O que Slobodan Milosevic me ensinou sobre Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Trump’s message was a variation, directed at his largely white constituency, of the you-shall-not-be-beaten-again rhetoric used with malignant effect by Slobodan Milošević during the collapse of Yugoslavia. Trump is not Milošević and the United States is not Yugoslavia, of course, but the echoes between these paragons of national shamelessness reveal the underlying methods and weaknesses of what Trump is trying to pull off.

In 1987, Milošević was sent to Kosovo to soothe angry Serbs who felt threatened by Albanians who dominated the province. A low-profile communist official at the time, Milošević visited a municipal office and spoke to a crowd of unhappy Serbs who had gathered outside. Milošević was uncertain as he addressed them, but everything changed when he voiced a nationalist message they had never heard before: “No one will be allowed to beat the Serbs again, no one!” he said.

The crowd began to chant his name. Even though he remained cold (he had almost no charisma), it was a decisive moment in which he realized the political usefulness of tapping into the resentments of Serbs who felt slighted by other identity groups in Yugoslavia. This had been a taboo, and he broke it. When Milošević returned to Belgrade, he took up the banner of Serb nationalism and ousted his low-energy mentor, Ivan Stambolić. He provoked other republics to secede from Yugoslavia, and this led to years of warfare and war crimes.

Milošević created his own reality. I have never interviewed Trump but I have an unforgettable memory of what it’s like to sit in a room with a gaslighter-in-chief and try to pin him down. I was one of the few American journalists whom Milošević spoke with before he was overthrown and extradited to a war crimes trial in The Hague, where he died of a heart attack in 2006.

Slobodan Milošević is greeted by supporters in front of his house in Belgrade during a gathering of the Socialist Party of Serbia in 2001.

Photo: Couple/Globalphoto.com/Liaison via Getty Images

I visited Milošević on a bright spring day when he was in the full bloom of power. His office was in the center of Belgrade in a former palace that had been chiseled with the less-than-joyous touch of Austro-Hungarian architecture. Plainclothes guards asked me to walk through a metal detector that beeped loudly, prompting one of the guards to ask with a laugh, “Any guns?” He waved me through. A woman then led me through empty hallways to a waiting room. Sit here, she said.

She returned in a minute and opened a set of double doors into an office that had a long row of windows letting in the day’s sunshine. The office was empty except for Slobodan Milošević, who was standing by the windows. His first words were, “Why do you write lies about my country?” I now realize these words could just as easily come out of Trump’s mouth, or his Twitter account, when he discusses media organizations he does not like, which is most of them.

Milošević was shameless in lying about obvious truths. “We are blamed for a nationalistic policy but I don’t believe that our policy is nationalistic,” he said. “If we don’t have national equality and equality of people, we cannot be, how to say, a civilized and prosperous country in the future.” As we spoke, the military forces he had organized were continuing to lay waste to Bosnia, encircling Sarajevo and other major cities with medieval-style sieges.

We sat together for 90 minutes, with nobody else in the room. Though he didn’t have the bluster of Trump — Milošević was a quiet and controlled speaker, with just occasional flashes of anger that were tactical, not impulsive — he was a master of the alternative fact, even in the face of someone who knew they were lies, because I had reported from Bosnia on the crimes perpetrated by military forces under his control. When I later wrote a book about all this, I described Milošević’s relationship to the truth in a way that I now realize fits Trump, too.

I would have had better luck trying to land a punch on a hologram. Milošević existed in a different dimension, a twilight zone of lies, and I was mucking about in the dimension of facts. He had spent his entire life in the world of communism, and he had become a master, an absolute master, at fabrication. Of course my verbal punches went right through him. It was as though I pointed to a black wall and asked Milošević what color it was. White, he says. No, I reply, look at it, that wall there, it is black, it is five feet away from us. He looks at it, then at me, and says, The wall is white, my friend, maybe you should have your eyes checked. He does not shout in anger. He sounds concerned for my eyesight. I knew the wall was black. I could see the wall. I had touched the wall. I had watched the workmen paint it black.

President Donald Trump raises his fist after speaking during the 58th Presidential Inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 20, 2017.

Photo: Carolyn Kaster/AP

Trump’s buffoonery was present, however, in another protagonist of the Balkan carnage — Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb leader who got his start as Milošević’s puppet. Karadžić’s fabulism was more brazen than his fellow Serb’s, if only because like Trump he adored the spotlight and talked so much. Karadžić was a night owl, and one evening I attended a press conference that began after midnight in his small-town headquarters outside besieged Sarajevo. The Muslims were bombing themselves, Karadžić said. The media invented the tales of Serb mistreatment of detainees. There was no ethnic cleansing — Muslims left their homes voluntarily.

Karadžić’s performance was Trumpian in its audacious make-believe, and it conveyed a lesson that’s useful to us today. Tyrants don’t care if you believe them, they just want you to succumb to doubt. “His ideas were so grotesque,” I later wrote of Karadžić, “his version of reality so twisted, that I was tempted to conclude he was on drugs, or that I was. I knew Bosnia well, and I knew that the things Karadžić said were lies, and that these lies were being broadcast worldwide, every day, several times a day, and they were being taken seriously. I am not saying that his lies were accepted as the truth, but I sensed they were obscuring the truth, causing outsiders to stay on the sidelines, and this of course was a great triumph for Karadžić. He didn’t need to make outsiders believe his version of events; he just needed to make them doubt the truth and sit on their hands.”

The terrible experience of the Balkans offers a slit of hope, however: Milošević was overthrown. His world of alternative facts led to a disaster that involved Weimar levels of hyperinflation that sapped his regime of popular support. During one of my stays at the Hyatt Hotel in Belgrade, the nightly rate exceeded 4 million dinars, taxes not included. The defining moment of his overthrow occurred when bulldozers from the working-class town of Čačak smashed into Belgrade at the head of a column of blue-collar workers who realized their hero had conned them.

It wasn’t inertia that caught up with Milošević, nor the liberals and students who opposed him from almost the first day. Well-behaved democrats played important and necessary roles, laying the groundwork for Milošević’s removal, but it was his core constituencies, the working class and the security services, that delivered the decisive blows. The role of Brutus is often taken by insiders who have finally had enough of a failed demagogue. These are early days in the Trump era, but if Milošević’s fate is as much of a guide as his rhetoric, Trump will be undone when the democratic resistance deepens and the voters and party that brought him to power turn on him.

Top photo: Slobodan Milošević appears on a broadcast during a 1999 speech.

The post What Slobodan Milosevic Taught Me About Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

The immediate trigger was an executive order signed last week by President Trump that banned entry visas for refugees from seven Muslim-dominated countries. The order, which did not go through a normal review process, caused chaos and heartbreak at airports in the United States and around the world, where refugees with valid visas were turned back without warning, and even holders of green cards were detained.

The ensuing protests by thousands of people were the first signs of something going terribly wrong in America, like a body jerking when a foreign substance is injected into its veins. More symptoms of rejection soon emerged. Hundreds of diplomats at the State Department are signing an unusual dissent cable that gravely warns of political blowback, saying the ban will “alienate entire societies” and serve as a “tipping point towards radicalization.” And on Monday night, Acting Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the Department of Justice would not defend the ban in court because “I am not convinced … that the executive order is lawful.” Within hours, Yates was fired, accused in a venomous White House statement of betrayal and weakness.

As the now-familiar saying goes, this is not normal. On their own, none of these events would have been unprecedented. Just last year, 51 diplomats at the State Department filed a dissent memo over the Obama administration’s Syria policy. The replacement of agency heads, sometimes in unhappy circumstances, is a feature of every democracy. But these events have occurred in such a short period of time that the script of the first 10 days of the Trump Administration reads like the work of Le Carré come to America.

Protesters gather in front of the Supreme Court to voice opposition to President Donald Trump’s executive order barring immigrants from certain countries entry into the U.S., Jan. 30, 2017.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via Getty Images

Perhaps most strikingly, bureaucracies appear to be taking sides and feuding with a sharpness that is characteristic of fractured and dysfunctional governments.

Before the election, the FBI publicly released far more information that was damaging to Hillary Clinton than to Donald Trump, and as a result many people concluded that the FBI and its director, James Comey, were pro-Trump. It was the opposite with the CIA, which appeared to be intentionally leaking information that was damaging to Trump’s campaign — and Trump himself lashed out at the CIA for doing so.

In another major schism – this one spanning two branches of the government — several federal judges issued stays against the immigration ban, finding it likely illegal, but some border agents refused to let their detainees speak to lawyers despite being presented with court orders instructing them to. Meanwhile, the bans were celebrated by unions representing more than 21,000 immigration officers. The unions, in a joint statement, congratulated the president for his “swift and decisive action” to keep America safe.

Over at the EPA, scientists say they are afraid to talk to journalists after the Trump administration demanded to know the names of officials who participated in climate-change negotiations. The newly installed head of the Department of Homeland Security clashed with the White House over its desire to appoint an anti-immigration extremist as his deputy. Congressional aides disclosed that they had secretly helped the White House draft the immigration ban and signed non-disclosure agreements that prevented them from telling their own bosses about it. And Trump’s senior political adviser, Steve Bannon, a white nationalist whose ex-wife accused him of domestic violence and anti-semitism, is orchestrating the White House’s executive orders in secretive ways that cut out most of the National Security Council staff and leave no paper trail that shows what happened.

Although this is all new to Americans, there is ample precedent overseas. I spent most of my life reporting on the breakdown of process and laws in foreign countries. The origin of the chaos is the assumption to power of a vastly inexperienced leader who is fantastically rich, psychologically unstable, unusually bombastic and trusts only a few people, mostly family members. This profile has elements of former and current rulers of Italy (Silvio Berlusconi), Uzbekistan (Islam Karimov), Kazakhstan (Nursultan Nazarbayev), the Democratic Republic of Congo (Mobutu Sese Seko), Venezuela (Hugo Chavez), Iraq (Saddam Hussein) and Equatorial Guinea (Teodoro Obiang), to name just a few.

One of the things I learned while reporting from some of these countries is that when a war of bureaucracies breaks out, some bureaucracies are far more equal than others — in the sense of truly mattering in determining a nation’s fate. The dissent from within the State Department is significant, but when the normal inter-agency process of modern states breaks down, foreign ministries tend to be left in the cold, carrying out whatever policies are determined by the places where the real power resides: the security ministries and the presidential palace.

The rebellion at the Justice Department by Sally Yates is a type that will likely be short-lived; she was a holdover from the Obama administration, and Trump has already replaced her with a compliant prosecutor. Political positions of that sort, which fill the top tiers of most agencies, will soon be filled by Trump vassals. The fight within bureaucracies will shift to being between those loyalists and the career civil servants who compose the bulk of the federal workforce, which totals about 2.1 million people, plus 3.7 million who work as contractors.

An unusual appeal went out to federal workers on Monday from a former National Security Council staffer, Laura Rosenberger, who wrote to her former colleagues, “In many ways, you are the last line of defense against illegal, unethical, or reckless actions — which the first week of this administration confirm will abound.” Rosenberger added, “History has shown us that implementation of such policies depends on a compliant bureaucracy of obedient individuals who look the other way do as they are told. Do what bureaucracy does well: slow-roll, obstruct, and constrain. Resist. Refuse to implement anything illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional.

It is a stirring plea but there are many reasons why it might not ignite a rebellion among the legions of bureaucrats who make the government run from day to day. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, asked to respond to the dissent from the State Department officials on Monday, made it clear what the administration thinks of disloyalty. “These career bureaucrats have a problem with it?” he said. “I think they should get with the program or go.” I have heard these sorts of threats before, though not on American soil.

Where this goes from here is impossible to say. It’s as if we were caught in a rogue wave that has crashed down upon us, turning us head over heels, crushing our heads under its pressure, filling our lungs with water, breaking our bones with its power. And somehow we still expect to fully understand what is happening to us, where the wave will take us, and what condition we will be in when the waters recede.

Top photo:President Donald Trump speaks during an Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on Jan. 22, 2017 in Washington.

The post In Just 10 Days, President Trump Has Split the Government Into Warring Factions appeared first on The Intercept.

This unusual question is presenting itself with urgent regularity as President Trump tries to overturn a wide array of sensible policies in his drive to implement a far-right agenda, including a chaotic travel ban aimed at Muslim immigrants. Yet it’s a familiar question to a particular species of government official: those who have resigned to protest deplorable initiatives they disagreed with. The last time it happened on a significant scale was in the early 1990s, and George Kenney was at the epicenter.

Kenney joined the State Department in 1988, and after serving overseas, he took a post in Washington as the deputy chief of Yugoslav affairs. He managed day-to-day policy on the region and pored over intelligence reports as well as news articles. He disagreed with the U.S. policy of standing aside as Serbian fighters seized large parts of Bosnia in a conflict that involved ethnic cleansing and siege warfare. As the author of the first drafts of State Department position papers, Kenney saw his strong language watered down by layers of higher officials who sought to minimize the justification for U.S. intervention. Six months after the war began in 1992, he quit.

“I can no longer in clear conscience support the administration’s ineffective, indeed, counterproductive handling of the Yugoslav crisis,” he wrote in his letter of resignation, which was front-page news.

Four State Department officials quit over Bosnia policy in the early 1990s, and their actions are newly relevant as the Trump era gets underway. “All over the nation’s capital, panicked job searches are underway,” noted a Washington Post story about bureaucrats looking for escape hatches in advance of what they fear will be a reversal of key policies on law enforcement, reproductive rights, and national security. The Environmental Protection Agency is on a virtual lockdown, with a freeze in its grant programs and a gag order on any of its employees talking with outsiders about what’s going on. A temporary ban has been instituted that prohibits a broad swath of refugees and green card holders from entering the United States. And there’s even a war over things that in ordinary times would be innocuous, such as social media postings by national parks.

What should a frustrated civil servant do? In recent weeks, The Intercept interviewed Kenney and the other officials who quit over Bosnia, and to a surprising degree, they generally agreed that dissenting officials should stay in their jobs as long as possible in the Trump administration, working inside the always-powerful machinery of bureaucracy to keep destructive policies from being implemented.

“My advice would be to throw sand in the gears,” said Kenney, who was the first State Department official to resign over Bosnia. “You’re not going to do anybody any good by leaving. Nobody is going to listen to you. If you work in the EPA and think the Trump people are the devil, you and every mid-level person who can, mount an internal resistance. There should be opportunities for people who are smart to act in a classic bureaucratic passive-aggressive manner and just be obstructionist. It’s a situation that lends itself to creative opposition from within.”

Kenney’s advice tracks the parting words of at least one of the Obama-era political appointees who had to step down in recent weeks — Vanita Gupta, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, which is expected to follow a discernably different agenda in the Trump era. “My ask of you today is that I need you to keep pushing,” Gupta told her career staff on her last day at work. “Even when it’s hard, I need every single one of you to keep pushing, because there are too many people in this country who are depending on us.”

Kenney’s public resignation shocked Washington, as did the ones that followed. Marshall Harris was next, then Jon Western, then Stephen Walker — all of them 30-something diplomats who publicly turned their backs on secure lives working for the U.S. government. The unique “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973 notwithstanding — when Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, was dismissed after President Richard Nixon demanded they fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox — the last wave of resignations-in-principle was among officials who opposed the invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. But those resignations, in 1970, were quiet and unnoticed. When Anthony Lake and three other mid-level aides quit the staff of National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, they did not publicize their reasons.

“We never should have heard of them,” noted a 1993 story in the Washington Post about the Bosnia dissenters. “They were mid-level bureaucrats, dots in the State Department matrix. But they’ve gone and done something extraordinary in Washington: They quit their jobs on moral grounds.”

Kenney said his views were shaped by a seminal text he read as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. Written by economist Albert Hirschman, the book was called “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States,” and it examined the choices that confronted dissatisfied consumers and officials. “Exit” was a euphemism for going elsewhere, “Voice” meant speaking up from the inside, and “Loyalty” meant staying silent. Hirschman, whose work is regarded as path-breaking, explained in a later essay that his original analysis of the efficacy of voice had been “too timid.” He noted the candidacies of George McGovern and Barry Goldwater — outsiders within their respective parties who rather than quitting or staying silent kept fighting and eventually won their parties’ presidential nominations.

“My point,” Hirschman wrote, “was of course that power grows not only out of the ability to exit, but also out of voice, and that voice will be wielded with special energy and dedication by those who have nowhere to exit to.”

Hirschman, who died in 2012, was speaking directly to the dilemma of federal workers who at this moment might feel a bit like Hamlet — “to resign or not to resign?” For Hirschman, doubt was not paralyzing but liberating, leading to action of some sort — he described it as proving Hamlet wrong. Hirschman’s own life was an example. Before becoming an academic, he fought in the Spanish civil war against Franco, with the French in their (very short) battle against invading Germans at the start of World War II, and he stayed in France during the German occupation and perilously helped several thousand refugees escape, including Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall.

But how much can an oppositional bureaucrat accomplish in the Trump era? One of the State Department officials who resigned in 1993, Jon Western, noted that particularly in the first months of a new administration, bureaucrats possess an unusual amount of influence because many appointees who are supposed to call the policy shots have not started their jobs. Political appointees are not just the brand names who lead the various agencies and departments of government. In every one of them, there are as many as five layers of political appointees, and it can be months or more before they are in place. Many of them have to be confirmed by Congress and obtain security clearances, some haven’t lived in Washington D.C. and must arrange to move there, while others are so new to their jobs that they don’t yet know enough to question the civil servants under them.

Western, now a professor of international relations and dean of faculty at Mount Holyoke College, recalled that when Bill Clinton took office in early 1993, an immediate policy review was ordered for Bosnia. Clinton became president after four years of George H.W. Bush and eight years of Ronald Reagan, so the exodus of political appointees was particularly deep — few Republicans wanted to stay on to help the other side, and the other side didn’t want them to stay. “None of the third, fourth or fifth layer people were in place,” Western recalled. The review was largely carried out by career civil servants who had helped design and execute the do-nothing policy that was under review. The White House “was left with a report that said there’s not a whole lot you can do,” Western recalled. “The bureaucracy can really slow things down. At the end of the day, policy has to be implemented by people on the ground, and for people on the ground to get their instructions, it has to go through a pretty cumbersome process.”

The number of federal career employees is 2.1 million, which is separate from the 3.7 million people who work as federal contractors. The growth of the government workforce since World War II has inevitably spawned a cascade of academic studies of bureaucratic politics, with a foundational text written by a Harvard professor, Graham Allison, whose 1971 book on the Cuban missile crisis examined three models for understanding how and why the crisis unfolded the way it did. Allison drew attention to what at the time was a relatively new model for making sense of how a state acts: the behind-the-scenes struggles of bureaucrats and bureaucracies. Allison compared it to a chess match in which the moves of one side are determined not by a single player (the president) or by a predictable strategy that is planned in advance, but by several bureaucratic players with distinct interests and strategies who battle each other over each move.

Even in the age of Twitter and stream-of-consciousness edicts from the commander-in-chief, “It’s not as though the president picks up the phone and says ‘This has to be done,’ and immediately things will be done,” Western said.

On January 24, 1993, the New York Times published a story based on a leaked intelligence assessment that Serbian forces operated 135 prison camps, months after they had promised to shut down all of their camps. Western, who was an intelligence analyst at the State Department at the time, was surprised to read about it in the Times because he had written the classified assessment just a day earlier. Someone else had slipped it to the Times — “I wouldn’t have felt comfortable” disclosing it, Western said — but he was glad it had been done.

Leaking to journalists is another way that civil servants can perform their jobs in the public interest, Western and the other Bosnia dissenters agreed. With Congress and the White House controlled by a political party that prefers “alternative facts,” the truth of what the government knows is less likely to see the light of day unless it is leaked. Even Western, who describes himself as “not a big fan” of the massive leaks of Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning, notes that without leaks the American public wouldn’t know about the Pentagon Papers and other truths the government did not want to share with the American public. “Leaking is part of the process of making sure information gets out,” he said.

During the run-up to the Iraq war, when senior officials in the George W. Bush administration falsely claimed that intelligence assessments confirmed Saddam Hussein’s regime was building weapons of mass destruction, the messier truth made its way into the public realm only because mid-level officials talked to journalists about the absence of hard evidence to back up the administration’s erroneous claims. By staying on the inside, midlevel bureaucrats can function as the fact-checkers of senior-level spin.

Stephen Walker, who was the fourth and final State Department official to resign over Bosnia, recalled in an interview that after Secretary of State Warren Christopher refused to say in 1993 that Serbian forces were systemically killing Muslims in Bosnia, somebody leaked a classified State Department memo that said the exact opposite. This was an example, Walker said, of a leak being the best and perhaps only way to present evidence that a senior official was lying about what the government knew. “While I never would have leaked myself, I’m glad people did it,” said Walker. “I’m glad that the things that got leaked at that time got leaked, because they were important documents that needed to be in the public domain and didn’t involve sources and methods.”

Of course a key difference between then and now is that unauthorized leaks are investigated far more aggressively than before, and the consequences of being caught are more severe. The Obama administration prosecuted more leakers and whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined, and the Trump administration, with its ingrained hostility toward the major media, is expected to continue the crackdown, if not intensify it.

When Marshall Harris began working at the State Department in 1985, he had to attend a six-week orientation course known as A-100, the department’s version of basic training. There were about 60 youthful diplomats in the course, and each day they received instruction in everything they would need to know as they started their careers — such as security protocols, how to write cables, the structure of the department, the do’s and don’ts of public speaking and negotiating.

One day, a lecturer told a story about a diplomat who disagreed with U.S. policy and resigned on principle. The punch line was that the righteous diplomat couldn’t find a job on the outside — his skills were so impractical that he ended up pumping gas in northern Virginia. The story might sound a bit apocryphal but the point it conveyed to Harris and his young colleagues-in-diplomacy was clear — if you resign, you will forever lose the prestige and security you enjoyed as a Foreign Service Officer. Don’t do it.

Just a few years later, Harris ignored that advice. He was a Bosnia specialist in the State Department and disagreed with the U.S. policy of looking the other way as genocide occurred. In 1993, after failing to change the policy, Harris decided to resign. “I can no longer serve in a Department of State that accepts the forceful dismemberment of a European state and that will not act against genocide and the Serbian officials who perpetrate it,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which quickly got into the hands of reporters.

For him and the three other Bosnia dissenters, resignation was a last resort that for each of them turned out to attract far more attention than they expected. Kenney, the first to quit, became an influential voice at the outset of the Bosnian conflict (though his views changed after a few years and he eventually expressed doubts about the scale of killings in Bosnia). Harris, after leaving the State Department, worked for a congressman, the late Frank McCloskey, who was a leading figure on Bosnia, and then he helped form a pro-Bosnia advocacy group with Walker. Western took a slightly different path, speaking out less than the others and going into the academic world (Walker is now a high school teacher, while Western is a professor).

The Bosnia dissenters, while not regretting their choices, recognize that the media landscape has shifted since their resignations catapulted them to durable perches in the public eye. When they resigned, the web was just a few years old, not much of a platform for public debate. The velocity of today’s news cycle is radically quicker. Harris recalled that when he resigned, “everyone wanted to talk to me,” so he did frequent television interviews that were serious and respectful. When I spoke with Harris on the phone earlier this month, he mentioned that on the previous night he had watched CNN’s Anderson Cooper show and the panel discussion included eight participants who competed for precious airtime for their seconds-long sound bites.

“Back in my day, you had a one-on-one interview,” Harris said. “But in a heartbeat today, you can get 50 people on a panel.”

The warning Harris received as a diplomat-in-training remains painfully relevant. Although some things have changed in a good way — Harris notes there are now more career opportunities outside government for people who resign — in general, leakers and whistleblowers tend to be shunned and punished by the institutions they leak against, even if the public welcomes their disclosures. While there is little hard data, a 1975 study looked at the resignations of high-level officials between 1900 and 1970. Only 34 of those resignations involved a public protest of some sort, and only one of the officials who resigned in public eventually returned to an equivalent or higher post in government.

“If you want somebody to stand up and say no and be noticed, you can’t have somebody like me, who was midlevel,” Kenny said. “You have to have someone quite senior to throw themselves on the barbed wire. But I’m not sure anyone who is in a position to be listened to would want to do it.”

For information on contacting The Intercept anonymously via SecureDrop, instructions are here: https://theintercept.com/leak/

Correction: January 29, 2017
This story has been updated to reflect that Stephen Walker formed a Bosnia advocacy group with Marshall Harris.

Illustration: Vivienne Flesher for The Intercept

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Late last year, Cartwright pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about disclosing classified information on the Stuxnet computer virus to reporters from the New York Times and Newsweek. The former general, a vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was known as Obama’s “favorite general,” was due to be sentenced this month on felony charges. Prosecutors were seeking a two-year prison term.

Obama pardoned him yesterday, which means Cartwright will not go to prison.

President Obama blows a horn alongside Gen. James Cartwright as they watch members of the Wounded Warrior Soldier Ride pass by on the grounds of the White House on May 4, 2011, in Washington.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

“It seems to me that the far bigger news from the perspective of policy and precedent-setting is the pardon of General James Cartwright,” wrote Steve Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor who specializes on national security law. Vladeck described the Cartwright pardon as “an interesting denouement” to the controversy over the Obama administration’s war on leakers. While Vladeck stated that he doubted it was the beginning of a trend, he asked, “Is it possible, then, that the Cartwright pardon is a tacit admission on the government’s part that it has been a bit too hard on leakers and those, like General Cartwright, who have interfered with leak investigations?”

The Cartwright pardon constitutes a new precedent in which a well-connected leaker of classified information who lied to the FBI has been spared jail time. In 2015, former Gen. David Petraeus admitted to sharing top-secret information with his biographer and girlfriend, Paula Broadwell, and lying to the FBI about it. Petraeus, who resigned from his job as CIA director when the scandal broke, negotiated a deal to plead guilty to a single misdemeanor count, accepted 18 months of probation, and avoided a prison sentence. (In another era, during the George W. Bush presidency, Scooter Libby, who was chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, received a presidential commutation for a 30-month sentence for leaking the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame.)

The Manning case is different from Cartwright’s in significant ways, including the amount of material leaked. Manning leaked a large cache of secret military and diplomatic documents, while Cartwright talked about a single top-secret program to undermine Iran’s nuclear industry (and his conversations with reporters from the New York Times and Newsweek were in the context of making the Obama administration look good, whereas Manning’s leak to WikiLeaks exposed government wrongdoing). While Cartwright received a full pardon, Manning only had her sentence commuted, to seven years from the staggering 35 years she received at trial.

At the time of the Petraeus plea deal, lawyers for several convicted leakers expressed outrage that Petraeus was permitted to avoid incarceration for crimes that were arguably far worse than those their clients were incarcerated for. Abbe Lowell, the lawyer for Stephen Kim, a State Department official who received a 13-month sentence for talking to a journalist about a single classified report on North Korea, said at the time, “The issue is not whether Gen. Petraeus was dealt with too leniently. … The issue is whether others are dealt with far too severely for conduct that is no different. This underscores the random, disparate and often unfair application of the national security laws where higher-ups are treated better than lower-downs.”

The Petraeus deal was cited in pleadings that Lowell and lawyers for another convicted leaker, Jeffrey Sterling, made to their respective judges, arguing that justice had to be meted out equally, and that their clients had received far harsher treatment (the appeals were unsuccessful, though). The Cartwright case adds another data point for future leak cases. There is not just the Petraeus plea deal that can be cited, but the Cartwright pardon, too.

“The clemency and pardons today underscore the uneven enforcement and completely unequal treatment of people accused of leaking classified information,” Lowell told The Intercept after the Cartwright and Manning decisions were announced.

One of the Obama-era leakers who did not receive the generous treatment showered on Cartwright and Petraeus is John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who pleaded guilty to sharing the name of a covert operative with a reporter. Even though the operative’s name was never published, Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison.

“Now we’ve seen it twice,” said Kiriakou, who was released from prison in 2015. “It’s not just the pardon, it’s the sweetheart deal Petraeus got as well. How can a prosecutor prosecute a leak case and with a straight face ask a judge to sentence somebody to 24 years [this is what Sterling faced] when Petraeus got 18 months of unsupervised probation and Cartwright just sat at home and waited for his pardon to come through?”

The contrast was noted by national security reporter Michael Isikoff in a dispatch for Yahoo News yesterday.

Still, the pardon is likely to prove controversial in light of the prison terms — in one case as long as three and a half years — given to other, much lower level government officials prosecuted by the Justice Department in leak-related cases. If nothing else, the move appears to undercut a significant argument made by the office of U.S. attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein in a court filing last week, that “when an individual is found to have made unauthorized disclosures, particularly one serving in a senior position, it is critically important” to hold that person accountable.

Of course, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump will pursue whatever cases it wants to pursue, and if the latest twists with Cartwright and Manning are politically inconvenient, lawyers for the new administration will try to downplay them. Pardons and commutations do not have the same legal standing as court rulings, and can be portrayed as discretionary and inherently political moves by an outgoing president.

“It’s hard to know the precedental value this will have,” said Jesselyn Raddack, who has represented several prominent leakers and whistleblowers. “Both of these cases were very politicized, for better or worse. We are also moving into a presidency that promises greater secrecy and doesn’t necessarily think secrecy is a bad thing and is reflexively anti-leak when it’s against [Trump], and pro-leak when it serves to smear his enemies.” Referring to the commutation of Manning’s sentence, Raddack added, “I hope it would be encouraging for whistleblowers, but encouraging for what? They could only be put in jail for seven years, and then someone will have mercy on them? It’s hard to read a lot of encouragement in that, because we’re still in such a chilling environment.”

Top photo: Retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright leaves the U.S. District Court in Washington on Oct. 17, 2016.

The post Obama’s Pardon of Gen. James Cartwright Is a New Twist in the War on Leaks appeared first on The Intercept.

But this story is not about the excellent reasons for thanking rather than locking up the two most famous whistleblowers of the post-9/11 era. Plenty of people are already calling for that in powerful ways. A new petition on Snowden’s behalf has been signed by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey as well as Steve Wozniak, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Aragorn (also known as Viggo Mortensen). Organizations coming out in support of a pardon for Snowden, who is currently a political refugee in Moscow, include the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International. And Oliver Stone has just released “Snowden,” a movie that emphasizes his good and patriotic intentions.

But the unfortunate truth of our times is that Obama is not going to pardon Snowden and Manning. His administration has invested too much capital in demonizing them to turn back now. However, there are other leakers and whistleblowers for whom the arguments in favor of pardons are not only compelling but politically palatable, too. Their names are Stephen Kim, Jeffrey Sterling, John Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake. All of them were government officials who talked with journalists and were charged under the Espionage Act for disclosures of information that were far less consequential than the classified emails that Hillary Clinton stored on her server at home or the top-secret war diaries that David Petraeus shared with his biographer and girlfriend. Petraeus, a former general and CIA director, got a fine for his transgressions. Clinton got a presidential nomination.

Consider this: Kiriakou, a CIA agent who criticized the agency’s use of torture, was thrown into prison because he provided a journalist with the name of one covert officer, although the name was never published. Kim, a State Department official, pleaded guilty to talking to Fox News reporter James Rosen about a single classified report on North Korea that an official later described as a “nothing burger.” Sterling, a CIA officer, was convicted of talking to New York Times reporter James Risen about a botched operation against Iran that went wrong because of bungling by the agency. Drake, who worked at the NSA, faced multiple felony charges after he talked to a Baltimore Sun reporter about fraud and abuse in a bloated surveillance program. All of them went to prison except Drake, who was able, in the end, to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, though he lost his job and security clearance and now works at an Apple store.

There is an imperative to apologize to Kim, Sterling, Kiriakou, and Drake that has nothing to do with justice (though justice should be sufficient incentive). It is possible that a crackpot grifter will be elected president of the United States in seven weeks time. Obama needs to start dramatically disavowing the excesses of his presidency, so that Donald Trump, if he wins in November, will not be able to use the continuity card to do even worse things with the excessive powers that Obama was able to arrogate for the Oval Office. (Trump would still do terrible things, of course, but he would at least have a harder time citing Obama as precedent.) One of the most insidious domestic legacies of Obama’s presidency is his unprecedented crackdown on officials who talked to journalists about embarrassing issues or policies the government wanted to keep secret — and this needs to be forsaken, now.

It wouldn’t be that out of character. The Obama administration has been admirable in the use of its powers to reverse or stop wrongful actions by state and municipal authorities. Earlier this month, the administration suspended construction on the North Dakota Access Pipeline because it violated the rights of Native Americans. In recent years, the Department of Justice has conducted scathing investigations into civil rights abuses by a number of police departments, and has extracted meaningful changes from many of them. Fairness for all has been a hallmark of these laudable moves, and the same standard should be applied to leakers and whistleblowers. If Petraeus and Clinton are allowed to get away with unauthorized sharing of classified information, it should be OK for lesser officials too, especially when their actions involved the exposure of government wrongdoing.

Instead of just correcting the errors of other branches of government, Obama should admit that his own administration made a terrible mistake by prosecuting good people who helped, rather than harmed, the cause of democracy. If pardoning Snowden and Manning requires more courage than the president possesses, he can at least show clemency for Kim, Kiriakou, Drake, and Sterling, who have suffered catastrophically. Pardons would clear their names and release Sterling from prison (he remains behind bars to this day). The fact that Trump has the instincts of a dictator makes it all the more crucial that Obama not hand him the powers and policies of one.

Top photos: John Kiriakou, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Tom Drake, Jeffrey Sterling, and Stephen Kim.

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The message arrived at night and consisted of three words: “Good evening sir!”

The sender was a hacker who had written a series of provocative memos at the National Security Agency. His secret memos had explained — with an earthy use of slang and emojis that was unusual for an operative of the largest eavesdropping organization in the world — how the NSA breaks into the digital accounts of people who manage computer networks, and how it tries to unmask people who use Tor to browse the web anonymously. Outlining some of the NSA’s most sensitive activities, the memos were leaked by Edward Snowden, and I had written about a few of them for The Intercept.

There is no Miss Manners for exchanging pleasantries with a man the government has trained to be the digital equivalent of a Navy SEAL. Though I had initiated the contact, I was wary of how he might respond. The hacker had publicly expressed a visceral dislike for Snowden and had accused The Intercept of jeopardizing lives by publishing classified information. One of his memos outlined the ways the NSA reroutes (or “shapes”) the internet traffic of entire countries, and another memo was titled “I Hunt Sysadmins.” I felt sure he could hack anyone’s computer, including mine.

Good evening sir!

The only NSA workers the agency has permitted me to talk with are the ones in its public affairs office who tell me I cannot talk with anyone else. Thanks to the documents leaked by Snowden, however, I have been able to write about a few characters at the NSA.

There was, for instance, a novelist-turned-linguist who penned an ethics column for the NSA’s in-house newsletter, and there was a mid-level manager who wrote an often zany advice column called “Ask Zelda!” But their classified writings, while revealing, could not tell me everything I wanted to know about the mindset of the men and women who spy on the world for the U.S. government.

I got lucky with the hacker, because he recently left the agency for the cybersecurity industry; it would be his choice to talk, not the NSA’s. Fortunately, speaking out is his second nature. While working for the NSA, he had publicly written about his religious beliefs, and he was active on social media. So I replied to his greeting and we began an exchange of cordial messages. He agreed to a video chat that turned into a three-hour discussion sprawling from the ethics of surveillance to the downsides of home improvements and the difficulty of securing your laptop. “I suppose why I talk is partially a personal compulsion to not necessarily reconcile two sides or different viewpoints but to just try to be honest about the way things are,” he told me. “Does that make sense?”

The hacker was at his home, wearing a dark hoodie that bore the name of one of his favorite heavy metal bands, Lamb of God. I agreed not to use his name in my story, so I’ll just refer to him as the Lamb. I could see a dime-store bubble-gum machine behind him, a cat-scratching tree, and attractive wood beams in the ceiling. But his home was not a tranquil place. Workmen were doing renovations, so the noise of a buzz saw and hammering intruded, his wife called him on the phone, and I could hear the sound of barking. “Sorry, my cats are taunting my dog,” he said, and later the animal in question, a black-and-white pit bull, jumped onto his lap and licked his face.

The Lamb wore a T-shirt under his hoodie and florid tattoos on his arms and smiled when I said, mostly in jest, that his unruly black beard made him look like a member of the Taliban, though without a turban. He looked very hacker, not very government.

When most of us think of hackers, we probably don’t think of government hackers. It might even seem odd that hackers would want to work for the NSA — and that the NSA would want to employ them. But the NSA employs legions of hackers, as do other agencies, including the FBI, CIA, DEA, DHS, and Department of Defense. Additionally, there are large numbers of hackers in the corporate world, working for military contractors like Booz Allen, SAIC, and Palantir. The reason is elegantly simple: You cannot hack the world without hackers.

In popular shows and movies such as “Mr. Robot” and “The Matrix,” hackers tend to be presented as unshaven geeks loosely connected to collectives like Anonymous, or to Romanian crime syndicates that steal credit cards by the millions, or they are teenagers who don’t realize their online mischief will get them into a boatload of trouble when Mom finds out.

The stereotypes differ in many ways but share a trait: They are transgressive anti-authoritarians with low regard for social norms and laws. You would not expect these people to work for The Man, but they do, in droves. If you could poll every hacker in the U.S. and ask whe­­­ther they practice their trade in dark basements or on official payrolls, a large number would likely admit to having pension plans. Who knows, it could be the majority.

This may qualify as one of the quietest triumphs for the U.S. government since 9/11: It has co-opted the skills and ideals of a group of outsiders whose anti-establishment tilt was expressed two decades ago by Matt Damon during a famous scene in Good Will Hunting. Damon, playing a math genius being recruited by the NSA, launches into a scathing riff about the agency serving the interests of government and corporate evil rather than ordinary people. Sure, he could break a code for the NSA and reveal the location of a rebel group in North Africa or the Middle East, but the result would be a U.S. bombing attack in which “1,500 people that I never met, never had a problem with, get killed.” He turns down the offer.

In recent years, two developments have helped make hacking for the government a lot more attractive than hacking for yourself. First, the Department of Justice has cracked down on freelance hacking, whether it be altruistic or malignant. If the DOJ doesn’t like the way you hack, you are going to jail. Meanwhile, hackers have been warmly invited to deploy their transgressive impulses in service to the homeland, because the NSA and other federal agencies have turned themselves into licensed hives of breaking into other people’s computers. For many, it’s a techno sandbox of irresistible delights, according to Gabriella Coleman, a professor at McGill University who studies hackers. “The NSA is a very exciting place for hackers because you have unlimited resources, you have some of the best talent in the world, whether it’s cryptographers or mathematicians or hackers,” she said. “It is just too intellectually exciting not to go there.”

Revealingly, one of the documents leaked by Snowden and published by The Intercept last year was a classified interview with a top NSA hacker (not the Lamb) who exulted that his job was awesome because “we do things that you can’t do anywhere else in the country … at least not legally. We are gainfully employed to hack computers owned by al-Qa’ida!” Asked about the kind of people he works with at the NSA, he replied, “Hackers, geeks, nerds … There’s an annual event for hackers in Las Vegas called DEF CON, and many of us attend. When there, we feel as though we are among our bretheren! [sic] We all have a similar mindset of wanting to tear things apart, to dig in, to see how things work.”

In 2012, Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director at the time, even attended DEF CON wearing blue jeans and a black T-shirt that bore the logo of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an anti-surveillance organization that is beloved by hackers and other good citizens of the world. To coincide with Alexander’s visit, the NSA had created a special webpage to recruit the hackers at DEF CON. “If you have a few, shall we say, indiscretions in your past, don’t be alarmed,” the webpage stated. “You shouldn’t automatically assume you won’t be hired.” Alexander’s personal pitch was even more direct: “In this room right here is the talent we need.”

If you are willing to become a patriot hacker, Uncle Sam wants you.

Illustration: Miguel Santamarina for The Intercept

As a teenager, the Lamb was a devout Christian who attended church two or three times a week, yet he also participated in online forums for Satanists and atheists. He wanted to learn what others believed and why they believed it, and he wanted to hear their responses to questions he raised. If his beliefs could not withstand challenges from opposing ones, they might not be worth keeping.

“As a Christian, I believe the Bible, and one of the things it says is if you seek the truth, you should find it,” he told me. “If I started to come across facts that contradicted what I believed and contradicted the way that I thought about things, I had to be open to confronting them and determining how I would integrate them into my life and my thought system.”

Before he became a hacker, the Lamb had the restless spirit of one. After high school, he attended a Christian university for a year but dropped out and joined the military as a linguist. He was assigned to the NSA, and although he told me his computer skills were modest at the time, he was intrigued by the mysteries inside the machines. “I started doing some basic computer training, like ‘Oh, here’s how computers talk to each other and network’ and that sort of stuff,” he said. “I enjoyed that far more than trying to maintain a language that I rarely used.”

He devoured books on computers and experimented on his own time, using an application called Wireshark to see how network data was moving to and from his own computer. He picked up a bit of programming knowledge, and he asked agency veterans for tips. As he wrote in one of his memos, “If you want to learn crazy new things … why not walk around NSA, find people in offices that do things you find interesting, and talk to them about how they do what they do.”

Screenshot from NSA document

Like Snowden, he did not need a formal education to succeed. Snowden, after all, dropped out of high school and mastered computers through self-education. As an NSA contractor, he rose to a position that gave him access to broad swaths of the agency’s networks. While Snowden was a systems administrator, the Lamb became an expert in network analysis and was well-versed in the crucial trick of shaping traffic from one place to another — for instance, sending it from an ISP in a foreign country to an NSA server.

The Lamb’s work was important, but his memos are remarkably irreverent, even cocky. I’ve read a fair number of NSA documents, and not one contains as much hacker and internet lingo as his; he used words like “skillz” and “internetz” and “ZOMG!” and phrases like “pwn the network” and “Dude! Map all the networks!!!” Some of what he wrote is just cheerily impudent, like the opening line of one memo: “Happy Friday my esteemed and valued intelligence Community colleagues!” Another memo began, “Welcome back, comrade!”

While poking gentle fun at the government hackers he worked with, the Lamb dismissed the amateur hackers on the outside. He identified himself and his highly trained colleagues at the NSA as a breed apart — a superior breed, much in the way that soldiers look down on weekend paintballers. Perhaps this shouldn’t be altogether surprising, because arrogance is one of the unfortunate hallmarks of the male-dominated hacker culture. At the NSA, this hubris can perhaps serve as an ethical lubricant that eases the task of hacking other people: They are not as special as you are, they do not have the magical powers you possess, they are targets first and humans second.

As the Lamb wrote in one of his memos, “When I first went to Blackhat/Defcon, it was with the wide-eyed anticipation of ‘I’m going to go listen to all of the talks that I can, soak up all of the information possible, and become a supar-1337-haxxor.’ What a let-down of an experience that was. You find the most interesting topics and briefings, wait in lines to get a seat, and find yourself straining your ears to listen to someone that has basically nothing new to say. Most of the talks get hyped up exponentially past any amount of substance they actually provide.”

When I asked the Lamb where he was in the hierarchy of hackers at the NSA, he just smiled and said, “I got to the point where more people would ask me questions than I asked other people questions.” He would not delve into the classified specifics of his job — he despises Snowden for leaking classified information — but I knew a lot through his memos.

Although network analysis, the Lamb’s area of expertise, is interesting from a technical perspective, he was one step removed from the most challenging and menacing type of government hacking — executing finely tuned attacks that infiltrate individual computers. Nonetheless, he offered this characterization of his NSA work: “They were just ridiculously cool projects that I’ll never forget.” One of the quandaries of technology is that “cool” does not necessarily mean “ethical.” Surveillance tools that are regarded as breakthroughs can be used to spy on innocent people as well as terrorists. This is a key part of the debate on the NSA, the concern that its formidable powers are being used, or can be used, to undermine privacy, freedom, and democracy.

The Lamb’s memos on cool ways to hunt sysadmins triggered a strong reaction when I wrote about them in 2014 with my colleague Ryan Gallagher. The memos explained how the NSA tracks down the email and Facebook accounts of systems administrators who oversee computer networks. After plundering their accounts, the NSA can impersonate the admins to get into their computer networks and pilfer the data flowing through them. As the Lamb wrote, “sys admins generally are not my end target. My end target is the extremist/terrorist or government official that happens to be using the network … who better to target than the person that already has the ‘keys to the kingdom’?”

Another of his NSA memos, “Network Shaping 101,” used Yemen as a theoretical case study for secretly redirecting the entirety of a country’s internet traffic to NSA servers. The presentation, consisting of a PowerPoint slideshow, was offbeat at times, with a reference to throwing confetti in the air when a hack worked and jokey lines like, “The following section could also be renamed the ‘I’m pulling my hair out in the fetal position while screaming “Why didn’t it work?!”’ section.” The Lamb also scribbled a hand-drawn diagram about network shaping that included a smiley face in the middle next to the phrase, “YEAH!!! MAKE DATA HAPPEN!” The diagram and slideshow were both classified as top secret.

NSA diagram on network shaping.

His memos are boastful, even cackling. At the end of one of the sysadmin memos, the Lamb wrote, “Current mood: scheming,” and at the end of another, “Current mood: devious.” He also listed “juche-licious” as one of his moods, ironically referring to the official ideology of North Korea. Another memo he wrote, “Tracking Targets Through Proxies & Anonymizers,” impishly noted that the use of identity-obscuring tools like Tor “generally makes for sad analysts” in the intelligence community; this was followed by a sad face emoji. The tone of his classified writing was consistent with some of his social media posts — the Lamb’s attitude, in public as well as in private, was often outspoken and brash.

What if the shoe was on the other foot, however? When I wrote about the sysadmin memos in 2014, I wondered how their author would feel if someone used the same devious rationale to hack his computer and his life. Nearly two years later, I had the chance to find out.

“If I turn the tables on you,” I asked the Lamb, “and say, OK, you’re a target for all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons. How do you feel about being a target and that kind of justification being used to justify getting all of your credentials and the keys to your kingdom?”

The Lamb smiled. “There is no real safe, sacred ground on the internet,” he replied. “Whatever you do on the internet is an attack surface of some sort and is just something that you live with. Any time that I do something on the internet, yeah, that is on the back of my mind. Anyone from a script kiddie to some random hacker to some other foreign intelligence service, each with their different capabilities — what could they be doing to me?”

He seemed to be putting the blame for NSA attacks on the victims — if they were too dimwitted to protect themselves from hunters like him, it was their fault. “People don’t want to think about being targets on the internet, in spite of the fact that at this point in the game, everybody is,” he added. “Every country spies.”

He was dead serious, no smiles any longer. “As much as we’d like to say we will all beat our swords into plowshares and become a peaceful people, it’s not going to happen,” he continued. “Intelligence agencies around the world are being asked questions by their governments, and government officials don’t want to hear, ‘That’s hard to solve.’ They just say, ‘Can you solve this and can you get me the intel I’m asking for?’ Which is nation agnostic, whether that’s the NSA, the FSB, the PLA or whoever.”

The Lamb’s political ideology evoked the cold-blooded realpolitik of Henry Kissinger. There is the idyllic digital world we would like to live in, there is the dog-eat-dog digital world we actually live in — and the Lamb, as I understood it, was intensely focused on winning in the latter.

“You know, the situation is what it is,” he said. “There are protocols that were designed years ago before anybody had any care about security, because when they were developed, nobody was foreseeing that they would be taken advantage of. … A lot of people on the internet seem to approach the problem [with the attitude of] ‘I’m just going to walk naked outside of my house and hope that nobody looks at me.’ From a security perspective, is that a good way to go about thinking? No, horrible … There are good ways to be more secure on the internet. But do most people use Tor? No. Do most people use Signal? No. Do most people use insecure things that most people can hack? Yes. Is that a bash against the intelligence community that people use stuff that’s easily exploitable? That’s a hard argument for me to make.”

But it wasn’t a hard argument for me to make, so I tried. Back in the 1990s, in the early days of the web, the uses and hopes for the internet were thought to be joyous and non-commercial. The web would let us talk to one another and would decentralize power and revolutionize the world in good ways. Those were the years when the Lamb spent hours and hours in chatrooms with Satanists and atheists — just the sort of connect-us-to-each-other activity that made everyone so excited about the future. At the time, few people thought the internet would become, as Bruce Schneier describes it, a surveillance platform. So I asked whether the Lamb felt conflicted, as Snowden did, working for an organization that turned the web further and further away from its original potential as a global platform for speaking and thinking freely.

He responded by noting that he is, by nature, a defiant type and attracted to hard problems. That’s how, without a lot of formal instruction, he became an NSA hacker — he was curious about how computers worked and he wanted to figure them out. “Technically challenging things are just inherently interesting to me,” he said. “If you tell me, ‘This can’t be done,’ I’m going to try and find a way to do it.”

I mentioned that lots of people, including Snowden, are now working on the problem of how to make the internet more secure, yet he seemed to do the opposite at the NSA by trying to find ways to track and identify people who use Tor and other anonymizers. Would he consider working on the other side of things? He wouldn’t rule it out, he said, but dismally suggested the game was over as far as having a liberating and safe internet, because our laptops and smartphones will betray us no matter what we do with them.

“There’s the old adage that the only secure computer is one that is turned off, buried in a box ten feet underground, and never turned on,” he said. “From a user perspective, someone trying to find holes by day and then just live on the internet by night, there’s the expectation [that] if somebody wants to have access to your computer bad enough, they’re going to get it. Whether that’s an intelligence agency or a cybercrimes syndicate, whoever that is, it’s probably going to happen.”

The Lamb was comfortable with the side he joined in the surveillance wars, and this sets him apart from the most common stereotypes of the men and women who devote their lives to spying on others.

Spies who do nothing but eavesdrop, slipping into computers and conversations without a trace, have a reputation in popular culture of being troubled in ways that conventional spies are not. Think of Gene Hackman in The Conversation, or Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others — these surveillers are haunted, as it seems they should be. Conventional spies are seen as journeying into hostile lands and committing heroic or devious acts; they are men and women of action, not thought. But the people who watch, listen, or hack are not as distracted by danger or adrenaline. They mostly labor in tranquility, in temperature-controlled offices without windows, risking bodily harm no worse than carpal tunnel syndrome, and they have an abundance of time to think about the lurking that is their occupation and the people on whom they practice it.

I have a bias against the watchers, I suppose. I have been concerned about the bureaucracies of surveillance since the 1980s, when I was a student in the Soviet Union and felt like hunted prey. The telephone in the dreary lobby of my dormitory on the banks of the Neva River in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) was assumed to be bugged, and if the KGB’s devices weren’t working, the dezhurnaya who sat nearby was sure to be listening. This was my anti-surveillance Rosebud, I guess. When I visited Russian friends, I stayed silent as I walked in their ill-lit stairwells, so that the accent of my Russian would not give away the fact a foreigner was visiting them. The walls had ears. This was one of the great contrasts between the Soviet Union and America, where I could speak to my friends without worrying about the government listening.

The Soviet Union is long gone, but in 2016 we live under the specter of far more surveillance than anything the KGB could have dreamed of with its rudimentary bugs and fearful informers. Not just government surveillance — law enforcement can easily obtain our phone and internet records with a warrant from the nearly always compliant courts — but corporate surveillance, too. It’s not just Google and Facebook that might know more details about our lives and friends than the KGB could have imagined in its most feverish dreams of information dominance, but even Zipcar and Amazon.

There are precautions one can take, and I did that with the Lamb. When we had our video chat, I used a computer that had been wiped clean of everything except its operating system and essential applications. Afterward, it was wiped clean again. My concern was that the Lamb might use the session to obtain data from or about the computer I was using; there are a lot of things he might have tried, if he was in a scheming mood. At the end of our three hours together, I mentioned to him that I had taken these precautions—and he approved.

“That’s fair,” he said. “I’m glad you have that appreciation. … From a perspective of a journalist who has access to classified information, it would be remiss to think you’re not a target of foreign intelligence services.”

He was telling me the U.S. government should be the least of my worries. He was trying to help me.

Documents published with this article:

• Tracking Targets Through Proxies & Anonymizers
• Network Shaping 101
• Shaping Diagram
• I Hunt Sys Admins (first published in 2014)

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The post He Was a Hacker for the NSA and He Was Willing to Talk. I Was Willing to Listen. appeared first on The Intercept.

The men and women

The website, SIDtoday, started modestly. Its inaugural article blandly described what it called “the analyst cockpit,” a portal for intelligence experts to access their data. The following day, which was April Fools’, SIDtoday posted an offbeat story about practical jokes, recounting how the Germans in World War II built a decoy air base, complete with planes, out of wood; the kicker, according to SIDtoday, was that the British realized the base was a decoy and dropped a wooden bomb on it. (Online fact-checkers have since declared the story a “well-traveled anecdote” of dubious accuracy.)

The April Fools’ article was at the frivolous end of the SIDtoday spectrum. Because it trafficked in “top-secret” information, SIDtoday lived in a classified environment that, over the years, allowed the agency’s spies to explain to each other, in a non-technical way, a surprising amount about what they were doing, how they were doing it, and why. In the first nine years of SIDtoday’s life, more than 4,500 stories were posted on the website, a gold mine of often mundane, occasionally revealing articles that made the agency human and comprehensible in a way that technical documents could not.

U.S. Marines pass a sign pointing the way to Baghdad as they continue their march to the capital, March 25, 2003, in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah.

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Functioning like a small-town newspaper, the staff of SIDtoday published question-and-answer articles with senior and mid-level officials who described their jobs and their motivations for doing them. Some articles were firsthand descriptions of important missions, as in the case of an NSA employee who went to Baghdad right after the Iraqi capital came under American control. “I rode the whole way in a five-ton truck, with easy access to thermite grenades that could be used to destroy our classified cargo in the event of an ambush,” he wrote at the end of 2003. Another story, by SID’s chief of staff, described how the agency helped with the rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch during the invasion (his article is included in the first batch of SIDtoday articles).

SIDtoday even assembled a stable of columnists over the course of its first nine years, contributors who wrote as a sideline to their day jobs at the agency. One column, called “Ask Zelda!,” was akin to “Dear Abby” for the intelligence community, written by a mid-level supervisor at the NSA who answered questions from readers, including one about what should be worn to the office on hot summer days. “Shorts and flip-flops don’t exactly convey the image of a fierce SIGINT warrior,” Zelda noted. Another column, “SIGINT Philosopher,” delved into the ethics of surveillance (reliably coming out on the favorable side) and was written by a language analyst who described a personal epiphany that came during a polygraph exam. “Signal v. Noise” explored the difficulties involved in collecting large amounts of data, while “SIGINT Curmudgeon” was written by a longtimer who waxed nostalgic about the good old days of eavesdropping. (None of these columns were up and running in the initial batch of SIDtoday just released by The Intercept, but I have written previously about “Ask Zelda!” and the “SIGINT Philosopher.” In both cases, The Intercept simultaneously published copies of the original columns.)

One of the cultural revelations in the archives of SIDtoday is the corporate language that was routinely used. Intelligence reports delivered to other government agencies were described as “products,” and there was a category called the “Counterterrorism Product Line.” Government agencies that received these reports were known as “customers,” and the NSA has an entire division called the “Customer Relationship Directorate.” One of the SIDtoday articles published today was titled “Dynamic Methods of Interaction With New and Existing Customers,” and it referred to “product line leaders” at the agency who created “customer support plans” that included details on what “each customer needs.” The customers mentioned in the article included the Department of Homeland Security, Secret Service, Missile Defense Agency, and Federal Reserve. The article was written by an official whose title was “acting chief, customer gateway.”

The SIDtoday articles also convey what officials at the agency were reading in their off-hours. Some articles included references to popular authors like the travel writer Bill Bryson, the New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell, and mid-century economist Herbert Simon. One of the articles released today was an enthusiastic review of the Neal Stephenson sci-fi novel Cryptonomicon, which was described in the article (written by a member of the communications team in the Signals Intelligence Directorate) as “an enthralling work that proves to be as much of a history lesson as an eye-opening thriller.”

The articles, almost uniformly glowing about the NSA, serve as reminders that the men and women who surveil the world are not machines; they have good days and bad days, jokes and tears, and strange tales about their lives. A two-part article from 2005, “‘Odd Jobs’ Before NSA,” listed unconventional occupations that some employees had before joining the world’s largest electronic spying organization. The prior jobs included being a craps dealer in Las Vegas, a developer of crossword puzzles for the New York Times, a professional baseball player in the Atlanta Braves farm system, a nanny for the daughter of Sunny von Bülow’s first husband, and a “mosquito bite test count subject” who was paid to visit forests and swamps to take off his shirt for a minute to assess the local mosquito population.

SIDtoday even offers a window into the hopes and wide-eyed wonder of the agency’s youngest workers, its summer interns. The title of one intern’s article for SIDtoday in 2004 was “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” while another article in 2011 recounted that on their first day of work, a boisterous group of interns stepped into an elevator and got a quick and stern lecture from “an older gentleman” who warned that “the only thing you need to know is that we don’t talk in the elevators, and the extroverts look at other people’s shoes.” The interns silently shared the same reaction — “What have we gotten ourselves into?”

Related Stories:

• Snowden Archive — The SIDtoday Files
• The Intercept Is Broadening Access to the Snowden Archive. Here’s Why
• The Most Intriguing Spy Stories From 166 Internal NSA Reports
• NSA Closely Involved in Guantánamo Interrogations, Documents Show

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The post What It’s Like to Read the NSA’s Newspaper for Spies appeared first on The Intercept.

Actually, that last bit is made up; Trump hasn’t talked about the Espionage Act. Instead, the Obama administration has used the draconian 1917 law to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. Under the cover of the Espionage Act and other laws, the administration has secretly obtained the emails and phone records of various reporters, and declared one of them — James Rosen of Fox News — a potential “co-conspirator” with his government source. Another reporter, James Risen of the New York Times, faced a jail sentence unless he revealed a government source (which he refused to do).

Obama has warned of the imminent perils of a Trump presidency, but on the key issue of freedom of the press, which is intimately tied to the ability of officials to talk to journalists, his own administration has established a dangerous precedent for Trump — or any future occupant of the Oval Office — to use one of the most punitive laws of the land against some of the most courageous and necessary people we have. One section of the Espionage Act even allows for the death penalty.

Obama’s gift to Trump was unintentionally highlighted in a speech the president delivered last week at a ceremony to honor the winner of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Journalism. Obama lamented the financial challenges facing the journalism industry and lauded the assembled reporters and editors for the hard and vital work they do. He made no mention of the ways in which his administration is making that job even harder, however, and that omission prompted the winner of the prize, ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis, to gently note, “That does not get him off the hook for his administration taking so long to respond to our FOIAs.”

Two years ago, Eben Moglen, a law professor at Columbia University, gave a series of lectures in which he discussed the idea of “fastening the procedures of totalitarianism on the substance of democratic society.” Moglen’s lectures were mostly concerned with surveillance by the National Security Agency — the title of his talks was “Snowden and the Future” — but his idea applies to other procedures the U.S. government has recently become fond of. Few are more important than targeting whistleblowers and journalists, and Obama has begun the fastening process.

The Release, a new film about Stephen Kim, directed by Stephen Maing.

It’s a maddening situation that becomes all the more maddening when you think of the lives of the leakers and whistleblowers the Department of Justice has ruined. I have previously written at length about two of them, Jeffrey Sterling of the CIA and Stephen Kim of the State Department. A new documentary about Kim, directed by Steve Maing and released this week by Field of Vision, the film division of The Intercept, powerfully shows the personal hell of living under Obama’s crackdown. After serving a prison sentence for discussing a classified report on North Korea with Fox’s James Rosen, Kim now finds it impossible to return to his old life. Although he has advanced degrees from Harvard and Yale, he cannot get a foreign policy job because of the taint of being a convicted leaker. Kim now describes himself as “homeless, penniless, family-less,” and adds, “I cannot go back to what I was. That person is gone.”

Leakers and whistleblowers are not just categories of people — they are actual people with names and careers and children and lives that have been unjustly crushed. David Petraeus, the former four-star general and CIA director, leaked far more classified data to his biographer-girlfriend than Sterling or Kim or John Kiriakou, and lied to the FBI about it. Petraeus, however, was let off with a misdemeanor plea bargain, because if you are powerful you can do as you like. That deal is another gift to Trump or any menace-in-waiting. The president has set a precedent that says it’s okay to literally give a get-out-of-jail card to your friends.

Now that we live in the shadow of a political era that goes by two words — President Trump — it’s time for Obama to disavow the precedent he has set. The next time he gives a speech on the importance of journalism and free speech, he should admit he has made a terrible mistake and pardon the people who were wrongly prosecuted, including Manning, Kim, Sterling, Kiriakou, and Thomas Drake. He should ask their forgiveness. Obama does not have the power to stop us from electing a terrible president, but he can limit the damage that one can do.

Related:

• Jeffrey Sterling Took on the CIA — and Lost Everything
• Stephen Kim Spoke to a Reporter. Now He’s in Jail. This Is His Story.
• Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System for Leaks
• Watch — “The Surrender“

The post Obama’s Gift to Donald Trump: A Policy of Cracking Down on Journalists and Their Sources appeared first on The Intercept.

Karadzic became the leader of Bosnian Serbs in the 1990s and made history in dark ways, but the latest twist, which occurred today, is unexpectedly bright — he has been convicted, after a long and open trial in The Hague, of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, and sentenced to 40 years in prison. This outcome is bright for reasons beyond the satisfaction of justice in the Balkans. At the moment, it might seem far-fetched to imagine that U.S. political and military officials will be held to account for torture and other war crimes they approved, condoned, or bore command responsibility for in the post-9/11 era. But it was even more unlikely in the 1990s to think that the hand of justice — the justice of a fair trial, not a mob’s noose or a precision-guided missile — would get close to Karadzic and his prime collaborators.

Guess what? Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav leader who masterminded the carnage in the Balkans, was ousted from power in 2000 and extradited to an international tribunal at The Hague. His trial was underway in 2006 when he died of a heart attack. Ratko Mladic, the military leader of Bosnian Serb forces, was extradited to The Hague in 2011 and a verdict in his case is expected soon. The unthinkable happened to the untouchable. And it has happened to others who were brought to The Hague for trial, including, just a few days ago, the leader of a Congolese rebel group that carried out a campaign of murder and pillage in the Central African Republic.

Many valid criticisms can be made of the war-crimes trials that have been conducted in the Netherlands and elsewhere. They provide victor’s justice with an international fig leaf; they are often weighted against malefactors whose skin colors are not white; they have passed over guilty parties from countries of geopolitical import. These are all true. Yet these trials and others have shown that in some cases — and it bears repeating, in cases that meet the particular requirements of the imperial age in which we live — the impossible can be accomplished.

FROM 1992 until 1995, Karadzic led the Bosnian Serbs who introduced the phrase “ethnic cleansing” into the lexicon of modern Europe, murderously pushing non-Serbs out of large swaths of Bosnia and besieging Sarajevo and other cities. At the time of his crimes and even afterward, he seemed immune to punishment — because he possessed bodyguards and protectors in Belgrade, and because the fabled international community didn’t care that much about bringing him to justice. Yet years later, justice caught up with him.

In 2014, President Obama made the headline-grabbing admission, “We tortured some folks.” Yet his long-overdue statement was not followed by the kind of legal consequences that have been required of other states and individuals that violated the laws of war. After all, it would not have been enough for the successors of Karadzic or Milosevic to simply admit that war crimes were committed and move on without trials. While a handful of low-level violators have been punished in the United States — some soldiers involved in abuses at Abu Ghraib have gone to prison, for instance — their commanders, whether with stars on their shoulders or tassels on their loafers, have lived unmolested by U.S. courts. And, for the most part, they have been honored for their service. (Here’s a video of President George W. Bush awarding a Medal of Freedom to, among others, CIA Director George Tenet, who oversaw the agency’s black sites and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”)

Many of the people who survived Karadzic’s crimes are long dead, as are many of the people who wrote about them. With this timeline in mind, it could well be a quarter century or more before a legal reckoning occurs for everything the U.S. government has done since al Qaeda terrorists hijacked four civilian jetliners on September 11, 2001. Today, for instance, Henry Kissinger enjoys the company and adulation of mainstream politicians and journalists, even as we continue to learn more about the graveyards filled a half century ago by his words and winks over Cambodia, Argentina, and Bangladesh. Kissinger is in his 90s and too hallowed in America to be affronted by a trial, so the best we can hope for might be the lacerating words of Bernie Sanders, who said in a debate with Hillary Clinton last month, “Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country. I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend.”

Of course, those were just the words of a presidential candidate, not the verdict of a court or of history, but it was something. The people who believed that Karadzic would never face justice now have something to celebrate, too. We should keep that in mind when we are told that we tortured some folks, but nobody should be held responsible for it.

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The post What the Guilty Verdict of Radovan Karadzic Tells Us About War Crimes After 9/11 appeared first on The Intercept.

In 13 Hours, Bay displays a fetish for fake blood and heads that explode like watermelons when waves of bad guys are given the tap-tap of eternal sleep from the hot barrels of American assault rifles. Are the repetitive scenes of mowed-down attackers a job-creation program for the hundreds of dark-haired extras dressed as ready-for-paradise militiamen? Was Bay suffering from the delusion that every attacker killed on screen would translate into a vote for an Oscar? The true story of 13 Hours, in Bay-worthy broad strokes, is this: Six private military contractors who work for the CIA try to stave off attacks by Libyan militants on two U.S. compounds in Benghazi in 2012. Yet Bay’s movie feels like a hybrid war/zombie film, The Green Berets meets Night of the Living Dead.

I went into the screening with the distinct premonition that I would emerge in anger after seeing another maddeningly effective piece of Hollywood war propaganda. That’s how I felt last year after seeing American Sniper, a surprise blockbuster directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy sniper Chris Kyle. In American Sniper, no one asked why Iraqis were shooting at Kyle and the rest of the U.S. military in the first place (hint: we invaded and occupied their country and tortured some of them at prisons like Abu Ghraib). Despite such errors of context, American Sniper was a formidable movie. It was really human and stuck with the audience. Much credit goes to Eastwood, a skilled director, and Cooper, a charismatic actor. His thespian counterpart in 13 Hours is John Krasinski, the nice guy from The Office. As it turns out, Krasinski wields a stapler and a pun far more convincingly than an M-4.

As far as propaganda goes, 13 Hours is mercifully thin. If we are lucky, it will fade away as quickly as the fake smoke from one of its many explosions. But the film is getting a big publicity push and might accidentally be taken seriously. Bay’s team is trying to work the behind-the-scenes alchemy that makes reviews by recovering war correspondents like me utterly irrelevant, not to mention film critics who don’t know an IED from LAX. 13 Hours is lining up endorsements from the taste-makers who really count, celebrities like Carmelo Anthony and Tiger Woods, who are among the sports figures who have attended advance screenings and tweeted about it. (Take that, Pauline Kael.)

13 Hours has a number of political problems that go beyond the one most people are likely to notice — the question of whether Hillary Clinton, secretary of state at the time, should be blamed for what happened in Benghazi. The film doesn’t actually mention Clinton by name. The short answer to the Clinton question is that everyone in the government should be blamed for what happened, including the Republicans who for years have bled the State Department of the funds it needs to provide proper security for its overseas facilities.

John Krasinski, James Badge Dale, and director Michael Bay on the set of “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.”

Photo: Christian Black/Paramount Pictures

13 Hours, like American Sniper, is allergic to context. American Sniper presented Iraqis as sub-human, and that’s pretty much the same treatment Libyans get in 13 Hours, which includes the now-obligatory shot of Muslim fighters praying next to their AK-47s. Yet Bay’s film makes an additional error — it depicts private military contractors as heroes. In the very particular case of what happened in Benghazi in 2012 on September 11 and 12, that’s correct — the men who fought to save Ambassador Christopher Stevens, who died in the attacks along with a mid-level State Department employee, were brave. Two of the military contractors died in combat that night.

The deeper truth — which doesn’t diminish the real-life efforts of the men portrayed in the film — is that private military contractors have been a pox on America’s post-9/11 warfare. Particularly in Iraq, mercenaries hired by the U.S. government operated with near impunity, shooting and killing civilians, and engendered hatred on all sides. Even U.S. troops were fed up with them. A number of times, when I was embedded in Iraq, U.S. soldiers criticized the highly paid mercenaries as irresponsible troublemakers whose excesses further diminished the reputation of all U.S. forces. The most notorious example was the killings at Nisour Square in 2007, when gunmen working for Blackwater killed 17 civilians and injured 24.

Outsourcing warfare to mercenaries leads to all kinds of perverse outcomes. This was true in Benghazi too, though that story is not told in 13 Hours or the book it’s based on. For instance, one of the contractors killed in Libya, Glen Doherty, was working for the CIA on a short-term contract as a “direct independent contractor.” He had formed his own company for this purpose, called Icarus, Inc., and had been required by the CIA to buy an insurance policy. But according to a lawsuit filed by his mother and other relatives (settled last year in a confidential agreement), the policy, bought from an insurer recommended by the CIA, was nearly worthless and the insurer refused to pay death benefits because Doherty had no children or spouse. Even the contractors are cheated in the new American way of war.

13 Hours also fails to mention one of the strange reasons why the CIA contractors in Benghazi were called into combat. The defense of a State Department diplomatic compound in the city had been outsourced to a little-known military contractor, Blue Mountain Group, which had hired a small number of underpaid and ill-trained Libyans. When the attack began, the Libyan contractors mostly disappeared, along with the local militia that was supposed to provide another layer of protection. The bizarre upshot: A group of contractors hired by the CIA was called in to save the day partly because a group of contractors hired by the State Department had run away. It’s a bizarre twist. Maybe someone will make a movie about it one day.

Related:

• How Clint Eastwood Ignores History in ‘American Sniper’
• Oscars Make History, so Hollywood’s War Stories Need to Be True
• Benghazi Film by Michael Bay Could Be Next “American Sniper” But Let’s Hope Not
• How the Makers of “Zero Dark Thirty” Seduced the CIA With Fake Earrings
• The CIA and the Myths of the Bin Laden Raid

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The post “13 Hours” Splashes Blood Across the Screen and Misses Real Story of Benghazi appeared first on The Intercept.

Of course the breach occurred in the latest episode of Homeland, so nobody is going to jail, unless manufacturing an implausible plotline is a federal crime. But the scenario that played out between Saul Berenson and Carrie Mathison on Sunday constitutes a welcome repudiation in popular culture of an abusive law, because Saul and Carrie are the heroes in this show, and heroes don’t do things that merit a 35-year prison sentence. While Homeland tends to be as reactionary as it is enjoyable, the latest twist puts Saul and perhaps Carrie into the same Espionage Act box as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Thomas Drake, Stephen Kim and John Kiriakou, all of whom have been charged under the law.

Yes, that means Saul Berenson is our new Edward Snowden, with the caveat that a compliant Saul was taken into custody in Berlin at the end of the episode, while the usually long arm of American law enforcement has not been able to touch Snowden, who lives in Russia. I wouldn’t be surprised if the show’s producers and writers, whose prior work is not infused with enthusiasm for left or libertarian causes, make the argument in a future episode that leaking classified documents for noble reasons is laudable only if you face the music like Saul. But let’s put that aside, because according to the Department of Justice, whether or not you surrender doesn’t lessen the impact of the dastardly things you have done to shred national security.

Although Sunday’s episode did not mention the Espionage Act, here’s how it comes into play. As the episode neared its end, Saul became convinced by Carrie, who herself is something of a fugitive, that the Russians had infiltrated the CIA. Carrie told Saul that she needs to see a cache of secret files that will give her the clues to expose the Kremlin’s perfidy. Carrie is of course no longer at the CIA, but once Saul came under suspicion as a turncoat for the Israelis and was abruptly deprived of his clearance, he surreptitiously accessed the agency’s computer system, downloaded the files, and then gave them to Carrie via the dashing billionaire she works for.

(Don’t blame me if you’re having a hard time following the plot, and please be thankful I haven’t mentioned the story line that involves a bullet-riddled Quinn trying to kill himself to save Carrie and being rescued at the last second by a Good Samaritan who takes him home and gives him a transfusion of his own blood but unfortunately does so at the Berlin apartment building where a just-released-from-prison Islamic radical is planning a series of bomb plots that Quinn overhears, leading Quinn to kill the radical while groaning and staggering from the septic bullet wound in his side. This is Homeland at its terrible best.)

It’s going to be instructive to see how the rest of the season deals with what Saul and Carrie have just done. I think it’s safe to assume they will be exonerated for exposing, through the leaked files, the Russian mole (or moles) — one of whom, as we already know, is the head of station in Berlin. But the fact is that Saul and Carrie have potentially violated a couple of sections of the Espionage Act, which does not allow for good intentions as an excuse for leaking classified documents. Carrie might be on the hook, in addition to Saul, because the U.S. government has intimated that it might be illegal to ask someone to leak classified documents.

Of course the law is one thing and its application by the Obama administration is another. David Petraeus, the former general and CIA director, shared with his biographer (and then-girlfriend) several diaries filled with secret information, but he got just a slap on the wrist, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified material. Will Saul and Carrie receive the Petraeus treatment from the Homeland equivalent of the Department of Justice — that is, the writers’ room? I hope so, if only to demonstrate that leaking secret documents in the public interest is an act that deserves the gratitude of society. Or an Emmy.

The post Homeland Goes Rogue Against the Espionage Act appeared first on The Intercept.

The post Tweets From Hell: How Peter Bouckaert Shares Refugees’ Hope and Despair appeared first on The Intercept.

From the moment it premiered in 2012, the film by Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal about the hunt for Osama bin Laden has been criticized as pro-torture propaganda. According to its many detractors, the film embraced the discredited notion that torture by CIA interrogators made Al Qaeda members talk about the whereabouts of their leader. It subsequently was revealed that Bigelow and Boal had received an unusual amount of access to CIA officials who had a keen interest in peddling the virtues of waterboarding, and this spawned a cottage industry of investigations and articles.

Vice News has added to the spicy pile with a 5,000-word article by Jason Leopold and Ky Henderson that draws on more than 100 pages of internal CIA documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. According to the documents, at least 10 CIA officers met Bigelow and Boal at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as at hotels and restaurants in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. In addition, the CIA director at the time, Leon Panetta, met Bigelow at a dinner in Washington and, soon after that, shared a table with her and Boal at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. It also turns out that Boal read his script over the phone to CIA public affairs officials on four separate days in the fall of 2011.

But the biggest takeaway from these documents is that even as the CIA turned Bigelow and Boal into its willing propagandists, the filmmakers were turning the CIA into star-gazing dupes; the seduction went both ways. Bigelow and Boal emerge in these documents as excellent co-opters of the nation’s toughest spies — and it didn’t take much for them to do that.

Bigelow and Boal visited CIA headquarters (an officer recalled having to cover up classified material on one occasion), but the meetings soon moved off campus to “avoid jealousy” about who was getting “face time” with the famous duo, according to the CIA documents obtained by Vice. For instance, one CIA officer met Boal at his suite in the luxury Jefferson Hotel in Washington D.C. and dined with him at the hotel as well as at a nearby restaurant, Citronelle, where a slab of ribeye cost $39. Not long afterwards, Bigelow met that same officer in her accommodations at the Ritz-Carlton in Georgetown.

The seduction was bi-coastal. A CIA officer met Boal in Hollywood for a meal and then drove to a beach house in Malibu to talk with Bigelow. Boal gave the officer a bottle of Tequila and boasted it was worth “several hundred dollars” (although when someone at the CIA checked, the highest listed price was $169.99). The officer who had met Boal at the Jefferson Hotel also had dinner with him and Bigelow at the members-only Soho House in L.A. and later told investigators she had “developed a friendship” with the filmmakers. It had not been terribly expensive for Bigelow and Boal to develop these friendships, however — Bigelow had given the officer a set of what the director described as “black Tahitian pearl earrings” that, it turned out, were painted black and were so cheap they weren’t worth the cost of an appraisal.

The documents show that auditors at the CIA referred the matter to the Department of Justice for possible criminal action against Boal and Bigelow for bribing public officials. Prosecutors took no action. To date, Zero Dark Thirty has earned more than $130 million in worldwide ticket sales.

Read also:

The CIA and the Myths of the Bin Laden Raid
Don’t Trust Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty and Why It’s So Important to Rebut Claims That Torture Works
Zero Dark Thirty: CIA hagiography, pernicious propaganda

Photo caption: Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal, by Rajnish Katyal/Hindustan Times via Getty Images.

The post How the Makers of “Zero Dark Thirty” Seduced the CIA with Fake Earrings appeared first on The Intercept.

That was the question the NSA asked its workforce in a memo soliciting applications for an in-house ethicist who would write a philosophically minded column about signals intelligence. The column, which would be posted on a classified network at the NSA, should be absorbing and original, the memo said, asking applicants to submit a sample to show they had what it takes to be the “Socrates of SIGINT.”

In 2012, the column was given to an analyst in the Signals Intelligence Directorate who wrote that initially he opposed the government watching everyone but came around to total surveillance after a polygraph exam did not go well. In a turn of events that was half-Sartre and half-Blade Runner, he explained that he was sure he failed the polygraph because the examiner did not know enough about his life to understand why at times the needle jumped.

“One of the many thoughts that continually went through my mind was that if I had to reveal part of my personal life to my employer, I’d really rather reveal all of it,” he wrote. “Partial revelation, such as the fact that answering question X made my pulse quicken, led to misunderstandings.”

He was fully aware of his statement’s implications.

“I found myself wishing that my life would be constantly and completely monitored,” he continued. “It might seem odd that a self-professed libertarian would wish an Orwellian dystopia on himself, but here was my rationale: If people knew a few things about me, I might seem suspicious. But if people knew everything about me, they’d see they had nothing to fear. This is the attitude I have brought to SIGINT work since then.”

When intelligence officials justify surveillance, they tend to use the stilted language of national security, and we typically hear only from senior officials who stick to their platitudes. It is rare for mid-level experts — the ones conducting the actual surveillance — to frankly explain what they do and why. And in this case, the candid confessions come from the NSA’s own surveillance philosopher. The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?

Not long after joining the NSA, Socrates was assigned a diplomatic target. He knew the saying by Henry Stimson that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” and he felt uncomfortable doing the digital equivalent of it. As he wrote, “If there were any place in the world that idealism should rule and we should show voluntary restraint in our intelligence work, diplomacy was that place. Terrorists who meant harm to children and puppies were one thing, but civil servants talking about work while schlepping their kids to soccer practice seemed a little too close to home.”

His polygraph was an epiphany, however.

“We tend to mistrust what we do not understand well,” he noted. “A target that has no ill will to the U.S., but which is being monitored, needs better and more monitoring, not less. So if we’re in for a penny, we need to be in for a pound.”

I wanted to know more about Socrates, but one of the asymmetric oddities of the NSA is that the agency permits itself to know whatever it wants to know about any of us, yet does everything it can to prevent us from knowing anything about the men and women who surveil us, aside from a handful of senior officials who function as the agency’s public face. An NSA spokesperson refused to confirm that Socrates even worked there. “I don’t have anything to provide for your research,” the spokesperson wrote in an email.

Socrates lives in the age of Google and data mining. Like the rest of us, he cannot remain invisible.

The “SIGINT Philosopher” columns, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, gave me the opportunity to learn more without the agency’s assistance, because they included his name. Heading down the path of collecting information about Socrates (whose name we are not publishing — more on that later), I was in the odd position of conducting surveillance on a proponent of surveillance, so I had a get-out-of-guilt-free card.

Unlike the paranoid eavesdropper played by Gene Hackman in The Conversation, or the quiet Stasi agent at the center of The Lives of Others, Socrates lives in the age of Google and data mining. Like the rest of us, he cannot remain invisible. Socrates was an evangelical Christian for seven years, got married at 19, divorced at 27, and remarried not long after. He is now a registered Democrat and lives in a Maryland suburb with his son and wife, a public school teacher. I’ve seen the inside of their house, thanks to a real estate listing; the home, on a cul de sac, has four bedrooms, is more than 2,000 square feet, and has a nice wooden deck. I’ve also seen pictures of their son, because Socrates and his wife posted family snapshots on their Facebook accounts. His wife was on Twitter.

Conducting surveillance can be a creepily invasive procedure, as Socrates discovered while peering into the digital life of his first diplomatic target, and as I discovered while collecting information about him. In the abstract, surveillance might seem an antiseptic activity — just a matter of figuring out whether a valid security reason exists to surveil a target and then executing a computer command and letting the algorithms do the rest. But it’s not always that clinical. Sheelagh McNeill, the research editor with whom I worked on this story, was able to find Socrates’ phone number, and although he did not respond to voicemails, he eventually got on the line when I called at night.

His young son answered and fetched his father. Socrates was not pleased. He asked that I not disclose his identity, which was ironic because his columns praised the virtues of total transparency as a way to build trust. Why shouldn’t the public know about him? What’s wrong with a bit of well-intentioned surveillance among fellow Americans? I was not able to ask these questions, however.

“I can’t say anything,” he said, not long before he hung up. “You can’t use my name.”

He didn’t need to say anything, because his NSA columns explained a lot, as did the online databases McNeill and I consulted, though all of it paled in comparison to the motherlode of his blog.

Illustration: Jon Proctor for The Intercept

HOW DO YOU TRACK A TRACKER?

The name on Socrates’ columns was not, it turned out, his full legal name; he used an abbreviated form of his first name. His last name is an ordinary one that yields a large number of search results. McNeill and I had a bit of luck, though — his columns included a user ID with his middle initial. McNeill needed a day to comb the web and examine public as well as proprietary databases before finding a person she believed was Socrates. He resided in the Washington area, was married to a woman who had worked in Korea (Socrates is a Korean language analyst), and had lived in a variety of places that correlated with biographical hints in the columns.

But there wasn’t a lot of flesh on the digital bones we had found; Socrates was correct when he said it’s easy to misunderstand someone if you know only a bit. McNeill and I, though fairly certain that we had located the right person, still didn’t know much about his life or who, in an existential sense, he was. That changed when McNeill typed his name into Google and the name of a world event that one of his columns had mentioned.

She walked to my desk with her laptop open and pointed to a blog on her screen.

“This is him,” she said.

The blog consists of more than 20,000 words Socrates wrote about his failed effort, before joining the NSA, to earn a living as a writer. As he explained in often bitter and personal detail, he reluctantly went from starving writer to salaried spy. Instead of creating fictional characters, he spied on real ones. It dawned on me: Coming from the world of books and words rather than technology and code, Socrates represented a post-modern version of the literary eavesdropper.

In his 20s, according to his blog, he wrote a personal mission statement, in the style of Jerry Maguire, in which he described the creation of literature as a higher calling than raising a child, proclaiming it nobler to live as a penniless writer than a parent. He took subsistence jobs to pay the bills and relied on financial support from family members as he tried to become the next Jonathan Franzen. He loved the great authors he read and studied — Melville, Cervantes, Borges, Vonnegut, and others. He wanted to produce great works that would persuade people to love and care about the world as much as he did.

It didn’t work out, and ironically the turning point was a graduate writing program he enrolled in at a Midwestern university in 2002. The program used the workshop method of putting students into a group and having them read and critique one another’s work. His experience amounted to a year and a half of getting bad advice from bad writers working part-time jobs to put themselves through a middling school. Nearly every professor was a dick, he wrote, and he mused that writing had turned them into dicks.

He was so angry with himself and his writing that he deleted everything he had written, even throwing away hard copies of his stories.

The worst part of the experience was the financial side, because he went into debt (annual tuition and living costs at his university can exceed $25,000). Tired of asking for handouts and getting rejection letters, he wrote in his blog that the nobility of writing was a lie. He was so angry with himself and his writing that he deleted everything he had written, even throwing away hard copies of his stories, and stopped reading literature altogether. He decided to look for real work.

Socrates was able to land a job at the NSA. He had a background in Korean, which is of great interest in the intelligence world. He worked hard, had a son, owned a house, did volunteer work with refugees. He was living the American dream. In 2012, he began the “SIGINT Philosopher” columns, and this seems to have reminded him of the joys and rewards of writing for an audience. The next year, according to his blog, he thought he might lose his day job and this crisis made him ask what he most wanted to do in life. The answer surprised him: He wanted to write.

He was having, as he frankly admitted, a mid-life crisis that turned into a writing experiment. After 10 years of ignoring literature, he set a goal — he would write a collection of stories for an annual competition organized by the University of Iowa Press. He had a bit less than a year to write the stories, while keeping his position at the NSA. In the summer of 2014, a month before the Iowa deadline and just before one of his stories was published in a small literary review, he started blogging, without mentioning that he was a spy.

The surveillance archetypes that dominate popular culture are different from Socrates because they eventually see evil in the systems of surveillance that employ them. There is Winston Smith in 1984, who works at the Ministry of Truth and despises everything it does. Gerd Wiesler in The Lives of Others turns insubordinate after he receives an assignment to surveil a well-known writer and his girlfriend. And Harry Caul in The Conversation comes to fear that he is being played by the business executive who hired him.

Socrates, on the other hand, is loyal to a fault. One of his columns made a point of saying that even if an NSA employee disagrees with a policy, and even if the policy is wrong, she should stay the course. “We probably all have something we know a lot about that is being handled at a higher level in a manner we’re not entirely happy about,” he wrote. “This can cause great cognitive dissonance for us, because we may feel our work is being used to help the government follow a policy we feel is bad.” Socrates advised modesty. Maybe the policy is actually correct — or perhaps it is wrong but will work out in the end. “I try,” he explained, “to be a good lieutenant and good civil servant of even the policies I think are misguided.”

Socrates does not have a quiet psyche, however. While his blog and columns do not question the NSA, he struggled to live meaningfully. He returned to creative writing to make a lasting and worthwhile mark, so that his time on earth would not be wasted. Unfortunately, his second effort to become a successful writer did not turn out any better than the first. He reached out to two writing groups but never heard back. He paid for an editor to review one of his stories, disagreed with the editor’s comments, and accused the editor of trying to drum up additional fees for more work — and blogged about all of this in excruciating detail. The story, about a man whose ex-girlfriend gives him herpes, was called “Infection.”

Socrates sent his stories to literary reviews and got rejection after rejection. Late last year, he wrote that he felt empty and low. His blogging platform allows for tags for each post, and the tags he used included “rejection,” “rejection notes,” “giving up,” and “why write?” Even worse was the silence that greeted the one story he had gotten published after he started blogging. He heard nothing from readers, and he wondered whether anyone other than family members and friends were aware of it.

THE INTERCEPT HAS A POLICY of not publishing the names of non-public intelligence officials unless there is a compelling reason, as with our naming of Alfreda Bikowsky, who oversaw key aspects of the CIA’s torture program. Withholding Socrates’ identity presents certain problems in the age of Google, however. If I quote from his blog, or give its name, or provide other search-enhancing morsels, like the name or location of his graduate writing program or where he was born, I might provide the sort of data that could instantly reveal his name with a few keystrokes.

So I am more or less trying to do what the NSA and a large number of agencies and corporations do with the personal data they possess — stripping away names and other identifying information to “anonymize” the data before sharing it. The beauty of anonymizing data, according to the (very many) entities that do it, is that nobody can be identified — citizens and consumers do not have to worry that their privacy is violated when petabytes of data are collected about what they do, where they go, what they read, where they eat, and what they buy, because their names are not attached to it. The conceit is that our data does not betray us.

You don’t need to code if you want to hack into someone’s life. We are all hackers now.

Anonymization is problematic, however, because it doesn’t always work. It is entirely possible that a reader of this story could make a few lucky or smart guesses and data-mine their way to Socrates’ name. There is a whole area of data research that’s known as re-identification, which consists of matching anonymized data with actual names. Even if anonymization did work, there’s a creepiness to knowing everything about a person even if you don’t know their name. Look at this story — it’s invasive without disclosing Socrates’ name, isn’t it? I could dial up the invasiveness, too. Would you like to know the asking price of the house he lives in? Would you like to know the names of the schools where his wife has worked? Would you like to see the pictures of their son or their house? Know the name of their dog? Their dates of birth? The branch of the military Socrates served in and his dates of service? There is so much I can tell you about Socrates without telling you his name. You don’t need to code if you want to hack into someone’s life. We are all hackers now.

If the original Socrates of ancient Greece were still around, he would probably suggest that it is morally compromising to conduct surveillance on people who have done no harm — no matter whether the surveillance is carried out by a philosopher in a robe, a journalist with a laptop, or an intelligence agency with a $10 billion budget. Surveillance, as a word, is a cleaned-up version of voyeurism, and whether state-sponsored or editor-approved, it’s creepy to carry out, and probably futile in most cases. Socrates (the columnist) insisted that total surveillance would allow the NSA to understand us and not mistake our intentions. His inaugural column even suggested that the NSA’s slogan could be “building informed decision-makers — so that targets do not suffer our nation’s wrath unless they really deserve it — by exercising deity-like monitoring of the target.” Yet Socrates probably knows, as most writers do, that what we say does not necessarily reflect what is in our minds.

Here’s an example. I told Socrates, in our phone call, that I had read his blog. I assumed that once our conversation was finished he would go online and take down the blog, scrupulously doing what a smart surveiller would do once he realized he was the target rather than targeter — try to scrub the public domain of his existence to inhibit surveillance of him.

Yet the blog stayed up. In fact, he continued posting — once about a blockbuster movie series he disliked, another time about a short story he generally liked. I asked McNeill, the research editor, what she made of this, and she was surprised, too. Although I could not spy on Socrates in the way the NSA spies on its targets, I had done a lot and thought I understood him. In addition to the biographical and financial data I had mined, Socrates and I have an intellectual kinship as writers. After all, editors have killed stories I have written. I have friends who have gone through graduate writing programs. I have taught in one. I have the same hope (probably futile) that my writing will do some good in this world and somebody in Hollywood will make a movie.

Yet I had misunderstood him. I’m not sure I can ever understand him, even if he were strapped into a polygraph and had all the time in the world to answer my questions. If it is true that we are mysteries even to ourselves — as the original Socrates suggested — the eavesdroppers at the NSA invade our privacy without learning who we really are.

Documents:

• Are You the SIGINT Philosopher?
• SIGINT Philosopher Is Back — With a New Face!
• Lessons for Civil Servants from the American Civil War
• Unlike All My Terrible Teammates, I Am a Wonderful Teammate
• In Praise of Not Knowing
• When Brevity Is Just the Soul of “Huh”?
• Descartes Would Have Been a Lousy SIGINT Reporter
• Are Obscure Languages Still … Obscure?

Research: Sheelagh McNeill.

The post What Happens When a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy? appeared first on The Intercept.

Hollywood surprised itself earlier this year by producing an Iraq War movie that was a blockbuster — American Sniper has earned more than half a billion dollars so far, starring Bradley Cooper in the role of Navy SEAL Chris Kyle. The film also produced intense cultural criticism about the way it narrowly represented the war, portraying Iraqis as little more than turbaned bullseyes for American valor.

Now comes the trailer for 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, an action film about the attempt by military contractors working for the CIA to rescue two diplomats from an extremist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. The film, directed by Michael Bay, is being touted as a cross between Black Hawk Down and American Sniper. The early reviews — I mean the early tweets — are highly favorable. If the trailer is an accurate indicator, or the director’s filmography (Bay also brought us Pearl Harbor and Transformers), the star-spangled hype is probably on the money, and we will be the poorer for it.

I haven’t seen the film yet — it comes out in January, so press screenings are months away. I contacted Mitchell Zuckoff, who wrote the nonfiction book on which the film is based, as well as a publicist for the studio that is producing the film, but they declined to say what’s in the movie. The main hints are the attention-getting trailer (please take a look) and the cast of characters on the IMDB site. There is apparently no Libyan character who merits a last name — there is just a “Fareed” and “Fareed’s wife.” The other apparently Libyan characters have no names at all; one of them is described as “Bandolier Militiaman” and another is “Camo Headwrap.” Who knows, perhaps 13 Hours will be loaded with rich historical context, but Bay, whose films have grossed $6.4 billion, according to his Twitter bio, is known for other things.

One of the problems with Hollywood war movies is that they rarely tell us what we need to know about the wars we engage in. It’s certainly true that American soldiers often perform heroically in the wars they fight — I have reported from Iraq as well as Afghanistan and have seen it first-hand. It is also true that American soldiers don’t always behave honorably (I have seen this too), but Hollywood doesn’t often shine a light on it. Studio executives prefer to back movies we are willing to buy tickets for, and crowd-pleasers tend to have heroic narratives in the John Wayne mold, which is why for every Apocalypse Now or Three Kings there seem to be a dozen American Snipers or Lone Survivors.

Yet the real problem with conventional war movies is their historically negligent portrayal of the people Americans fight against. The Iraqis or Afghans or Somalis or Vietnamese in our most popular war movies tend to be stick figures at best, snarling animals at worst. This is not only epically unfair to the people upon whose lands we have chosen to fight our wars, it hurts us as well, because we just consume more of the intellectual junk that leads us to believe we are always the good guys and they are always the bad guys and the people we kill always deserve it.

And there’s a genre twist in the trailer for 13 Hours, which portrays military contractors as heroes. It’s true that some contractors have acted bravely in the war zones where they were lucratively employed to fight, and some have been killed (including two in Benghazi), but their overall record is terrible. Military contractors — traditionally referred to as mercenaries — are one of the poxes of the new American way of warfare. When I was in Baghdad in the early years of the occupation, military contractors were among the greatest perils to human life, because they were all but unaccountable and acted like it. Driving around Baghdad in an unmarked civilian vehicle, I worried more about being shot by one of the Blackwater cowboys than being blown up by a car bomb. Yet now they are being packaged as a new type of American war hero, a sort of mercenary chic.

Yes, it’s only a movie, and one we’re not able to see until January. But movies seem to do more to shape our understanding of warfare, valor and foreigners than any other form of popular culture, and it seems we are heading toward another feel-good brainwash.

Also read:
How Clint Eastwood Ignores History in ‘American Sniper’
Oscars Make History, So Hollywood’s War Stories Need To Be True

The post Benghazi Film by Michael Bay Could Be Next “American Sniper” But Let’s Hope Not appeared first on The Intercept.

A former covert officer for the Central Intelligence Agency, Sterling sat down in a federal courtroom with a lawyer on either side, looking up at a judge who would announce in a few moments whether he would go to prison for the next 20 years. A few feet away, three prosecutors waited expectantly, hoping that more than a decade of investigation by the FBI would conclude with a severe sentence for a man who committed an “unconscionable” crime, as one of them told the judge.

In Sterling’s blind spot, behind his left shoulder, his wife tried not to sob so loudly that the judge would hear. A social worker, she had been interrogated by FBI agents, her modest home was searched, she had been made to testify before a grand jury, and she had given up her hopes for an ordinary life — a child or two rather than the miscarriages she had, a husband who could hold a job, a life that was not under surveillance, and friends who were free of harassment from government agents asking for information about her and her husband.

One of Sterling’s lawyers stood up to ask for leniency. Sterling was a good person, the lawyer said, not a traitor. He was the first in his family to graduate from college. After leaving the CIA, he worked as a healthcare investigator and won awards for uncovering millions of dollars in fraud. He loved his wife. He did not cause any harm and did not deserve to be locked up until he was an old man for talking to a New York Times reporter about a classified program that he believed had gone awry. Please let the sentence be fair, the lawyer said.

It was time for Sterling to say a few words. His lawyers followed him to the lectern, standing a half step behind, as though to steady him if he wavered. A tall man with a low voice, Sterling thanked the court for its efforts to conduct the trial and thanked the judge for delaying its start so he could attend the funeral of one of his brothers. He did not say whether, as the jury had decided, he was guilty of what they had convicted him for — violating the Espionage Act and other laws related to disclosing classified information.

Sterling’s battle against the government had begun more than 15 years earlier, when he was still at the CIA. After he lodged a racial discrimination complaint, he was fired by the agency and filed two federal lawsuits against it, one for retaliation and discrimination, another for obstructing the publication of his autobiography. He also spoke as a whistleblower to Congress. Soon, his savings ran out and he became all but homeless, driving around the country, lost in despair. He eventually returned to his hometown near St. Louis and rebuilt his life, finding the woman who became his wife and landing a job he thrived at.

His new life was torn apart when FBI agents came to his workplace in 2011, placing him in handcuffs and parading him past his colleagues. A few days later, still in jail, he was fired because he had not shown up for work. The drama ended in a wood-paneled courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia on a warm afternoon in May, after Sterling finished his brief statement to the judge.

Sterling’s case has drawn attention primarily for two reasons: it was part of the Obama Administration’s controversial crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, and prosecutors had tried to force the Times reporter, James Risen, to divulge the name of his source, whom the government believed was Sterling. The case, known as United States of America v. Jeffrey Alexander Sterling, was treated mainly as a freedom-of-the-press issue, with Risen as the heroic centerpiece. Lost in the judicial briefs about the First Amendment was the black man in the middle.

This is Sterling’s story.

DURING HIS LAST year of law school in St. Louis, Sterling was reading a newspaper between classes. He noticed an advertisement that showed a man standing at the edge of a body of water and looking at the horizon in an inspirational way. See the world, the ad said. Serve your country. Join the CIA.

It got him.

As a teenager, Sterling had become fascinated with the rest of the world. When he arrived home from high school, he would watch the MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS. Attending a racially mixed high school, he didn’t fit in. He remembers being called an Oreo, black on the outside and white on the inside, because his interests didn’t coincide with some people’s concept of what a black kid should do or think or say. Within hours of reading the CIA ad he began working on his application.

His first day at Langley — what people at the agency call their “EOD,” or Entrance On Duty — was May 13, 1993. He was told to park behind the main building and enter through the back doors used by most employees. But Sterling made a detour around the long sides of the building to walk through the grand entrance — the one with the shiny CIA emblem on the marble floor, where you walk by a wall that has stars for each CIA officer killed in the line of duty.

“That was a thrill,” he told me. “I actually did that for the first few days. It meant that much to me, to be able to walk in that front door knowing that I was part of something special. I was so proud of it.”

I met Sterling in April, at his home in O’Fallon, on the outskirts of St. Louis. It had been three months since the jury convicted him, and he was waiting for the hearing at which he would find out whether he would receive the term recommended under federal sentencing guidelines — between 19 to 24 years in prison. He was surprisingly tranquil, occasionally stroking his gray-flecked goatee as he talked about his long fight with the government. Other than discussing his case in a short documentary directed by Judith Ehrlich and produced by Norman Solomon, Sterling has not talked publicly about it. The Justice Department, asked to respond to his account, refused to provide any comment.

IT DID NOT take long, apparently, for the color of Sterling’s skin to set him apart at the CIA.

Once he had completed the agency’s version of basic spy training, Sterling was assigned to the Iran Task Force and dispatched to language school to learn Farsi. In 1997, just before he was to leave for his first overseas post in Germany, he was told that somebody else was going instead.

“We’re concerned that you would stick out as a big black guy speaking Farsi,” Sterling recalls his supervisor saying.

Shocked, he responded, “Well, when did you figure out I was black?”

The agency did not have a good record on diversity. At the time, all of its directors, deputy directors and chiefs of espionage operations had been white men. In 1995, the agency had agreed to pay $990,000 to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by female case officers who accused the agency of sex discrimination. The agency promised to do better on both racial and gender diversity — but it wasn’t, as far as Sterling could tell.

“I seriously considered leaving the agency,” he told me. “But I believed in what I would be able to do. I believed in the career I could have there.”

A few months later, he accepted a different overseas assignment. Shortly before he was to leave, a supervisor said he would instead go to the position in Germany that he had previously been turned down for, because the officer they were planning to send had pulled out. Sterling, a proud man, said he didn’t want to take a position for which he had been deemed second-best.

“You either go where we want or you’re going nowhere,” Sterling says he was told.

He went.

“I was like, OK, I can deal with this, I at least have an assignment,” Sterling told me. “I’ll prove to them how I’m a great case officer.”

Sterling recalls being the only black officer at the agency’s station in Bonn. His cover was as an Army logistics officer rather than a State Department officer, and he says this made it more difficult to gain entry to the social and political circles where foreign spies are recruited; doors that open for diplomats are closed to logistics officers. He believes his bosses thought the color of his skin meant he wouldn’t do as well as other officers, so they didn’t bother giving him a good cover.

“I couldn’t get into a janitor’s convention,” he said.

Sterling returned to the U.S. and was assigned to the counter-proliferation division at the agency’s headquarters before being dispatched to the New York station, where he says that once again he was the only black officer. Things did not go smoothly. He was given an unusual ultimatum — start recruiting three new spies, hold three meetings with each of them, or leave New York. He felt singled out, asked to do more than other officers while lacking the cover they had.

“That was the last I could take of it,” Sterling recalled. “I just said ‘No, I don’t accept this and I’m going to file a complaint.’”

He was transferred back to Langley, where he was given a closet-sized office that he and the co-worker he shared it with jokingly called “the penalty box.” He filed an internal racial discrimination complaint that didn’t succeed, and soon he was fired. John Brennan, who at the time was the agency’s deputy executive director and is currently its director, told the New York Times that “it was an unfortunate situation because Jeffrey was a talented officer and had a lot of skills we are looking for, and we wanted him to succeed. We were quite pleased with Jeffrey’s performance in a number of areas. Unfortunately, there were some areas of his work and development that needed some improvement.”

In O’Fallon, Sterling and I met at the single-story home he shares with his wife and two cats in a community of nearly identical red-and-white houses. “We’re really outside the beltway here,” he joked at one point. He has a voice that’s made for radio — deep and fluid, a bass that usually stays in the same comfortable register. He was dressed in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, with sandals on his feet. On the wall, there was a print by Salvador Dali of two butterflies dancing in the air. His tone varied only once or twice, when his steady voice sharpened into a knife.

“I had dedicated myself to that agency,” he said, when I asked why he chose to confront the CIA rather than, as many people might have done, carry on quietly or resign without filing a lawsuit. “I couldn’t just walk away from something that was so vital to me and that I knew I was good at, proved I was good at. That was it for me … No, you are not going to treat me that way.”

IN 1972, JIM CROCE came out with a hit song, “You Don’t Mess Around with Jim,” that had several lines about the things a sensible person never does, such as spitting into the wind, pulling off the mask of the Lone Ranger, and tugging on Superman’s cape. Sterling pointed to that last bit of advice — not tugging on Superman’s cape — to describe the path he took. He challenged the CIA, and it probably wasn’t a sensible choice.

In 2001, as he was leaving the agency, he filed a federal lawsuit that said the CIA retaliated against him for making an internal discrimination complaint, and that he had indeed faced a pattern of discrimination there. The suit was dismissed by a judge after the CIA successfully argued in pre-trial motions that a trial would expose state secrets by disclosing sources and methods of intelligence-gathering. An appeals court upheld that ruling, though it noted that the dismissal “places, on behalf of the entire country, a burden on Sterling that he alone must bear” by being deprived of his right to a trial. The dismissal spared Sterling’s supervisors from testifying about their interactions with him. The government has not provided specific responses, in court or to the media, about his accusations of racial discrimination, other than to generally state that he faced none.

He tugged on the CIA’s cape in other ways. He wrote a memoir, tentatively titled Spook: An American Journey Through Black and White, and submitted chapters for pre-publication review. According to a lawsuit Sterling filed in 2003, the CIA determined that his manuscript contained classified information that should not be published, and demanded that he add information that, his suit said, was “blatantly false.” Facing a tough legal battle with a presiding judge who seemed sympathetic to the CIA, Sterling eventually agreed to drop the suit. His manuscript has not been published.

Also in 2003, Sterling met staffers from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to let them know his concerns about the mismanagement of a classified program he worked on at the agency. Merlin, as the program was called, involved the CIA giving Iran faulty nuclear blueprints. If the blueprints were used, Iran’s nuclear program would be delayed. The blueprints were given to the Iranians by a Russian scientist who lived in the United States, and Sterling was his CIA handler. The CIA has said the program worked well, but Sterling told the committee staffers it was botched and that the Iranians learned the blueprints were flawed; the Iranians might have gained nuclear insights from the accurate parts.

By the time he talked to the Senate staffers, Sterling had become radioactive by Washington standards. This is the usual whistleblower’s fate. He applied for jobs with the private-sector contractors that tend to eagerly recruit experts like him, and they initially seemed quite interested, Sterling recalls, but their attention vanished suddenly, presumably when they learned about his disputes with the CIA. His descent began in full. Running out of money, he sold his belongings on Craigslist, gave his cats to a woman who had a farm, and packed a few things into his car and took off.

The idea was to drive to his mother’s house in Missouri, but he wandered, parking at truck stops at night and sleeping in his car. “I had nowhere to go,” he recalled. “I had worked hard and it all fell apart.” He eventually visited friends in St. Louis who had a newborn and they made a deal — Sterling cared for their baby and lived rent-free in their house. “It was very humbling to go from being a case officer with the Central Intelligence Agency to now I’m a manny,” Sterling noted.

Then, as things do, his life turned around. In 2004 he landed a job as a healthcare investigator at WellPoint, and he also met a woman, Holly Brooke, and after a few months moved into her house. He now had a job, a life partner, a home. Everything was great until, on the morning of New Year’s Eve in 2005, the CIA’s top lawyer, John Rizzo, was woken up at home by a phone call on his secure line.

RIZZO GROGGILY ANSWERED the phone and was told by an official at the National Security Council that a book was about to be published that disclosed one of the CIA’s most sensitive intelligence programs. The book, by James Risen, was called State of War, and it described the Merlin program as perhaps “one of the most reckless operations in the modern history of the CIA.” Risen’s book did not identify who his source, or sources, were.

Rizzo, who described the day’s events in his memoir, threw on his clothes and drove into town to get the book from the NSC official, then drove to Langley to share it with senior officials who had been dragged from their homes to figure out what to do. The White House wanted to take the extraordinary step of stopping the book from being published. President Bush’s top lawyer, Harriet Miers, asked Rizzo to call Sumner Redstone, the chairman of Viacom, which owned Simon & Schuster, the book’s publisher. In the end, Rizzo didn’t call Redstone, but he made a mental note to file a crimes report with the Department of Justice; the leaker had to be found.

Within a month, two FBI agents were at Sterling’s house outside St. Louis. They claimed they were concerned that an Iranian was on the loose who might do harm to him. Sterling sensed it was a ruse; he told the FBI agents he’d be able to spot someone following him, particularly an Iranian because there were no Iranians where he lived. The agents then asked if they could come inside and Sterling refused. They had a copy of Risen’s book and asked if he knew about it.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know anything about that book. That was the first I had ever seen of that,’” Sterling told me.

This wasn’t the first time Sterling was questioned by the FBI. Risen had interviewed Sterling in 2002 and published a story about his discrimination lawsuit. The next year, Risen reported a story about the Merlin program, but it wasn’t published. Risen asked the CIA for pre-publication comment on the story and was soon summoned to the White House, along with his editor. They were told by then-National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice that the story, if published, would reveal a valuable covert program and could cost lives. The Times decided to kill it.

The Justice Department launched a criminal investigation in 2003 and FBI agents questioned Sterling that year. However, until the agents showed up at his doorstep in 2006 with Risen’s book, Sterling thought his struggles with the government were behind him.

After that visit, Holly was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury. She was questioned for seven hours at FBI headquarters in Washington and, she told me, the next day she spent three hours before the grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia. When she returned to St. Louis, she got a call from her lawyer, who said the FBI was coming to search her home. More than a dozen agents soon showed up to confiscate some of the couple’s belongings.

“They left and I had a meltdown,” Holly said during lunch at a pub near her home, as easy-listening rock music played in the background. “I was sobbing and crying and couldn’t understand this. I attempted to go to work the next day and I just lost it. My boss came to me and she said, ‘You need to leave. I think you are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.’”

Then, as mysteriously as it had intruded into their lives, the FBI’s investigation seemed to dissipate. In the fall of 2010, Sterling’s lawyer called him to say the case appeared to be winding down.

ON JANUARY 6, 2011, Sterling was asked to attend a meeting at his office. He was on medical leave after a knee-replacement operation, so he hobbled into work with a cane, and after checking on the mail that had piled up on his desk, a colleague told him the security staff needed to see him because there was a problem with his badge. It was urgent, Sterling was told. When he visited the security staff he was confronted, he says, by several FBI agents and police officers who placed him under arrest. His cane was taken away, his arms were handcuffed behind his back, and he was marched out of the building, limping, as his co-workers gaped. The indictment accused him of leaking to Risen out of “anger and resentment” at the CIA.

The timing of his arrest was unusual. The exchanges between Sterling and Risen began in 2001 and finished in 2005, according to records of their phone calls and emails that were listed in the indictment. Why was Sterling arrested six years after he last communicated with Risen and five years after his home was searched by the FBI? If, as the government claimed, he had caused so much harm, why did prosecutors wait so long to press charges?

The answers appear to be political. Until Barack Obama was elected president, the Department of Justice rarely prosecuted leakers. Obama promised, as a candidate, to create the most transparent administration ever, but he has presided over more leak prosecutions under the Espionage Act than all previous administrations combined. Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence during Obama’s first term, told the Times that a decision was made in 2009 to “hang an admiral once in a while,” as Blair put it, to show would-be leakers they should not talk to the press. The Justice Department did not charge high-level officials, however; mid-level officials were the principal targets, and it appears that Sterling’s all-but-shut case was brought back to life as part of the crackdown.

Sterling, detained for weeks, became despondent.

“All of it came crashing down on me, sitting in that jail cell,” he said. “So many years, so many struggles, and I had gotten to a point where I had picked myself up and was just moving on. But this behemoth of anger, of retaliation, was having its way. It was an extremely low feeling that I was going through, disbelief, shock.”

He stopped eating until Holly was allowed to visit.

“Just seeing her face shocked me back into knowing that here’s this woman who loves me and she’s been with me through thick and thin,” he said. “I made a promise to her that I would stay alive, I won’t try to hurt myself.”

RELEASED FROM JAIL, Sterling no longer had a job and could not find a new one, due to the taint of an Espionage Act indictment, and he had to wait four years for his trial to begin. A large part of the delay was due to a legal battle between the prosecution and Risen — the prosecution wanted Risen to name his source, whom the government believed was Sterling, but Risen refused to cooperate, raising the prospect of a journalist going to jail for defying the government. The Obama administration, criticized for violating First Amendment protections, backed off just before the trial began.

On January 13, the trial opened with the lead prosecutor, James Trump, telling the jury that Sterling was a traitor.

“The defendant betrayed his country,” Trump said. “He betrayed his colleagues. He betrayed the CIA and compromised its mission. And most importantly, he betrayed the Russian asset, a man who literally placed his trust and his life into the defendant’s hands.”

Trump addressed the question of motive.

“And why?” he asked. “Anger, bitterness, selfishness. The defendant struck back at the CIA because he thought he had been treated unfairly. He had sued the agency for discrimination and demanded that they pay him $200,000 to settle his claim. When the agency refused, he struck back with the only weapon he had: secrets, the agency’s secrets.”

The government’s case consisted mostly of records of emails and phone calls between Sterling and Risen that began in 2001 and continued into 2005. The emails were very short, just a line or so, and did not reference any CIA programs. The phone calls were mostly short too, some just a few seconds, and the government did not introduce recordings or transcripts of any of them.

Sterling was represented by two lawyers, Edward MacMahon Jr. and Barry Pollack. In his opening statement, MacMahon pointed to the lack of hard evidence against his client.

“Mr. Trump is a fine lawyer,” MacMahon said. “If he had an email with details of these programs or a phone call, you would have heard it, and you’re not going to hear it in this case .… Mr. Trump told you that [Sterling] spoke to Risen. Did you hear where, when, or anything about what happened? No. That’s because there isn’t any such evidence of it whatsoever .… You don’t see a written communication to Mr. Risen from Mr. Sterling about the program at all, no evidence they even met in person.”

After a two-week trial that included some CIA witnesses testifying from behind a screen, so that their identities would not be revealed, the jury convicted Sterling, based on what the judge, Leonie Brinkema, described at the sentencing as “very powerful circumstantial evidence.” She added, “In a perfect world, you’d only have direct evidence, but many times that’s not the case in a criminal case.”

Sterling sat motionless as she explained the reasoning behind the sentence that she was about to announce. I had asked Sterling, when we met in St. Louis, what he expected would happen.

“This process has destroyed a lot of me,” he began, his voice shifting in the halting way that means anguish has broken loose. “The thought that I’m going to be sent to prison, I can’t and haven’t been able to deal with that. I don’t know where to put it or how to deal with it because it doesn’t make any sense. I’m dreading going to jail. Maybe some miracle will happen and I won’t. But I still have to be realistic and prepare for the worst.”

A few minutes before three in the afternoon, Judge Brinkema said that Sterling would go to prison for three and a half years. This was far below the sentencing guidelines — and was seen as a rebuke of the prosecution’s portrayal of Sterling as a traitor who had to be locked away for a long time. But that wasn’t much comfort for Sterling or his wife, because he would nonetheless be locked away. After the hearing ended, Sterling walked to the front row of seats to console his sobbing wife. You could hear her wails in the courtroom.

His lawyers requested that he be allowed to serve his sentence in his home state of Missouri, so that his wife and other family members could easily visit him. Earlier this week, Sterling reported to the prison that was selected for him. It is in Colorado.

Read also:

• Stephen Kim Spoke To A Reporter. Now He’s In Jail. This Is His Story.
• CIA’s Jeffrey Sterling Sentenced to 42 Months for Leaking to New York Times Journalist
• Petraeus Gets Leniency for Leaking — And Risen’s CIA Source Should Too, His Lawyers Say
• Lawyers for CIA Leaker Cite Selective Prosecution After Petraeus Plea Deal
• After Petraeus Plea Deal, Lawyer Demands Release of Stephen Kim
• Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System for Leaks
• The Surrender (a short documentary by Stephen Maing)

Video: Peter Maass
Photo: Kevin Wolf/AP

The post How Jeffrey Sterling Took on the CIA — and Lost Everything appeared first on The Intercept.

“We in the agency are at risk of a similar, collective paralysis in the face of a dizzying array of choices every single day,” the analyst wrote in 2011. “’Analysis paralysis’ isn’t only a cute rhyme. It’s the term for what happens when you spend so much time analyzing a situation that you ultimately stymie any outcome …. It’s what happens in SIGINT [signals intelligence] when we have access to endless possibilities, but we struggle to prioritize, narrow, and exploit the best ones.”

The document is one of about a dozen in which NSA intelligence experts express concerns usually heard from the agency’s critics: that the U.S. government’s “collect it all” strategy can undermine the effort to fight terrorism. The documents, provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, appear to contradict years of statements from senior officials who have claimed that pervasive surveillance of global communications helps the government identify terrorists before they strike or quickly find them after an attack.

The Patriot Act, portions of which expire on Sunday, has been used since 2001 to conduct a number of dragnet surveillance programs, including the bulk collection of phone metadata from American companies. But the documents suggest that analysts at the NSA have drowned in data since 9/11, making it more difficult for them to find the real threats. The titles of the documents capture their overall message: “Data Is Not Intelligence,” “The Fallacies Behind the Scenes,” “Cognitive Overflow?” “Summit Fever” and “In Praise of Not Knowing.” Other titles include “Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept” and “Overcome by Overload?”

The documents are not uniform in their positions. Some acknowledge the overload problem but say the agency is adjusting well. They do not specifically mention the Patriot Act, just the larger dilemma of cutting through a flood of incoming data. But in an apparent sign of the scale of the problem, the documents confirm that the NSA even has a special category of programs that is called “Coping With Information Overload.”

The jam vs. jelly document, titled “Too Many Choices,” started off in a colorful way but ended with a fairly stark warning: “The SIGINT mission is far too vital to unnecessarily expand the haystacks while we search for the needles. Prioritization is key.”

These doubts are infrequently heard from officials inside the NSA. These documents are a window into the private thinking of mid-level officials who are almost never permitted to discuss their concerns in public.

AN AMUSING PARABLE circulated at the NSA a few years ago. Two people go to a farm and purchase a truckload of melons for a dollar each. They then sell the melons along a busy road for the same price, a dollar. As they drive back to the farm for another load, they realize they aren’t making a profit, so one of them suggests, “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”

The parable was written by an intelligence analyst in a document dated Jan. 23, 2012 that was titled, “Do We Need a Bigger SIGINT Truck?” It expresses, in a lively fashion, a critique of the agency’s effort to collect what former NSA Director Keith Alexander referred to as “the whole haystack.” The critique goes to the heart of the agency’s drive to gather as much of the world’s communications as possible: because it may not find what it needs in a partial haystack of data, the haystack is expanded as much as possible, on the assumption that more data will eventually yield useful information.

“The problem is that when you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.”
–Edward Snowden

The Snowden files show that in practice, it doesn’t turn out that way: more is not necessarily better, and in fact, extreme volume creates its own challenges.

“Recently I tried to answer what seemed like a relatively straightforward question about which telephony metadata collection capabilities are the most important in case we need to shut something off when the metadata coffers get full,” wrote the intelligence analyst. “By the end of the day, I felt like capitulating with the white flag of, ‘We need COLOSSAL data storage so we don’t have to worry about it,’ (aka we need a bigger SIGINT truck).” The analyst added, “Without metrics, how do we know that we have improved something or made it worse? There’s a running joke … that we’ll only know if collection is important by shutting it off and seeing if someone screams.”

Another document, while not mentioning the dangers of collecting too much data, expressed concerns about pursuing entrenched but unproductive programs.

“How many times have you been watching a terrible movie, only to convince yourself to stick it out to the end and find out what happens, since you’ve already invested too much time or money to simply walk away?” the document asked. “This ‘gone too far to stop now’ mentality is our built-in mechanism to help us allocate and ration resources. However, it can work to our detriment in prioritizing and deciding which projects or efforts are worth further expenditure of resources, regardless of how much has already been ‘sunk.’ As has been said before, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

“We are drowning in information. And yet we know nothing. For sure.”
–NSA Intelligence Analyst

Many of these documents were written by intelligence analysts who had regular columns distributed on NSANet, the agency’s intranet. One of the columns was called “Signal v. Noise,” another was called “The SIGINT Philosopher.” Two of the documents cite the academic work of Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering research on what’s become known as the attention economy. Simon wrote that consumers and managers have trouble making smart choices because their exposure to more information decreases their ability to understand the information. Both documents mention the same passage from Simon’s essay, Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World:

“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

In addition to consulting Nobel-prize winning work, NSA analysts have turned to easier literature, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. The author of a 2011 document referenced Blink and stated, “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.” The author added, “Gladwell has captured one of the biggest challenges facing SID today. Our costs associated with this information overload are not only financial, such as the need to build data warehouses large enough to store the mountain of data that arrives at our doorstep each day, but also include the more intangible costs of too much data to review, process, translate and report.”

Alexander, the NSA director from 2005 to 2014 and chief proponent of the agency’s “collect it all” strategy, vigorously defended the bulk collection programs. “What we have, from my perspective, is a reasonable approach on how we can defend our nation and protect our civil liberties and privacy,” he said at a security conference in Aspen in 2013. He added, “You need the haystack to find the needle.” The same point has been made by other officials, including James Cole, the former deputy attorney general who told a congressional committee in 2013, “If you’re looking for the needle in the haystack, you have to have the entire haystack to look through.”

NSA Slide, May 2011

The opposing viewpoint was voiced earlier this month by Snowden, who noted in an interview with the Guardian that the men who committed recent terrorist attacks in France, Canada and Australia were under surveillance—their data was in the haystack yet they weren’t singled out. “It wasn’t the fact that we weren’t watching people or not,” Snowden said. “It was the fact that we were watching people so much that we did not understand what we had. The problem is that when you collect it all, when you monitor everyone, you understand nothing.”

In a 2011 interview with SIDtoday, a deputy director in the Signals Intelligence Directorate was asked about “analytic modernization” at the agency. His response, while positive on the NSA’s ability to surmount obstacles, noted that it faced difficulties, including the fact that some targets use encryption and switch phone numbers to avoid detection. He pointed to volume as a particular problem.

“We live in an Information Age when we have massive reserves of information and don’t have the capability to exploit it,” he stated. “I was told that there are 2 petabytes of data in the SIGINT System at any given time. How much is that? That’s equal to 20 million 4-drawer filing cabinets. How many cabinets per analyst is that? By the end of this year, we’ll have 1 terabyte of data per second coming in. You can’t crank that through the existing processes and be effective.”

The documents noted the difficulty of sifting through the ever-growing haystack of data. For instance, a 2011 document titled “ELINT Analysts – Overcome by Overload? Help is Here with IM&S” outlined a half dozen computer tools that “are designed to invert the paradigm where an analyst spends more time searching for data than analyzing it.” Another document, written by an intelligence analyst in 2010, bluntly stated that “we are drowning in information. And yet we know nothing. For sure.” The analyst went on to ask, “Anyone know just how many tools are available at the Agency, alone? Would you know where to go to find out? Anyone ever start a new target…without the first clue where to begin? Did you ever start a project wondering if you were the sole person in the Intelligence Community to work this project? How would you find out?” The analyst, trying to encourage more sharing of tips about the best ways to find data in the haystack, concluded by writing, in boldface, “Don’t let those coming behind you suffer the way you have.”

The agency appears to be spending significant sums of money to solve the haystack problem. The document headlined “Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept,” written in 2006 by three NSA officials and previously published by The Intercept, outlined a series of programs to prepare for a near future in which the speed and volume of signals intelligence would explode “almost beyond imagination.” The document referred to a mysterious NSA entity–the “Coping With Information Overload Office.” This appears to be related to an item in the Intelligence Community’s 2013 Budget Justification to Congress, known as the “black budget”—$48.6 million for projects related to “Coping with Information Overload.”

The data glut is felt in the NSA’s partner agency in Britain, too. A slideshow entitled “A Short Introduction to SIGINT,” from GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, posed the following question: “How are people supposed to keep on top of all their targets and the new ones when they have far more than [they] could do in a day? How are they supposed to find the needle in the haystack and prioritise what is most important to look at?” The slideshow continued, “Give an analyst three leads, one of which is interesting: they may have time to follow that up. Give them three hundred leads, ten of which are interesting: that’s probably not much use.”

These documents tend to shy away from confrontation—they express concern with the status quo but do not blame senior officials or demand an abrupt change of course. They were written by agency staffers who appear to believe in the general mission of the NSA. For instance, the author of a “SIGINT Philosopher” column wrote that if the NSA was a corporation, it could have the following mission statement: “building informed decision makers — so that targets do not suffer our nation’s wrath unless they really deserve it — by exercising deity-like monitoring of the target.”

On occasion, however, the veil of bureaucratic deference is lowered. In another “SIGINT Philosopher” column, “Cognitive Overflow?,” the author offered a forthright assessment of the haystack problem and the weakness of proposed solutions:

“If an individual brain has finite ‘channel capacity,’ does the vast collective of SID, comprised of thousands of brilliant, yet limited, brains also have a definite ‘channel capacity’? If so, what is it? How do we know when we’ve reached it? What if we’ve already exceeded it? In essence, could SID’s reach exceed its grasp? Can the combined cognitive power of SID connect all the necessary dots to avoid, predict, or advise when the improbable, complex, or unthinkable happens?”

The column did not offer an optimistic view.

“Take for example the number of tools, clearances, systems, compliances, and administrative requirements we encounter before we even begin to engage in the work of the mission itself,” the column continued. “The mission then involves an ever-expanding set of complex issues, targets, accesses, and capabilities. The ‘cognitive burden,’ so to speak, must at times feel overwhelming to some of us.”

The analyst who wrote the column dismissed, politely but firmly, the typical response of senior officials when they are asked in public about their ability to find needles in their expanding haystack.

“Surely someone will point out that the burgeoning amalgam of technological advances will aid us in shouldering the burden,” he noted. “However, historically, this scenario doesn’t seem to completely bear out. The onslaught of more computer power—often intended to automate some processes—has in many respects demanded an expansion of our combined ‘channel capacity’ rather than curbing the flow of the information.”

______

Documents published with this article:

• Too Many Choices
• Cognitive Overflow?
• Summit Fever
• Do We Need a Bigger SIGINT Truck?
• Overcome With Overload? Help is Here with IM&S
• In Praise of Not Knowing
• The Fallacies Behind the Scenes
• Leave Bright Pebbles, Not Breadcrumbs, for Those Coming After You
• ‘Data Is Not Intelligence’
• Is There a Sustainable Ops Tempo in S2? How Can Analysts Deal with the Flood of Collection?
• Dealing With a ‘Tsunami’ of Intercept
• SIGINT Mission Thread 3

Related:

• Facing Data Deluge, Secret U.K. Spying Report Warned of Intelligence Failure

The post Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize “Collect It All” Surveillance appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2015/05/28/nsa-officials-privately-criticize-collect-it-all-surveillance/feed/ 45 NSA Slide, May 2011 https://theintercept.com/2015/05/19/cia-myths-and-myths-of-bin-laden-raid/ https://theintercept.com/2015/05/19/cia-myths-and-myths-of-bin-laden-raid/#comments Tue, 19 May 2015 14:30:51 +0000 https://firstlook.org/theintercept/?p=23782 A new Frontline documentary could not come at a better moment, as Seymour Hersh re-opens debate over the considerable holes in the government’s story.

The post The CIA and the Myths of the Bin Laden Raid appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> (This post is from our new blog: Unofficial Sources.)

If you read the sketchy New York Times article on the Delta Force raid into Syria a few days ago — how an ISIS leader was killed when he “tried to engage” American commandos while his fighters used women and children as shields, and an 18-year-old slave was freed with no civilian casualties thanks to “very precise fire” — you can be forgiven for thinking, “Haven’t I seen this movie before?”


You probably have, and it was called Zero Dark Thirty, the film directed by Kathryn Bigelow, written by Mark Boal and backed with gusto by the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA provided Bigelow and Boal with privileged access to officials and operators behind the hunt for Osama bin Laden — and not coincidently, their movie portrayed the CIA’s torture program as essential to the effort to find and kill the leader of al Qaeda. It grossed more than $132 million worldwide.

Zero Dark Thirty was criticized by a number of writers (including me) when it came out in 2012, and now it is being treated as a political farce in a new Frontline documentary scheduled to be broadcast by PBS on Tuesday, May 19. Titled “Secrets, Politics and Torture,” the show explores the CIA’s effort to persuade Congress, the White House and the American public that its “enhanced interrogation methods” were responsible for extracting from unwilling prisoners the clues that led to bin Laden and other enemy targets.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer whose work on CIA torture has been exemplary, explains that the team behind Zero Dark Thirty was conned by the CIA.

“The CIA’s business is seduction, basically,” she says in the documentary. “And to seduce Hollywood producers, I mean they are easy marks compared to some of the people that the CIA has to go after.”

Another journalist, Michael Isikoff, connects the final dots by pointing out the harm caused by political lies that find their way into blockbuster films.

“Movies like Zero Dark Thirty have a huge impact,” he says. “More people see them, and more people get their impressions about what happened from a movie like that than they do from countless news stories or TV spots.”

The Frontline documentary could not come at a better moment. Just last week, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a 10,000-word story in the London Review of Books that challenged much of the official narrative about the hunt for bin Laden. You don’t have to believe everything Hersh wrote — and I don’t, including the reference to SEAL team members throwing some of bin Laden’s corpse over the Hindu Kush — to appreciate the debate he has re-opened over the considerable holes in the government’s story.

There is a saying in the military that first reports are always wrong. We need to remember this lesson when we get first reports of the latest military or intelligence successes — and the second reports and the movies, too. Much that the Pentagon said about the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch during the invasion of Iraq turned out to be fictitious. The media’s portrayal of the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square was pretty much the opposite of what really happened as Marines stormed into Baghdad on April 9, 2003. Similar problems of fact probably exist in this week’s accounts of a flawless killing of an ISIS leader (or at least a man whom the military tells us is an ISIS leader).

The Frontline documentary includes a clip from Zero Dark Thirty in which a CIA torturer yells at an al Qaeda prisoner, “When you lie to me, I hurt you!” A repurposing of that line would hold true for the government and the American public — when it lies to us, it hurts us.

Photo: Jessica Chastain in “Zero Dark Thirty” via Sony Pictures

The post The CIA and the Myths of the Bin Laden Raid appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> https://theintercept.com/2015/05/19/cia-myths-and-myths-of-bin-laden-raid/feed/ 96 https://theintercept.com/2015/05/13/governments-crackdown-leaks-faces-new-challenges/ https://theintercept.com/2015/05/13/governments-crackdown-leaks-faces-new-challenges/#comments Wed, 13 May 2015 21:19:44 +0000 https://firstlook.org/theintercept/?p=23300 Judge's decision on prison sentence for Jeffrey Sterling, former CIA agent, seen as rebuke of government's claim of significant harm caused by leaks to journalists.

The post Obama’s War on Leaks Faces Backlash in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

]]> Nearly a decade ago, at a federal courthouse in northern Virginia, Judge Leonie Brinkema set a new standard for taking a tough stance against people who inflict harm on America.

She presided over the lengthy trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was convicted as a co-conspirator in the 9/11 attacks against America. The jury decided he would spend the rest of his life in prison, and when the sentence was formally issued, Brinkema told Moussaoui, “You will die with a whimper.” He tried to interrupt, but she would have none of it. “You will never get the chance to speak again, and that’s an appropriate ending,” she said sternly.

In the same courthouse this week, Brinkema listened intently as a government lawyer argued that Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent convicted of leaking classified information to a New York Times reporter, had caused grave damage to national security and should be sentenced to a long term in prison, saying his actions were “unconscionable” and constituted a “substantial and costly blow to our intelligence efforts.” In its legal briefs, the prosecution had asked for a “severe” sentence that many observers regarded as being in line with federal guidelines for at least 19 years behind bars.

In a surprising turn, Brinkema sentenced Sterling to just three and a half years in prison, which is a long time to be deprived of liberty but nothing like two decades. She told the courtroom that Sterling had done what no intelligence officer should do, disclosing the identity of a covert asset. But she made no mention of the prosecution’s claim that he caused significant harm to national security. That omission, combined with a sentence far below the prosecution’s request, strongly indicate she didn’t believe the government’s dire warnings.

“The Sterling sentence certainly contained an implicit rebuke to the prosecution,” said Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “By ordering the sentences for each of the nine felony counts against Sterling to run concurrently, Judge Brinkema was declaring in effect that Sterling had been overcharged.”

One of Sterling’s lawyers, Barry Pollack, agreed.

“I do think that the court largely rejected the government’s view of the harm that was caused by the leak in this case,” he told The Intercept. “By claiming that this was one of the greatest leaks and threats to national security, the government simply overplayed its hand and I think the judge did not agree with that assessment.”

The sentence appears to be a blow to Obama’s broader crackdown on leakers and whistleblowers, solidifying a trend in which the government has failed, with the notable exception of Chelsea Manning, to get lengthy prison terms against people who are portrayed in prosecution filings as severely damaging national security. The sentences handed out recently — 13 months to Stephen Kim, a former State Department official, and 30 months to John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer — have been widely criticized as unjust and have been disastrous for the men involved, but they are not the sort of lengthy sentences handed out to major criminals.

One of the much-criticized characteristics of the crackdown — its selectivity — is showing signs of coming back to haunt the government, too. Primarily mid-level officials whose leaks embarrass the government have been targeted with prison terms while senior officials who are friendly to the administration are untouched or slapped on the wrist. The plea deal with former general and former CIA director David Petraeus is a recent example — Petraeus admitted to sharing classified information with his biographer and then-girlfriend, Paula Broadwell, but was allowed to plead guilty to just a misdemeanor and avoided any time in jail.

Judge Brinkema did not mention Petraeus by name on Monday, but she hinted at his case in a remark that the justice system has to be fair. Aftergood, in an email to The Intercept, noted that “every case and every ruling perturbs the environment in which later cases are brought,” adding that “the Petraeus outcome may have worked subterraneously to Sterling’s benefit.”

Sterling’s sentence has begun to draw attention. In an editorial today, The New York Times described Brinkema’s decision as a “significant rebuke to the Obama administration’s dogged-yet-selective crusade against leaks.” That view was echoed by national security journalist Marcy Wheeler, who wrote of Sterling’s sentence, “The government’s insistence that whistleblowing and accountability equate to spying is coming under increasing scrutiny, even mockery.”

The criticism is coming from all sides. Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard Law School professor and former assistant attorney general and special counsel to the Department of Defense, last week chided the government for hyping the damage caused by leaks. In a speech that focused on how the intelligence community should react to the disclosure of secrets, he noted that officials had been “jeopardizing vital credibility through exaggerated claims about the national security harms of disclosure.” He also called for the intelligence community to “rethink, really rethink, the pervasive resistance to public disclosure of any aspect of any intelligence operation.”

When the Obama administration began its war on leakers and whistleblowers in 2009, there was little precedent for trying to put leakers into prison. The series of leak cases brought by the administration under the draconian Espionage Act — more than all previous administrations combined — gave the impression of a crackdown to end all crackdowns. Instead, if Brinkema’s rebuke is an indication, it risks becoming the crackdown without clothes — an effort to imprison officials who have done no harm, and perhaps some good, because leaks often put into the public domain information that the public should know.

Of course the government has gotten a lengthy sentence for one leaker — Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, was sentenced to 35 years for sharing a trove of military and diplomatic cables with Wikileaks. And Espionage Act charges have been filed against Edward Snowden, who leaked thousands of NSA documents. But Brinkema’s decision could give the government cause to reconsider the scope of its crackdown.

“I hope it makes them more reluctant to file these cases,” Pollack said. “An inordinate amount of resources went into this case. At the end of the day, what the government had was a circumstantial case that it ultimately was able to sell to the jury, but they did not get the type of sentence that they thought that they might get. As a taxpayer, I would certainly question whether the needs of national security really required the government throwing these kinds of resources at Jeffrey Sterling over a leak that occurred years ago, on a program that I think was of questionable value.”

The Department of Justice, contacted by The Intercept, did not provide any comment.

Read also:

• Stephen Kim Spoke To A Reporter. Now He’s In Jail. This Is His Story.
• CIA’s Jeffrey Sterling Sentenced to 42 Months for Leaking to New York Times Journalist
• Petraeus Gets Leniency for Leaking — And Risen’s CIA Source Should Too, His Lawyers Say
• Lawyers for CIA Leaker Cite Selective Prosecution After Petraeus Plea Deal
• After Petraeus Plea Deal, Lawyer Demands Release of Stephen Kim
• Petraeus Plea Deal Reveals Two-Tier Justice System for Leaks
• The Surrender (a short documentary by Stephen Maing)

Update: Wording has been added to clarify that the prosecution did not specify what would constitute a “severe” sentence.

Illustration of Judge Leonie Brinkema: Dana Verkouteren/AP

The post Obama’s War on Leaks Faces Backlash in Court appeared first on The Intercept.

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