The Atlantic Journalist (Barton Gellman) Always Watching His Back After Interviewing Snowden

[amosbatto]

There’s a reason this stuff is classified and for him to pick and choose which parts he publishes is extremely irresponsible.

Overclassification of information is a widely acknowledged problem in the US government. This editorial gives a good summary of the problem. Security officials testified before the House that between 50 and 90 percent of what is classified either shouldn’t be classified or it is overclassified. 2000+ officials made 77.5 million classification decisions in fiscal year 2014, which means over 35,000 classification decisions per official per year. These officials are basically rubber stamps, granting whatever classification is requested, and almost no time is spent reviewing each classification request. If a government employee requests that something be classified, it is almost never denied. There is no review or oversight of the classification decisions and every incentive is to not deny classification requests.

Now compare that rubberstamping process with what happens with reporters at the Washington Post where Gellman did the majority of his reporting. First a team of reporters goes through the classified documents and argue among themselves about what they think the public should know. Then, they have to convince their editor. Then, they have to convince the company’s lawyers. Then, they contact the relevant government agency and give them a chance to give an official comment on the record. At that point, the government agency has the chance to try to convince them that they shouldn’t publish the information. Finally, they have to convince the paper’s fact checkers. Many reporters have said that their stories were not run after going through this process. Newspapers often aren’t eager to offend government officials, because it harms their ability to get access in the future. It isn’t an accident which media get the important interviews.

Surely there are rare cases where something illegal is classified to cover it up, and that in itself is illegal and should be exposed. But “I think this raises civil liberties questions” is clearly not the same thing.

Considering how many important stories that Gellman broke about the government violating people’s civil liberties, he knows what he is talking about. Let me give you an example of how Gellman’s reporting helped protect my civil liberties. Gellman was the lead reporter who broke the story that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld had turned Bush’s Department of Defense into a rogue intelligence agency, that was doing things that were illegal under US law and were not in the DoD’s mandate. One of the things that the DoD was doing was spying on domestic peace activist groups who opposed the war in Iraq.

I was a grad student at the time, and I was one of the founders of a student activist group against the war at my university. I remember two strange guys coming up to us and asking us a bunch of questions about our email list, when we met, etc. I can’t be sure who these guys were, but I spent a lot of time talking to people about the war, and they didn’t act anything like the normal students we talked to. They acted like military, and they didn’t want to sign our petition, or give any info about themselves, but they kept milking me for info in weird ways. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but after Gellman’s story was published, we heard from other student anti-war groups that had similar experiences and some of them filed FOIA requests to verify that they had been spied upon.

[kieran]

There’s a reason this stuff is classified and for him to pick and choose which parts he publishes is extremely irresponsible.

I don’t understand this sentence at all. If you had said “for him not to pick and choose which parts he publishes, and instead just publish it all, would be irresponsible” then I could at least understand what you are saying.

Picking and choosing i.e. carefully considering the potential problems in the disclosure, and weighing the costs and benefits, could very much be responsible.

The problem anyway is that most of these government departments operate on the principle of “need to know” and so everything is secret, and noone outside the government needs to know anything. That is a sensible approach if your goal is maximum “stealth”. It is a sensible approach if you are accountable to noone. It is not a sensible approach if your goal is maximum good decision-making. It is not a sensible approach if you see the government department as part of a larger whole (society), to whom it is ultimately accountable. It is not a sensible approach if the government department takes the attitude that anyone who questions its actions is an enemy of the state - as seems to be the attitude that develops over time, insular and isolated from wider society, a bunker mentality.

[Gavaudan]

Fallacies of generalization again, from the both of you. This has become a waste of time.

[reC]

to change their meaning is what I find to be improper.

i agree with you here, however the context, as was said in the definition you linked to - in a general sense - has the sudden quality of altering some generally accepted meaning … that is not to say that for instance “military strategy” loses it’s general meaning but rather that in THAT particular historic context it can suffer mutations in the perceived and intended scope … i must say that this quality has fascinated me for a long time and i do have to admit that it CAN become tedious and annoying at the same time when context plays tricks on you mind regarding meaning

since you brought censorship up in the other thread i believe it’s only fair that we articulate it in this thread as well, because this irresponsibility that jt0 referred to above might ALSO be influenced by context.

right, last but not least - the words “to withold” and “to suppress”

i’ll give an example. let’s draw a comparison between a side-arm and speech. a magazine clip holds/stores bullets (could be blank or the real thing). in this sense it WITHOLDS something. if the side-arm has been loaded there is a high chance that a round is already in the firing chamber (or not)

so far so good. nobody has fired the gun YET but it is LOADED and ready.

next. SUPPRESSION. it could be a necessary thing if one wishes to maintain STEALTH when firing the gun. so indeed in order to suppress we need something to fire first. that isn’t to say we can’t fire WITHOUT a suppressor. we absolutely CAN fire without a suppressor.

the point is speech functions in a very similar way. with or without suppression or censorship. the question is again what is the context ? what is the agenda ? and who holds the gun ? or rather who controls the one/ones that hold the “gun” ?

[Jt0]

Security officials testified before the House that between 50 and 90 percent of what is classified either shouldn’t be classified or it is overclassified

Before treating this as fact though, it should be noted that these numbers result from three officials giving their opinion over a span of almost 20 years. I’m sure there are many more who feel classification is almost always justified; the main debate, especially when they’re talking about overclassification of documents, is not whether documents should be released to the public or not, it’s whether the harm to the United States upon release would be “exceptionally grave” or just “serious.”

These officials are basically rubber stamps, granting whatever classification is requested, and almost no time is spent reviewing each classification request.

I would argue that original classification authorities, whose entire job is making classification decisions, are probably more efficient at determining what information should and shouldn’t be classified than reporters at the Washington Post who suddenly get their hands on already-classified documents. This doesn’t mean they function as “rubber stamps” who blindly approve every request they get with no review.

Picking and choosing i.e. carefully considering the potential problems in the disclosure, and weighing the costs and benefits, could very much be responsible.

I don’t think arguing semantics is useful here, but the way I was using the phrase is a common expression of disdain for someone making serious decisions lightly, or exercising judgment where they shouldn’t have any. Just search for “pick and choose which laws to follow” for a large number of articles using the phrase this way.

[amosbatto]

I would argue that original classification authorities, whose entire job is making classification decisions, are probably more efficient at determining what information should and shouldn’t be classified than reporters at the Washington Post who suddenly get their hands on already-classified documents. This doesn’t mean they function as “rubber stamps” who blindly approve every request they get with no review.

The people who really make the decision about what to classify are not the 2000+ classification officials, but government employees working on individual projects who request classification, and they can have all sorts of illegitimate reasons for classifying information, such as the fact that it might be embarrassing if the public knew that a project is overbudget or is a waste of taxpayer money. The classification official who has to make 35,000 decisions per year doesn’t have the time to make any meaningful judgement about whether something should or shouldn’t be classified.

You claim that Gellman is making bad decisions about what to publish, but you haven’t provided a single example where he (and his coauthors at the Washington Post) made a bad decision. In contrast, I will give you one more example of how Gellman did a public service to the American people through his reporting. The Bush administration was manipulating intelligence to claim that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Gellman was one of the principal reporters who exposed how that intelligence was manipulated and demonstrated that the Bush administration was lying to the American public in order to go to war with Iraq.

Unfortunately, Gellman’s reporting happened after the war in Iraq had already started. If the American people had been allowed to examine the evidence which was classified, it would have been obvious that there was no hard proof of WMDs. Access to that classified information might have averted the Iraq War, which has killed 4500 Americans and 461,000 Iraqis and caused 4.5 million Iraqi refugees. The total cost of the Iraq War has been estimated at $5 trillion dollars (including interest payments on the debt that it incurred).

There are many other examples of how the American people were lied into wars by the US government, which could have been prevented if the public had access to secret government information. James K. Polk sent troops to contested territory in 1846 in present-day Brownsville to provoke a war with Mexico and then claimed that Americans had been unjustly attacked, which led to the Mexican American War. The US Navy falsely claimed that the USS Maine was blown up by a mine off the coast of Cuba, which led to the War of 1898 with Spain. The US government claimed that the Germans carried out an unprovoked attack on the Lusitania, but the ship was secretly carrying arms to the UK. The sinking of the Lusitania was used as one of the main justifications for the US entering WWI in 1917. Lyndon B Johnson claimed that North Vietnam attacked the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, but the reality was the USS Maddox fired first on N. Vietnamese ships on August 2 and then falsely claimed that the US warship was attacked on August 4. Johnson used this false incident to dramatically escalate the US war in Vietnam. The logs of the USS Maddox were withheld from the American public, so they didn’t know that their President was lying to them about the attack.

The only hope that we have of preventing the next war based on lies told by the government is reporters like Gellman who publicize classified information that the government wants to hide. By prosecuting whistleblowers and threatening media companies, governments are making it less likely that traditional media companies like the Washington Post will be the organizations vetting classified documents in the future. Instead, whistleblowers will turn to organizations like WikiLeaks and OpenLeaks that are less discriminating in what they publish online and don’t give the government the opportunity to respond before publishing. If those sites are shut down, then whistleblowers will turn to GlobaLeaks which has no centralized authority and does even less vetting of the documents to remove dangerous information from what gets published.

Democracy requires that citizens know what their governments are doing in their name. By saying that journalists shouldn’t be looking at classified information and deciding what to publish in the name of public interest, you are opening the door to secret unaccountable government, which ultimately undermines democracy itself.

[reC]

“The Question was how should we maneuver them into firing the first shot … it was desirable to make sure the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt as to who were the aggressors” < Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, November 25, 1941

“i dropped from my mother’s womb. i hit the floor… and i started crawling through hostile territory towards my grave.” < McKenna

“operation enduring freedom '03 - went for the Taliban, stayed for the opium.” < Nebraska Williams

“you can’t trust freedom when it’s not in your hands” < Guns-n-Roses

The total cost of the Iraq War has been estimated at $5 trillion dollars (including interest payments on the debt that it incurred).

money is not an object when you can print as much as you want … all you need is to chop some trees down for paper until you can coordinate a global block-chain currency that is NOT produced by using ONLY free-software (i.e do we know what the code in the firmware/drivers on the dGPUS/ASICS does besides computing that hash-rate really fucking FAST ?)

[Jt0]

The classification official who has to make 35,000 decisions per year doesn’t have the time to make any meaningful judgement about whether something should or shouldn’t be classified.

Let’s say for the sake of argument that each OCA has to make 35,000 decisions per year. Keep in mind that a “classification decision” can be the classification level of an entire document or the classification level of a portion marking. Given a full time position, an OCA has to make an average of around 16.8 decisions about these markings per hour. Referring to the linked document, these markings are for:

• document titles
• slides
• figure titles
• figures themselves
• bullet points, sentences, or paragraphs

I count 46 classification markings in those two training slides. Is it really so hard to believe someone could regularly do 16-17 of those in an hour?

You claim that Gellman is making bad decisions about what to publish

I have claimed that he is being irresponsible, not that he has made a bad decision for which I can give an example. I’m sure I could dig through years of his publications and find something, but I don’t have time for that and it’s beside the point. It’s like arguing that a tightrope walker is putting himself in danger and being asked to find a case where he fell; just because he hasn’t fallen doesn’t mean the act is safe.

My argument is that in general it’s irresponsible for a member of the press to reveal information to his country’s enemies that has been determined to weaken the country’s ability to defend itself.

Each of the historical cases you provided is debatable, but I think that debate would be off topic here.

[Gavaudan]

That’s not what those words mean, but I haven’t the wherewithal anymore.

[tracy]

Well if you want just D-Day without political context, I’m putting on a small war-game convention in Carlisle PA mid-August. Presuming of course, any PA lock-downs are lifted. (You can bring your favorite D-Day game, I never tried Avalon Hill’s 1961 first edition.)