Tag: Secrecy

Leaked Surveys Reveal Problematic Culture in Law Enforcement Courses

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Blueleaks, a massive collection of lawe enforcement documents that were released by DDoSecrets.

Well, we now have the first big reveal of this cache of documents, and it’s significant.

It appears that instructors at one of the largest law enforcement training programs are open and virulent bigots.

If anyone suggests to you that there are only a few “bad apples”, you need to remind them that the trainers,Derek Chauvin comes to mind, are among the most bigoted and most dismissive of civil rights and basic human decency:

In early September 2017, the Midwest Counterdrug Training Center (MCTC) hosted a course on “narcoterrorism.” By most accounts, it was a helpful few days of lessons on the drug trade and criminal organizations, led by an instructor with years of law enforcement experience.

In surveys, some later praised it as a “wake-up call,” a course with “virtually no room for improvement.”

………

And then, there was this: “I don’t know where to start – as someone who has worked full-time counter-terrorism for the past six years, this course was a complete disappointment. The instruction was long on rants and short on any actual substance. Any substantive material was outdated (some of it more than 20 years old). Much of the material taught is publicly available ‘conspiracy’ theory that has been disproved through investigation.”

The respondent continued, “While the instructor was open about his ‘anti-PC’ beliefs – this is the only time I have ever heard the [N-word] repeatedly used by instructors and students.”

The written review ended with a warning to the MCTC leadership.

“This is a time bomb – if anyone were to record [the teacher’s] rants and leak them to the media your whole program would go down in flames.”

While the “teacher’s rants” were not leaked, this response was, as part of the BlueLeaks hack in June. It’s one of the thousands of surveys filled out following MCTC law enforcement training offered throughout the past decade.

Funded by the Department of Defense and administered by the Iowa National Guard Counterdrug Task Force, the Center has trained “over 190,000 local, tribal, state, and federal law enforcement officers, military members, and prevention and treatment professionals,” according to its website.

………

While thousands responded favorably these courses over the past 10 years, the negative reviews call into question the culture of the organization, in which instructors saying racial slurs or homophobic jokes would still be rated highly by the majority of survey participants.

Some, including the instructor described above, continued to teach for years, despite being flagged repeatedly. According to additional surveys, the above teacher was still leading MCTC courses as recently as March 2020.

………

“Asking students if they ‘were the pitcher or catcher’ may be funny to some but is asking for a lawsuit in front of the wrong audience. Asking if they were going to ‘spit or swallow’ was a similar inappropriate question, as well as referring to the black male in the class as ‘brotha’ multiple times when it was obvious he was uncomfortable with it. Joking about sex assault cases is probably not the best idea considering someone may know a victim.”

………

“If a camera was placed in the room he would be on national news for his statements and views. This course was labeled for ‘drugs’ and just about every example referred to sex,” cautioned another reviewer.

Still, surveys from 2019 show that instructor was still brought back for additional courses.

………

The spread of biased, outdated, or debunked information was another leading concern. The majority of these complaints were leveled at the same instructors identified above for offensive language.

“Many media sources were slightly outdated and notoriously biased,” wrote one commenter in 2015. “Some of the sources used were blatant political rhetoric.”

………

Multiple responders—even those who otherwise ranked the courses favorably—noted a lack of sources outside of Fox News and a lack of examples or trends less than three decades old.

………

Others criticized the actual course material and practical law enforcement learnings offered. A 2013 student mentioned their instructor, “suggested [criminal] subjects not be given a break to get a drink and use the restroom after several hours, which may be considered a civil rights violation.”

………

Numerous comments in this vein referred back to the “reputation of MCTC,” and fears that instructors like these would “degrade” its status or that of other law enforcement departments.

“I found myself embarrassed to admit being part of the National Guard during this class due to instructor’s association with a National Guard affiliated course,” read one 2018 response.

………

“He flat out said in class that he lied all the time in court to cover his partner’s asses. He said multiple times a badge and being a cop means ‘you can do whatever the f%$# you want.’”

Why this is not a lede for every law enforcement section of every paper in the United States is beyond me.

Pass the Popcorn

Federal judge Judge Royce Lamberth ruled against an injunction against the publication of John Bolton’s tell-all memoir.
This was not a particularly deep ruling, it was just a recognition of reality, which was that with over one hundred thousand prepublications circulating, nothing in the book is a secret any more.

The judge also noted that this does not mean that Bolton is in the right, and that he is likely to lose any profits and advances from the book, as well as facing civil and criminal sanctions.

All in all, it’s a wonderful ruling, because the first and second most horrible people on earth* both lose:

President Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton can go forward with the publication of his memoir, a federal judge ruled on Saturday, rejecting the administration’s request for an order that he try to pull the book back and saying it was too late for such an order to succeed.

“With hundreds of thousands of copies around the globe — many in newsrooms — the damage is done. There is no restoring the status quo,” wrote Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia.

But in a 10-page opinion, Judge Lamberth also suggested that Mr. Bolton may be in jeopardy of forfeiting his $2 million advance, as the Justice Department has separately requested — and that he could be prosecuted for allowing the book to be published before receiving final notice that a prepublication review to scrub out classified information was complete.

I am amused.

*If I was forced to choose whether to let Trump or Bolton die, I would ask for the Dion Sanders option.
Both.

You Have No Right to Know if the Government Wants to Murder You

This is literally straight out of Kafka’s novel The Trial, where the protagonist is sentenced to death by an unspecified court for an unspecified crime:

A U.S. judge Tuesday dismissed an American journalist’s lawsuit challenging his alleged placement on a “kill list” by U.S. authorities in Syria, after the Trump administration invoked the “state secrets” privilege to withhold sensitive national security information.

U.S. District Judge Rosemary M. Collyer of Washington, D.C., last year had opened the way for Bilal Abdul Kareem, a freelance journalist who grew up in New York, to seek answers in his civil case from the government and to try to clear his name after what he claims were five near-misses by U.S. airstrikes in Syria.

Collyer in June 2018 ruled that Abdul Kareem, who said he was mistaken for a militant because of his frequent contact with militants linked to al-Qaeda, was exercising his constitutional right to due process in court.

But after talks between Abdul Kareem’s lawyers and U.S. authorities broke down, the government tapped the rarely invoked state secrets authority, saying Abdul Kareem sought information revealing “the existence and operational details of alleged military and intelligence activities directed at combating the terrorist threat to the United States.”

In a 14-page opinion, Collyer said she was bound to agree, saying the government’s right to withhold information in such instances is “absolute.” 

First, the invocation of the state secrets privilege is not that uncommon, and second, the case that established this absolute privilege, United States v. Reynolds, the US government lied to the court about the secret nature of the the evidence.

This is yet another fact that makes the case for the Swedish concept of Offentlighetsprincipen (openness), which creates the default of public access for all government data.

Just Ignoring the Court?

The DoJ fighting public release of information is something that has been standard operating procedure for a very long time, the Obama administration has fought this tooth and nail against the public release of information, but this is different, because the DoJ is simply refusing to comply.

There has been no request for an appeal or injunction, they are just refusing to follow a judge’s orders:

Federal prosecutors on Friday declined to make public transcripts of recorded conversations between Michael Flynn and Russia’s ambassador to the United States in December 2016, despite a judge’s order.

In a court filing Friday, the Justice Department wrote that it did not rely on such recordings to establish Flynn’s guilt or determine a recommendation for his sentencing.

Prosecutors also failed to release an unredacted version of portions of the Mueller report related to Flynn that the judge had ordered be made public.

………

The government’s unusual response came after U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Washington ordered earlier in May that the Justice Department make public various materials related to the case, including transcripts of any audio recordings of Flynn, such as his conversations with Russian officials.

………

Sullivan made clear he wanted the full transcript of Flynn’s calls to be shared with the public, although he did not provide his reasoning. The Justice Department’s response appeared to duck that order.

There are any number of ways that the DoJ could delay the release of this information.

Just telling a judge to go pound sand is a remarkably lawless, even by the standards of the US State Security Apparatus.

Consider the Source

Rachel Maddow, who has been banging the, “Julian Assange is a Russian agent,” drum relentlessly for the past 2+ years has realized that her ox is gored as well:

Rachel Maddow has aired a segment condemning the new indictment against Julian Assange for 17 alleged violations of the Espionage Act.

Yes, that Rachel Maddow.

MSNBC’s top host began the segment after it was introduced by Chris Hayes, agreeing with her colleague that it’s surprising that more news outlets aren’t giving this story more “wall to wall” coverage, given its immense significance. She recapped Assange’s various legal struggles up until this point, then accurately described Assange’s new Espionage Act charges for publishing secret documents.

“And these new charges are not about stealing classified information or outsmarting computer systems in order to illegally obtain classified information,” Maddow said. “It’s not about that. These new charges are trying to prosecute Assange for publishing that stolen, secret material which was obtained by somebody else. And that is a whole different kettle of fish then what he was initially charged with.”

“By charging Assange for publishing that stuff that was taken by Manning, by issuing these charges today, the Justice Department has just done something you might have otherwise thought was impossible,” Maddow added after explaining the unprecedented nature of this case. “The Justice Department today, the Trump administration today, just put every journalistic institution in this country on Julian Assange’s side of the ledger. On his side of the fight. Which, I know, is unimaginable. But that is because the government is now trying to assert this brand new right to criminally prosecute people for publishing secret stuff, and newspapers and magazines and investigative journalists and all sorts of different entities publish secret stuff all the time. That is the bread and butter of what we do.”

Publishing information that someone else does not want published is journalism.

Anything else is stenography.

The Blithely Stated Terrifying Statement

It’s clear that Donald Trump, and his poodle Attorney General William Barr, are attempting a purge of of the the US state security apparatus in response to the Mueller report.

Needless to say, the ability of Donald Trump to use this to mold the FBI, CIA, NSA, etc. into his own image.

This is not to say that they status quo is a good thing.

In the lead paragraph of the article, there is a very chilling sentence, and it is the sheer banality of the statement that terrifies:

President Trump’s order allowing Attorney General William P. Barr to declassify any intelligence that led to the Russia investigation sets up a potential confrontation with the C.I.A. It effectively strips the agency of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which ones remain hidden.

(emphasis mine)

If there is any organization in the US government that should not have the absolute power to choose which secrets it shares, it is the CIA.

Considering the record of the CIA, with its long history of failures, support for authoritarian regimes, assaults on democracy, and spreading misery, if there is any agency which needs aggressive scrutiny from civilian government, they are it.

This is Supposed to Have a Chilling Effect

Julian Assangehas now been charged under the espionage act for publishing information that the government did not want published.

Publishing information that someone does not want published is journalism.  Anything else is stenography:

Julian Assange could face decades in a US prison after being charged with violating the Espionage Act by publishing classified information through WikiLeaks.

Prosecutors announced 17 additional charges against Assange for publishing hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic cables and files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Assange, 47, was previously charged with working to hack a Pentagon computer system, in a secret indictment that was unveiled soon after his arrest at Ecuador’s embassy in London last month.

“Assange’s actions risked serious harm to United States national security to the benefit of our adversaries,” the justice department said in a statement. Officials said the publication of secret files by WikiLeaks was “one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of the United States”.

………

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson, labelled the new charges facing Assange as “the evil of lawlessness in its purest form”.

He added: “With the indictment, the ‘leader of the free world’ dismisses the First Amendment – hailed as a model of press freedom around the world – and launches a blatant extraterritorial assault outside its border, attacking basic principles of democracy in Europe and the rest of the world.”

I agree with this characterization.

The new charges against Assange raise profound questions about the freedom of the press under the first amendment of the US constitution. They may also complicate Washington’s attempts to extradite him from London.

Barry Pollack, a lawyer for Assange in the US, said in a statement: “These unprecedented charges demonstrate the gravity of the threat the criminal prosecution of Julian Assange poses to all journalists in their endeavor to inform the public about actions taken by the US government.”

The charges were roundly condemned by press freedom advocates. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press said the charges posed a “dire threat” to journalists publishing classified information in the public interest. The Freedom of the Press Foundation described the prosecution as “terrifying”.

Terrorizing journalists is the goal here.

Don’t Leak to the Intercept

Federal prosecutors in Virginia charged a former United States intelligence analyst with providing classified information to a reporter, according to unsealed court documents.

Daniel Everette Hale, 31, of Nashville was arrested Thursday morning and was expected to make an initial appearance in federal court in Nashville. He was charged under the Espionage Act and with theft of government property. The Espionage Act is a World War I-era law that criminalizes the disclosure of potentially damaging national security secrets to someone not authorized to receive them.

One of the interesting things is that over the past few years, all the whistle blowers charged in recent years have been working with The Intercept.

I know that in the Reality Winner case, her jailing was a direct consequence of profoundly incompetent OpSec, and also I know that that the owner of the site, Pierre Omidyar has had close ties to the US state security apparatus for years.

I don’t know whether this is an artifact of either incompetence or deliberate malice, but in either case, if you want to whistle-blow, it’s best to choose some other organization.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

It raises the obvious question: If they had a need to keep these records all these years, why do they have a burning need to destroy them now? (It’s a rhetorical question)

More details are coming to light about California’s opacity activists. Faced with impending transparency, a handful of law enforcement agencies decided to fire up the shredders rather than risk turning over police conduct records to the public under the new public records law.

Inglewood’s police department was given the go-ahead to shred years of responsive documents last December in a council meeting that produced no record of discussion on the matter or the council’s determination.

Public records requests filed after the new law went into effect in January uncovered moves made by the Fremont city council to help local police rid themselves of records the public might try to request. The city lowered the retention period for officer-involved shooting records from 25 years to ten and allowed the department to destroy 45 years of police misconduct records it had decided to hold onto until it became inconvenient for it to do so.

………

Departments are willing to hold onto misconduct/shooting records for decades, but only start destroying them when it looks like they might have to share. Agencies can point to mandated retention periods all they want, but the argument doesn’t wash if they’re only sticklers about it when transparency is being forced on them.

Why you cannot allow the police to police the police.

Assange Expelled from Embassy and Arrested

The British charges are for jumping bail, which is not in dispute, he spent 7 years in the Ecuadoran embassy avoiding an extradition hearing.

However, the US government also has an extradition request, claiming conspiracy to hack (but not actual hacking of) government servers.

According to the indictment filed by the Department of Justice this consisted of: (See also this tweet storm)

  • Receiving leaked documents from Manning.
  • Using encrypted communications.
  • Deleting logs to protect Manning’s identity.
  • Encouraging Manning to dig up more documents.

It looks increasingly like the jailing of Chelsea Manning is an attempt to get her to testify (lie) that Assange engaged in a specific conspiracy with her to hack government computers.

Assange is a complete asshole.

He is also a biased* journalist, thought it is understandable:   while Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton called for his apprehension and/or murder.

But he is still a journalist, and what he is being prosecuted for is classic journalism.

Here are links from from Craig Murray, Matt Taibbi, Just Security, and The Intercept.

Murray is a SitRep on Assange, and the other 3 are on the potential 1st amendment issues, which are legion.

My guess is that the Poodles in the UK will extradite Assange, and he will be convicted at a trial where he won’t have meaningful access to the evidence against him, and the judge will disallow any arguments that his actions were journalistic in nature.

Also, he will be tortured through prolonged solitary confinement while in custody.

*Kind of understandable though, since many avatars of conventional political and foreign policy wisdom were calling for his assassination.

So, Is Your Money on “Suicide” or “Natural Causes”?

When juxtaposed with their preventing his communication with the outside world, I’m beginning to see the actuarial possibilities as kind of bleak:

The president of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno, has ordered the withdrawal of additional security assigned to the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has remained for almost six years.

………

Over more than five years, Ecuador put at least $5m (£3.7m) into a secret intelligence budget that protected him while he had visits from Nigel Farage, members of European nationalist groups and individuals linked to the Kremlin.

Rafael Correa, the then Ecuadorian president who approved of the operation, later defended the security measures as “routine and modest”.

However, his successor, Moreno, appears to differ in his view. His government said in a statement: “The president of the republic, Lenin Moreno, has ordered that any additional security at the Ecuadorian embassy in London be withdrawn immediately.

………

Moreno has previously described Assange’s situation as “a stone in his shoe”.

I inclined to believe that, “A stone in his shoe,” translated from the Ecuadorean dialect of Spanish to, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”

This will not end well.

Kushner Clearance Downgraded

He has had an interim Top Secret clearance for months, and now it has been reduced to a secret clearance, because, between his lies misstatements on his clearance forms and his extensive debts to a veritable rogues gallery he is a walking security risk.

We’ve already had reports of multiple foreign governments using his precarious financial situation and closeness to Donald Trump to attempt to derive leverage with the White House, so this was a logical decision to make.

So Not a Surprise

Donald Trump decided not to release the Democratic answer to the Nunes memo:

Donald Trump is blocking the release of the Democrats’ rebuttal to a Republican memo that accused the FBI of a politically biased investigation into the president’s ties to Russia.

Donald McGahn, the White House counsel, released a letter Friday night arguing that disclosure of the Democrats’ memo would “create especially significant concerns for the national security and law enforcement interests” and claiming that Trump was “inclined to declassify” the document, but could not at this time due to “classified and especially sensitive passages”.

Democrats on the House intelligence committee, which is investigating Russian meddling into the US election, authored the new memo, which they said provided context for a four-page memo authored by Republican Devin Nunes, a close ally of Donald Trump.

………

The Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, condemned the White House’s decision to block the Democratic memo on Friday, saying in a statement: “The President’s double standard when it comes to transparency is appalling. The rationale for releasing the Nunes memo, transparency, vanishes when it could show information that’s harmful to him. Millions of Americans are asking one simple question: what is he hiding?”

Yeah, pretty much, Chuck.

You know that Trump would never release the memo without redacting it into uselessness.

Pass the Popcorn

So, now the House Intelligence Committee has approved the release of the Democratic rebuttal to the Nunes memo, so the ball is in Trump’s court now.

So, Trump can approve the memo, and look like a complete tool, or he can try to suppress the memo, and look like a complete tool, or he can do nothing for a week, and look like a complete tool.

All in all, I am amused:

#ReleaseTheMemo is set to happen again.

Just days after releasing a memo sowing doubt about the integrity of those investigating ties between President Trump and Russia, the House intelligence committee agreed to declassify a Democratic rebuttal.

The original memo—penned by the staff of chairman Devin Nunes and released after fierce objections from both the Justice Department and the FBI—was immediately championed by Trump as a vindication.

But the top Democratic on the panel, Rep. Adam Schiff, claimed after prevailing in a unanimous committee vote on Monday that his document would reveal “many distortions and inaccuracies in the [Republican] memo.”

The vote came hours after Trump taunted Schiff on Twitter. And it was an abrupt reversal for the committee Republicans, all of whom voted against releasing the Democratic document last week—something their Democratic colleagues said was a political stunt to ensure the pro-Trump narrative laid out in the Nunes memo had days to circulate unrebutted. Schiff said Monday night that the Republicans’ transparency rhetoric placed them in an “unsupportable position” to reject the Democratic memo.

Much as with last week’s disclosure of Nunes’ memo, Trump now has five days to object to the release of the Democratic counter-memo. Should he, the full House can vote to override Trump and release it. Asked ahead of the Monday committee vote if the FBI had reservations about the release of the Democratic memo, the bureau declined comment.

This would be perfect, except that we are seeing bunches of alleged civil libertarians defending the surveillance activities of the FBI, CIA, and NSA.

Preach it, Brother!

Over at Foreign Policy magazine, an avatar of the establishment, has published an article calling for comprehensive and independents audits of state secrets:

The battle over the disclosure of the memo on the Russia investigation prepared by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes has been analyzed mostly in narrow partisan terms, but it has much larger significance for the health of American democracy. A key weakness of the U.S. democratic system, and indeed all democracies, is the paradox of secrecy: voters need to know what the government does in order to evaluate it but the government needs secrecy to effectively serve the public. As parties have polarized, the tensions inherent to that paradox have become increasingly impossible to ignore.

These tensions now demand some attempt at a resolution, even if any such answer will inevitably demand sacrifices from current stakeholders. The most plausible solution may be one that nobody in the political establishment has yet seriously contemplated — the creation of a system of public audits for government secrets.

Everyone knows that secrecy is a problem for democracy because voters cannot easily evaluate the government if the government acts in secret. This leads to endless calls for greater transparency, with the obligatory invocation of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s memorable line that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” What this trite sentiment overlooks is that secrecy is also essential to democracy. No democracy can function unless the government is permitted to act in secret.

 ………

Hence the need for a public auditing system, one that requires the government from time to time to release batches of classified information to the public — and in real time, not decades later, as is the current practice. For this to work, all secret information at a given time — tax records, health records, military strategies, weapons systems, CIA analyses, FBI and IRS investigations — would need to be accessible. A citizens’ counsel could be created, with the authority to review that secret information, subpoena government officials to defend their classification choices, and disclose the information to the public if the officials fail to persuade.

While I disagree with the mechanism, I have been advocating for the incorporating Swedish principle of Offentlighetsprincipen (Openness) into the US constitution for years, it is not a bad start.

The Nunes Memo

It’s complete crap.

There are a number of what appear to be elementary factual errors, but it’s basically a nothing-burger.

It is also a document that should ever have been classified at any level.

The claims that its release would compromise national security are, and ALWAYS HAS BEEN six pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag.

Everyone involved in this knew this before the release, because the summaries that had been floating about made that quite clear,

The claims of security damage were made because the FBI did not want a criticism of their actions to be made public.

The bottom line is that Devin Nunes peddled a sh%$ sandwich for explicitly partisan political purposes.

There is nothing shocking about this:  This is what politicians, particularly hacks like Nunes do.

The objections, and the hysteria from the US state security apparatus is rather more concerning.  They are, as they frequently have in the past, attempted to short circuit any meaningful oversight by making bogus claims of national security consequences.

What is probably most significant is that this is the first time ever that the House Intelligence Committee has declassified a document unilaterally using Clause 11(g) of Rule X of the House rules.

What this means is that the intelligence apparatus was unable to delay, suppress, or rewrite this document to its liking.

This rule has been in existence since the 1970s, and has never been invoked before, and from this narrow perspective, at least from my perspective as someone who is profoundly suspicious of US intelligence and law enforcement agencies, this is a welcome change.

In fact, it should have happened years ago.

This Year’s Maryland Senate Primary Should Be Fun

Chelsea Manning is running for the US Senate Seat currently held by Ben Cardin:

Chelsea E. Manning, the transgender former Army private who was convicted of passing sensitive government documents to WikiLeaks, is seeking to run for the U.S. Senate in Maryland, according to federal election filings.

Manning would be challenging Democrat Benjamin L. Cardin, who is in his second term in the Senate and is up for reelection in November. Cardin is Maryland’s senior senator and is considered an overwhelming favorite to win a third term.

I’m actually considering voting for her, because it would be a personal f%$# you to the US state security apparatus.

Requiem for a Hero

He was 84:

One day in May 1971, John C. Raines, a religion professor at Temple University, had just returned to his home in Germantown, Pa., from playing tennis when two F.B.I. agents knocked on the door.

For weeks, hundreds of agents had been combing Philadelphia for the amateur burglars who had embarrassed the F.B.I. by raiding a suburban field office and stealing a thousand files, and then baffled the bureau by evading capture.

The documents were delivered anonymously to journalists and congressmen as proof that the bureau had systematically and illegally infiltrated, intimidated and disrupted protest groups.

………

The burglary, and subsequent lawsuits by NBC and others, prompted a groundbreaking investigation in 1975 by the so-called Church committee, a special Senate panel led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee revealed details of the F.B.I.’s secret Cointelpro, or counterintelligence, operation, which included illegal sabotage of dissident groups deemed to be subversive.

Dr. Raines died on Sunday in Philadelphia at 84. His wife said the cause was congestive heart failure.

………

Among the files was an F.B.I. order to interview dissidents aggressively. The bureau’s goal, the order said, was to “enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles” and “to get the point across there is an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox.”

What that proved, Dr. Raines said, was that J. Edgar Hoover, the F.B.I. director, “was not simply into surveillance; Hoover was into taking the voice of dissent away from dissent.”

The cache also included a routine routing slip with the word “Cointelpro.” The burglars overlooked the document, but the Church Committee later exposed the program in detail.

This man was a hero, like Ellsburg and Snowden.

Commitment to Transparency, My Ass

There was never an indictment, because it was determined that this would serve to alert the Japanese that their codes had been broken, but what was interesting to me was that, 70 years after the fact, the government was still trying to keep this cloaked in secrecy:

Newly published documents by the National Security Archive reveal why a grand jury refused to prosecute a Chicago Tribune reporter during World War II for a leak.

Correspondent Stanley Johnston was accused of revealing the United States cracked a Japanese code, which alerted the military to Japanese war plans before the Battle of Midway. A Tribune editor attributed the source of information to “naval intelligence.”

A prosecution was contemplated under the Espionage Act, but the government backed off because they feared what may happen if a trial publicized that the U.S. compromised the Japanese code.

The Justice Department under President Barack Obama fought against a lawsuit filed by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. It lost when a district court ruled in 2015 that disclosure would “result in a more complete public record of this historic event” and affirm the government is “open, in all respects, to scrutiny by the people.”

Yet, the government appealed, and it was not until September 2016, when the appeals court ruled against the government’s claim that a federal court had no jurisdiction to order the release of transcripts, that an effort to keep 75 year-old documents secret came to an end.

This is a 75 year old secret, and Barack Obama and his Evil Minions felt compelled to keep it under wraps, because ……… Worst Constitutional law professor ever.

One would think that Obama was working for the US state security apparatus, not the other way around.