Actually, both you Pandora and Mr. Reasonable are linked a bit here, Mr. Reasonable being wrong yet shows why.
Under Bush, likely cause his daddy was the director of the FBI, he was criticized in the very beginning of his administration for insisting on secrecy.
It takes a long time for this to filter down across all branches of government, and it is much wider that something you can accomplish with chain of command and screening. I don’t advocate neglecting it, just… I can’t imagine how to come up with a typologucal method for detecting betrayal. Signal Corps is generally made up of injured guys given a new MOS to work behind a desk, or guts like Trixie (I don’t mean they are all Granny, subtract that from “Trixie” and imagine a hetero’ish, pale, lanky male or female who never see sunlight with bizarre ideas running around in a sea of make-believe regulations, raking it all way too fucking seriously. My best friend was in a Comm unit, back then, security consisted of a few firewalls and a code you had to punch in to enter their little crazy world of wiring under the removable floors and ceiling. He was super army, in a role we could of more or less outsourced to a guy in India, or someone in a wheelchair. I wouldn’t call them crazy, but sane isn’t a term I would use for them either.
Anything and everything we use in the military electronic information wise starts and ends with them. When we need to expand a system, or upgrade it per specs, it is them who decides the specs, and a accounting office that gets the cheapest version of it off the market. A market largely made of personal computers, with USB drives and DVD ROMs handing off every computer, WIFI, etc.
That shit is all over the place, and these guys can enter into any non-secret squirrel network and enter any computer and fuvk around with it, even when your not online. Playing Solitaire? Don’t be surprised if the next card is picked by them. In the civilian world, this would be scary bug brother shit, but on military networks, it is just paranoid security, ran by some damn idiots who never see the sun, who live more or less to pop up saying get off social media or messenger services, or porn sites. They don’t exactly have the power of Military Police at their beck and call, short of child pornography. They can send reports to your unit commander. That can be bad news for you, but if your unit commander doesn’t fucking care, oh well.
That was the security situation at the end if the Bush Administration. Some sites, like the deeply fucking useless, pointless military web portal (had nothing of use to me on it, absolutely pointless) had amazing security. You couldn’t hack anything save maybe for a shirt while images on it’s homepage, and it is legal for the government to search any computer or device that merely opens up on it’s homepage without even logging it. Why I’m not providing a link. I was surprised that Obama just didn’t change over the Obama Care sign ups to that site, it was set up and well monitored. Wasn’t essential at all, he could of had it fixed under a day doing that.
We also had a cyber command in DC. We had some secret squirrel networks spying on Signal’s pathetic little Yahoo Messenger ops. We were making a “land warrior” transition in the airborne by getting brigade level electronic command and control to battalion level (think Obama in that room during the Bin Laden raid, that’s land warrior, where a distant command can monitor satellite and individual soldiers video feed, talk in real time). It was supposed to transition down to the company level eventually, haven’t seen evidence yet of this for the light infantry. For mech, they typically have it already, a command and control vehicle full of communication gadgets and computers.
The basic idea at the start if the Obama Administration, I’m not certain how far back it stretched into Bush’s administration, if at all, is that you could create a synergy of information between the different branches, and let guys like me more or less go through available documents from various military and civilian branches, putting it all together.
On the one hand, this is great. Someone like me, I can make vast connections rapidly, solving situations fast, your guaranteed some amazing results. Problem is, INTJs only account for Luke, 1.4% of the population in general, and in the infantry, like, 0.000001%, usually better in officer rank representation, above the national average of representation. The other types, like ENTJ and ISTP that can think like me, are rare too.
Your returns outside that group around the enlisted and lower rank officers combined will be less than these three types if given a little caffeine and time, and we aren’t necessarily any more loyal or trustworthy than anyone else.
Basically, a well intentioned idea, reminiscent of Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership, and on paper you would think I’m all for it, but Greenleaf emphasized controlling the methods for tracking down intuitives, and controlling their ability to explain their ideas for change directly to them, like the Mohists. Basically, those in charge, were still in charge.
Not under this moronic system. Mohism is a military philosophy, in this case, the military adopted a philosophy better suited to a small corporation at low risk for corporate espionage. Just share all your fucking files with other departments.
Some departments refused, saying basically fuck no- if the sort of information they collect got out, it could be very dangerous. They were smart.
Hillary’s state department and the military for whatever bizarre reason decided to swap fluids and fuck each other, and nobody in signal cared to slap down on this shit. Why? Cause they are a bunch of weird, hippy fucks with a contrasting, weird super soldier fixation. Think “Men Who Stare At Goats” at times. They set the standards for access, and of course they get access.
Military isn’t ideologically uniformed. You get the same spread of ideologies in the civilian world as in the military, except there tends to be less Democrats, due to patriotism, plus the troops know that the Dems are opposed to them. That leaves the rest of the political spectrum open. Sometimes we have gangs popping up, other times we get paranoid leftist groups. Fuck, my barracks even had a few guys obsessed with Che Guevera.
If ideas are popular on the outside world, someone is fascinated with it inside the military.
During the Bush Administration, a lot of shit was drummed up against the war, some legitimate, other paranoid schizophrenic clinging onto the worst of this propaganda. You don’t necessarily have to be a Paranoid Schizophrenic to like the radio show “Coast to Coast” at night, talking about government conspiracies to hide Werewolves from the Illuminati and Aliens probing you in the butt. A lot of people are into that, and some can even appear intelligent and function in the workplace. Most workplaces don’t have as much at stake though.
At some point, the idea that high treason and spying was “whistle blowing” gained currency amongst the wikileaks population of this time. I’m not gonna explain why, just know it us linked to the propaganda the left generated during the Bush Administration, especially Obama, to get into office. Your not a whistle blower by turning over all of the military’s and state department’s files to that James Bond Villian from Tomorrow Never Dies “Elliott Carver”
Julian Assange is a similar character. You can legitimately whistleblow by contacting JAG, or the Justice Department, or leaking only a very select group of files linked to a actual crime to the media. Note I’m not opposed to leaking helicopter massacres of people surrendering, getting shot up anyway. That’s good for the public to know. What isn’t good, as the Arab Spring proved, was leaking everything, about everyone, around the world. The truth didn’t set us free, democracy didn’t bloom, we didn’t become more liberated and freer as a result. Millions died, and millions more displaced, for nothing. It basically destroyed a lot of fringe left anarchist assumptions within the media profession that ethics could be dumped.
Notice I tend to take the exact opposite approach, I encourage secrecy, but at the same time try to realistically analyze even enemy states, pointing out not just the bad, but even the good. I encourage international competency and security, even with less than morally upright allies, in the belief stable nations seek security and cooperation, that corruption and fascism can be selectively weened out of shitheaded allies over generations, when they adopt a parallel military system to ours, similar weapons, that require similar training, similar education, similar oversight by government, and cultural adaptions that makes the state less militant, allowing for stable coexistence of the martial and civil. Some nations are lopsided one or the other, not healthy for either extreme, puts a country at risk.
I have some ideas how to type guts like Manning out, but can’t really. Honestly, I wouldn’t nail the full phenomena, and mental degeneration can his in weeks to months, where as security clearance can last for years. Even if you fail to get a security clearance, like I did, I couldn’t account for where my mother and father were on the questionnaires, you can still be the unwilling forced recipient of deeply classified information, and arguing you lack a security clearance, was in fact rejected for one, in my experience doesn’t do shit in preventing it from landing on your lap, being told to shut up and do it anyway.
What we need to do is buy computers with no ports, formatted on non-compatible operating systems that can’t be read by civilian computers, and not let anyone not working in a battalion headquarters unit or above have access to this, and severely restrict the flow of information between branches of government, expect for Greenleaf hunts for intuitive thinkers- if you can track someone like me down, wasting time in some bizarre MOS, by holding a class in every day room on base each year, feel free to induct them into your secret squirrel, enhanced access programs. Otherwise, don’t.
What started in the Bush Administration in terms of increasing secrecy should never of stopped. There should be no plateau, it should be increasing under every president. I can’t blame the secretary of the navy in WW1 for the ships WW2 started off with, as you gotta ask what all the secretary of navy were doing between. If you want a competent, cutting edge ideal to be enforced, you gotta keep on it, systematically and incrementally changing it.
I don’t fault Obama or Hillary for having too many holes to fix, but rather for pulling back on the emphasis to fix them. It takes far longer than eight years to transform a system. It takes generations, but for that to happen, Every president and head of state needed to be on the ball. Secrecy is a top concern in diplomacy, one of the first things Hillary should of shut down, your supposed to ask what our biggest threats as a organization are can close them down before they can hurt you.
Nobody were asking these questions, well, not true, some departments did, and they as a result refused to network their databases.
I put a lot of stock in the competency of cabinet positions. You gotta be a subject matter expert to be in charge, and I don’t buy the excuse “I didn’t know”. I’m slightly more sympathetic if previous administration did it that bad way, or Congress strangled your budget to the point you couldn’t really change anything, but even then, not much. New leaders should always seek out their vulnerabilities, stamp out what can be stomped on. This was a easy one, the various departments not so carelessly share such information.
