Tag Archives: ethics

Clinton’s Handling of Classified Material

Posted on by
Reply

Fox News‘ Catherine Herridge and Pamela Browne have a piece centered on the potential for password exchanges among Democratic Party Presidential candidate and ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a number of her minions as the means of getting access to classified information and to Clinton’s unclassified and unprotected personal email server. In that piece, a number of scenarios were posited for “jumping the gap,” a physical gap between the classified network and the unclassified network—the World Wide Web that is the Internet on which Clinton’s personal server existed—there is no connection other than the air we breathe between those two networks. Those scenarios were

  • Reading intelligence reports or briefings, and then summarizing the findings in emails sent on Clinton’s unsecured personal server.
  • Accessing the classified intelligence computer network, and then lifting sections by typing them verbatim into a device such as an iPad or BlackBerry.
  • Taking pictures of a computer screen to capture the intelligence.
  • Using a thumb drive or disk to physically move the intelligence, but this would require access to a data center. It’s unclear whether Clinton’s former IT specialist Bryan Pagliano, who as first reported by The Washington Post has reached an immunity deal with the Justice Department, or others had sufficient administrator privileges to physically transfer data.

The problem with the last three is that cell phones and tablets aren’t allowed into areas where classified material exists: they have radios. Neither are laptops, or any computing device, including cell phones and tablets, that are not owned by the facility containing the classified material. Cameras and other recording devices—optical or magnetic—also are banned from such facilities, including thumb drives or anything else that might be plugged into an existing computer or storage device. Bringing these sorts of things into those areas, more than once, would have to be a deliberate—and so criminal—act.

Even a single occurrence, absent-mindedly done, is a fireable offense: folks who are granted access to classified material, whether in those secured areas or elsewhere are too well trained and no better.

Error in Judgment

Posted on by
Reply

A CVS store in Beltsville, MD, was robbed earlier in the week, and the manager, an Army veteran, intervened in the attempt. CVS fired him for the effort.

It seems two men jumped the pharmacy counter and forced the pharmacists to open their safe so the two thugs could steal the controlled drugs inside. Our army vet had his cashiers call the police, and he locked the doors so the thugs couldn’t leave.

In the end, the thugs got away, anyway. When the vet’s boss arrived afterward, he fired the vet—for intervening. The vet, a bigger man than some, said this about his firing:

My boss, when he came in to deliver the news, he was sick to his stomach. He didn’t want to, but he didn’t have a choice.

Actually, the boss did. Misguided CVS policy, or not, the boss didn’t have to fire the man; he could have stood as tall as his employee.

Remember these errors in judgment, by both the boss and by CVS, as you contemplate doing business with CVS.

The Fox Investigating the Hen House Leak, Revisited

Posted on by
Reply

I mentioned Fox Business News‘ reporting on the FAA’s carefully biased “outreach” plan for increasing “diversity” in its air traffic controller employee base nearly a year ago, and I concluded that brief mention with the seemingly cynical remark, “Stand by for another whitewash.”

Now, it seems the whitewash is well in hand. DoT conducted its investigation, and there’s no word on its outcome. The FAA conducted its investigation; it

concluded an internal investigation which cleared the NBCFAE and Snow of doing anything wrong. In a statement sent to members of Congress last month the FAA claimed its Office of Security and Hazardous Materials Safety (ASH) had conducted an investigation into the allegations of cheating and favoritism. The FAA claims it was a thorough investigation which reviewed relevant audio recordings and documents. The statement says, “ASH found no specific information or evidence supporting claims that Human Resources employees improperly provided an advantage to ATCS applicants affiliated with the NBCFAE….”

The NBCFAE, recall, is the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees, one of whose members, Moranda Reilly (among others),

received emails in December 2013 and a recorded message from NBCFAE officer and air traffic controller Shelton Snow.   Reilly says the emails included buzzwords that, “…would help identify us. Key words the system would pick up. It was a kind of a way for our resumes to be picked and chosen. We were told not to share this information with anybody outside NBCFAE.”

Now, in an attempted final response to a FOIA request for those and related emails pursuant to a related law suit, the FAA has filed a motion with the Federal court presiding claiming it is

unable to recover missing and “corrupted” emails….

The FAA reached its conclusion of no wrong-doing, no carefully constructed bias in its air traffic controller applicant selection, by the FAA knowing these critical data weren’t being used in its investigation.

The “missing and unrecoverable” status of that evidence seems awfully convenient.

Orenstein’s Ruling

Posted on by
Reply

…on the Apple case in New York. The Wall Street Journal‘s Law Blog has some notes on Orenstein’s ruling.

In a discussion of why the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (which in the context of this discussion authorized things like pen registers in telecommunications companies’ landline telephone switching centers to be attached to specific telephone circuits in response to a search warrant) wasn’t applicable to the New York case, Orenstein wrote

The absence from that comprehensive scheme of any requirement that Apple provide the assistance sought here implies a legislative decision to prohibit the imposition of such a duty. Thus, even under the government’s reading of the [All Writs Act], I would conclude that while the matter is a close call, the Application seeks an order that is not “agreeable to the usages and principles of law.”

And (here as summarized by the Law Blog) in answering a hypothetical in which the President proposed a bill requiring [Apple] to submit to the government in similar cases and the Congress unanimously rejected it:

Under the government’s reading of the All Writs Act, he says, the Justice Department could still seek an order compelling Apple’s assistance “because Congress had merely rejected the bill—however emphatically, and however clear its reasons for doing so—rather than affirmatively passing legislation to prohibit the executive branch’s proposal.” He describes that reading of the All Writs Act as “absurd.”

“Absurd” understates the case. Here’s what the Constitution says about what the government is permitted [sic] to do:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

And

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If it’s not a specifically named capacity of the government to do, it is expressly forbidden the government. Full stop.

Misusing the Judicial System

Posted on by
Reply

Here’s another cynical decision to bypass the legislative branch of our republican government design, this time by DoJ. Given the behavior of the Obama administration, though, this attitude is unsurprising.

A Federal judge in a New York drug case has ruled that Apple cannot be forced by the government to help crack a cell phone held by prosecutors and claimed by those prosecutors to have critical, if encrypted, information.

The judge wrote, in part,

How best to balance those interests [between privacy and security] is a matter of critical importance to our society, and the need for an answer becomes more pressing daily, as the tide of technological advance flows ever farther past the boundaries of what seemed possible even a few decades ago. But that debate must happen today, and it must take place among legislators who are equipped to consider the technological and cultural realities of a world their predecessors could not begin to conceive.

Indeed. That balance, where to draw the line, and how is a political decision, to be determined solely by us citizens through our elected representatives in Congress. Political decisions cannot be reached by judges; their role is strictly limited by our Constitution to determining the constitutionality of a law and if constitutional to applying it as written. Judges can not, may not, adjust a law to suit the government’s wishes.

Nevertheless, Justice will stay within the judicial system. A carefully unnamed (at least by the AP, whose article is at the link above) insisted on this:

We are disappointed in the Magistrate’s ruling and plan to ask the District Judge to review the matter in the coming days…. This phone may contain evidence that will assist us in an active criminal investigation and we will continue to use the judicial system in our attempt to obtain it.

We will continue to use the judicial system…. DoJ will continue deliberately to bypass Congress. DoJ will continue to seek to impose its own political will on us.