DOJ Charges Federal Contractor With Leaking Classified Info To Media (thehill.com) 241
schwit1 quotes a report from The Hill: The Department of Justice charged 25-year-old government contractor Reality Leigh Winner with sharing top secret material with a media outlet, prosecutors announced in a press release Monday. Court documents filed by the government don't specify which media outlet received the materials allegedly leaked by Winner, but NBC News reported that the material went to the Intercept online news outlet. The Intercept published a top secret NSA report Monday that alleged Russian military intelligence launched a 2016 cyberattack on a voting software company. Details on the report published by The Intercept suggest that it was created on May 5, 2017 -- the same day prosecutors say the materials Winner is charged with sharing were created. A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on whether Winner is accused of sharing the report published by the Intercept. Last month, Winner allegedly "printed and improperly removed classified intelligence reporting, which contained classified national defense information" before mailing the materials to an unnamed online news outlet a few days later, according to prosecutors.
I guess you could say... (Score:5, Funny)
When Reality finally struck, no-one went home a Winner :(
Random name generator (Score:2)
It looks like the NSA's fall-guy random name generator had a bit of a misfire.
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I"ll bet the helicopter parents are *still* hovering just outside her door.
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At least, it is a coherent accusation (Score:3, Insightful)
At least, the GP is offering a coherent accusation [wikipedia.org].
Which means, he is one step ahead of the folks demanding "Trump investigation" and "Russian connection". Those not only have no proof, but can't even state the charge...
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Ah, the conspiracy theories live on.... Vince Foster in Fort Marcy Park anyone?
You got to admit, a lot of strange deaths seem to surround the Clintons....Why? Who knows, and at this point, who cares.
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But every R candidate for president for the last 100 years has literally been Hitler...
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You do actually have a point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Weapons, marching as a show of force, brown shirts...now all we're missing is kristallnacht.
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Oh no, you took me wrong... There are two alternate readings of this...
There is the joke angle "What difference does it make at this point..." (From Hill's congressional testimony on Benghazi) A bad joke, I know.
OR.
I'd LOVE to see Bill and Hill sent to the big house and I'm pretty sure they would deserve it. However, at this point the politics of it all makes it unlikely to be successful and the amount of time between now and when the possible crimes took place makes prosecution even more unlikely. It wou
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Learn more about Bill Clinton (and Hillary while you're at it) then see the plausibility of this.
Oooo wake up sheeple. Alex Jones knows the score.
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Don't worry, Jared and Company will be charged soon also - with treason.
You clearly don't understand the definition of treason. I suggest you read the part of the Constitution that does define it, an try to come up with how this would fit.
Millenials (Score:3)
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With apologies to the Running Man... (Score:3)
Why can't we get actionable leaks. (Score:3, Insightful)
I personally think too much stuff is marked as classified which really shouldn't be. Because it is mostly common knowledge, we just don't have the details. However if you are going to leak classified info. Please leak in quality not quantity. I much rather see a report about a leak every few years about something really actionable. About some injustice that is only classified because it makes the ruling people look bad, and is something truly affecting ones conscious.
These little leaks in a state where we are ruled by a 12 year old in a 70 year old body. We are much better putting him in a state of false security where his overconfidence will lead to real mistakes and the leak can hit like a dagger. Vs a constant irritant .
Re:Why can't we get actionable leaks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Having the Japanese Navy know that we're aware they plan to attack Midway is bad, but having them realize that means we're reading their coded transmissions is far, far worse. It means they'll change their codes, and we can't read them any more. If it was a human agent, it means that guy is probably going to get shot, or at the very least will have to run and won't be able to send any more reports.
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Yes I think your points are lost on a lot of people, even the leakers.
I not a big fan of leakers, unless like Snowden they can go a long way to demonstrating they tried very hard to work within the system first. Leaks of this type can be highly damaging to intelligence efforts and yet remain almost useless to the public. That Russia or any other sometimes or always hostile power might try and tamper with electronic voting: DUH!
What I actually would find interesting is the the methods used to analyze and
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I not a big fan of leakers, unless like Snowden they can go a long way to demonstrating they tried very hard to work within the system first.
And just as important, leak something that's going to stay secret, like corruption, or US agencies violating the law. The whole point of Snowden's data dump was to reveal that the NSA was illegally collecting information on Americans, for policy rationales they did not have a legal right to institute.
The NSA was not going to keep secret that the Russians tried to hack American vote gathering machines. She bought herself a 15 year prison sentence for revealing nothing. I'm still trying to figure out wheth
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Close but no cigar.
Information often (maybe too often) carries the classification, for example war plans. The vast amount of Secret material is information.
Sources and Methods Information (SAMI) often carries a higher classification (Top Secret and SCI). You are correct that the SAMI stuff is the stuff that causes real long lasting damage if disclosed.
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That's what was learned after the war; the Japanese weren't changing the codes, and they did know we'd cracked them. Because it would imply the emperor wasn't a God, or something like that. So they just swept the problem under the rug and sailed right into an honorable death.
The Germans are a much better example to make your point using WWII.
Re: Why can't we get actionable leaks. (Score:2)
Let me see if I understand...
You want the president to make more mistakes?
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If the president is doing something wrong, then I would like him to make mistakes so we know about it so we can take actionable corrective actions against it.
I want a president who will work for my country and handle the big picture problems, even if I disagree with the answer. With Trump, he is just trying to appease his ego. Ignoring the big picture and putting us in risk.
This type of personally in my experience will tend to screw up at some point, and either we let him get away from it, or confront it.
Re: Why can't we get actionable leaks. (Score:2)
That doesn't jibe well, with the last paragraph of your first post. You stated that you believe we'd be better off if we enabled him to make mistakes, seemingly so that you can catch him making mistakes - without regards to the outcome of those mistakes.
I am not sure what kind of person thinks like that, honestly.
To put it out there, I dislike Trump - a great deal. However, I kinda hope he does well as president. I don't actually want him to make mistakes. Ideally, he'll be a great president and continue to
Which Agency? (Score:2)
Most agencies have offices all over the country, but which one is based in Georgia, other than the CDC? If this contractor was working for the CDC why would he have access to cyberhacking information? Cover?
Re:Which Agency? (Score:4, Informative)
Most agencies have offices all over the country, but which one is based in Georgia, other than the CDC? If this contractor was working for the CDC why would he have access to cyberhacking information? Cover?
It's a poorly worded sentence. The agency in question is the NSA and the company, Pluribus International, is based out of Georgia. Or at least the leaker was. The article I read this morning made it clear that it was an NSA document that was leaked, the NSA that tracked the leak down, and an NSA system was used to find the document to begin with.
Ultimate Nominative determinism failure (Score:2)
"Reality Winner" perhaps she considered this was her ace up her sleeve.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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Re:So, a whistleblower, not a "deep state" anythin (Score:5, Informative)
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It's funny. It was proven that the CIA has a 60 million dollar deal with the Washington Post to allow it to feed stories yet every time a report or leak comes out people that 10 years ago would never trust this crap claim it's "all legit" in an almost "move along, nothing to see here" kind of manner.
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What does having "ALL KINDS of pro Sanders/Anti-Trump tweets and social media posts" have to do with being able to have a TS clearance?
I sure hope we NEVER start basing security clearances on an individuals legitimate political beliefs because that would be what "McCarthyism" was all about.
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But...it can keep you out of Harvard....
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So...telling racially or sexually insensitive jokes, or making comments on such (no action on either)...should keep you out of any institution?
Re: So, a whistleblower, not a "deep state" anythi (Score:2)
As head of the executive, he (theoretically) has access to all classified material. He also can, again theoretically, declassify anything he wants. I say theoretical because of logistics and political feasibility.
Re:So, a whistleblower, not a "deep state" anythin (Score:5, Interesting)
The only facts are
- for some stupid reason, we have electronic voting machines
- they may be vulnerable to hacking
- some hackers tried to hack them, including Russians
So what? If your government uses electronic voting machines, expect stories about them getting hacked from time to time.
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The document had hidden identifying information (Score:2, Informative)
Color printers use a pattern of tiny yellow dots to embed an almost invisible code with the printer serial number and the date and time in every printed document. The Intercept handed over a scan of the document to the NSA for redaction with the code still intact. It is also in the published document. The EFF has the technical details. [eff.org]
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I read the EFF article cited but I could not see any yellow dots in their photos. I guess I must have coughed too much coffee on my monitor reading Slashdot.
Looks like The Intercept may have outed her (Score:5, Interesting)
Going to be interesting to see how The Intercept tries to make up for their part in her now almost certainly ruined life...
Re:Looks like The Intercept may have outed her (Score:5, Informative)
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She's 100% responsible for deciding to leak information to serve her agenda, sure - but that wasn't my point. Whether she'd currently be on the hook for it - or ever would be, for that matter - is entirely on The Intercept's sloppy handing of the data they were provided. Imagine if the situation were reversed and a document was provided to the US as evidence of a foreign power's activities and then released to the media with being properly sanitised for some r
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This was not Snowden or Manning style whistle blowing.
Because the NSA sitting on evidence of Russian hacking during the US election is totally not pertinent to the current political climate. /derp
In fact, this allegedly shows that the Russian meddling was about phishing at the county level, not about involvement with the Trump campaign, so unless you want to claim that this Sanders supporter was supporting Trump to get back at Clinton, this is very poor political activism for "her side".
Once again, this is
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Didn't exactly cover her tracks (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess we can thank her for confirming the NSA discovered Russian interference but most reasonable people would have known that already even if they weren't privy to the details. She'll probably end up in prison for 5-10 years over this.
Re:Didn't exactly cover her tracks (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like printers are a lot more secure and their output a lot more traceable than voting machines.
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People here have been claiming the document fake as late as this morning. Charging the leaker in this case effectively verifies the document's authenticity.
This is one of the reason leakers are so seldom prosecuted. Going after them does more political damage than the leak itself. In attempting to protect itself from unflattering revelations, the administration has endorsed a document that, for the first time, raises a serious question about its legitimacy.
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Well, if you read my post you'd have known I was responding to people here who claim they were fake.
Nor did I imply document to said anything about how past leakers were treated.
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Overdue (Score:2)
There have been a large number of politically motivated leaks lately. At one point things got so bad the Brits publicly declared they wouldn't share intel anymore.
So far this is the first of these leaks to actually result in an arrest. Several well known leaks came when only a small handful of high level people could have gotten the data to begin with. The FBI needs to arrest all of the people doing the leaking, not just low level contractors. Perhaps this arrest is just the first in series, can it really b
Re: Overdue (Score:3)
Aren't all intelligence leaks politically motivated?
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Some are motivated by greed - Aldrich Ames is one such example.
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Valid point, point conceded.
I'm still (pretty) sure that the majority are politically motivated. From Snowden to Manning, they seem to usually be motivated by politics. Ames may have also had a political component, IIRC. Though, as you say, his primary motivation was financial. It's been a while since I've read the specifics, so I'm not sure if I'm misremembering him also having a political motivation.
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I'd think that Ideology is certainly political. The latter two *may* also be political. I've not heard of anyone doing it, just for money, in ages. I may have missed someone, but I can't think of any recent examples.
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Indeed. If they want to engage in criminal activity in support of their pet political aims, they'll have to accept the consequences if/when caught.
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If you are a bit more careful, well then things get a lot more difficult to trace.
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So far this is the first of these leaks to actually result in an arrest. Several well known leaks came when only a small handful of high level people could have gotten the data to begin with. The FBI needs to arrest all of the people doing the leaking, not just low level contractors. Perhaps this arrest is just the first in series, can it really be that hard to track down these leaks?
Probably a lot more harder than this one. She looked at the document, printed it out, then apparently emailed the people who got it, and when questioned, admitted to doing it. I figure the intelligence industry is probably more secure than the healthcare industry, and the healthcare industry has records of who looked at what and everybody know it. Those high level leakers probably took steps to not do stupid things to begin with that would immediately lead back to them. If they were one of many people to lo
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The FBI search warrant application mentioned that Winner took a trip to Belize in May, and judging from some of the pictures found on her social media accounts, it looks like it was a vacation trip. But I'm wondering if she met with anyone down there.
Status update: Spying lol
The amount of work (Score:3, Insightful)
the government will put into adding credibility into a story is amazing.
Like I said in a different thread:
After what happened with Snowden, what do you think the odds are that a contractor can both obtain and distribute a NSA document at all without anyone from the NSA noticing ?
I have serious doubts about it and my initial thoughts are this is just the Government pushing the Evil Russians narrative vs the home grown ( DNC ) efforts to skew the election.
Because the former is expected and the latter undermines the trust in the overall US election process. Can't have that now can we ? Bad things happen in armed countries when the populace loses faith in the election systems.
Russia just happens to be a convenient scapegoat for anything that's wrong these days.
Even IF the NSA verifies the document and shows you the evidence they have, after the bullshit they have pulled recently with their surveillance programs, would you trust any of it ?
Dear NSA: That's the problem when you erode / destroy the public trust. When you have a real situation where you need folks to believe you, very few will.
If any at all.
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"After what happened with Snowden, what do you think the odds are that a contractor can both obtain and distribute a NSA document at all without anyone from the NSA noticing ?"
You clearly don't know anything on the subject. Old rules are better enforced, New rules in place, but it is still reliance on humans, and they are imperfect.
Finding the source after a leak is near trivial, which should be a deterrent. But stopping all leaks requires more watchers asking more questions, reviewing more logs, and not ma
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Bad things happen in armed countries when the populace loses faith in the election systems.
The important point about a mass, armed uprising is that it is a mass uprising, not that it is armed.
If you piss enough people off, it doesn't matter if they've only got bits of wood with nails in as weapons, you can't kill all of them.
Obama: Internet tough guy (Score:2)
And so in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that did not happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, there were going to be some serious consequences if he did not.
And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through Wikileaks had already occurred.
So when I look back in terms of how we handled it, I think we handled it the way it should have been handled. We allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to do its job without political influence.
So, at the time that Obama made these comments, the NSA had evidence that Russia was continuing with hacking efforts. Tough guy!
No claim that voting machines were hacked (Score:4, Interesting)
The report does not claim that voting machines were hacked, a once-popular post-election theory from Democrats, nor does it state whether the information pertaining to the voting systems could be used to hack those systems.
As opined by Matt Vespa> [townhall.com], "still, 55 percent of Democrats [hotair.com] think that Russia messed with the vote totals to get Trump elected. The Left has gone insane [townhall.com]. Like the rest of the Russian collusion drama, there is no evidence that vote tallies were tampered with by a foreign intelligence service."
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The standard argument against the possibility of hacking an American is that it's impossible given the decentralized nature of American elections. But the people making this argument aren't hackers, and they don't understand how hackers think. They seem to believe that a hacker would try to brute force hack every election district in America.
If *you* were going to try to hack the US elections, would you do it that way?
I know what I'd do: I'd probe the system looking for vulnerable installations in swing sta
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"The Left has gone insane".
Each side learns from each other, and the strategies and tactics that are proven to work in one election cycle have a tendency to be used by the opposition parties in subsequent election cycles. We are now in the 2018-2020 cycle.
Theory (Score:2)
In Reality...
(rimshot)
Re:Anti-Trump Sandersnista (Score:5, Insightful)
Infowars, really? You do realize that Alex Jones has admitted in court proceedings that he's just playing a character and doesn't actually believe the stuff he says, don't you?
The actual tweet is a reply to Kanye West: "@kanyewest you should make a shirt that says, "being white is terrorism"". Kanye West - the "George Bush doesn't care about black people" guy. The Obama hasn't accomplished as much as Bush because "...he ain't got those connections. Black people don't have the same level of connections as Jewish people...We ain't Jewish. We don't got family that got money like that." guy. The reason-he-lost-an-awards-show being "maybe my skin's not right" guy. A guy who's a living parody of himself.
And a guy who runs a fashion line. Hence the joke about the T-shirt.
Of course, to you people the problem isn't the fact that Russia not only launched an aggressive campaign against the public to shift the election, but also tried to compromise voting software and spearfish local election officials. No no, that's not the problem at all. The problem is that someone dared leak the fact that they did this. And that it's someone who doesn't like Trump - like most Americans [fivethirtyeight.com]. And oh my god, she also supports BLM, like the majority of people her age group [pbs.org] - including white people in her age group. Clearly the problem isn't a major effort by a hostile power to compromise an election - it's that a person who agrees with the stances of the majority dared tell people about it! Damn her!
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"The person I voted for didn't win, so let me make 101 excuses, with 100 being it is Russia" FTFY
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Stop for a second and think of how you would react if the situation were reversed, if someone came here and posted something from Natural News or Democratic Underground.
The content of the post you linked from crazyconspiracycentral.com was addressed. But I guess you stopped reading after seeing your choice in "news" sources criticized.
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Uhm, no. Why lie?
That was part of a quote that you didn't understand.
She didn't even state it, it was part of a question she was asking Kayne West on twitter. LOL
Re: Anti-Trump Sandersnista (Score:5, Insightful)
You may agree or disagree with the positions - but you are simply making a straw man and digging yourself into an intellectual hole when you convince yourself of this bullsh!t.
Re: Anti-Trump Sandersnista (Score:5, Informative)
It means that government is limited - that does not have a role in say wage and price freezes (rent control); that it's function is not to redistribute wealth; etc...
I think the problem is we all agree on "small government" and then assume everyone else is with us on the specifics. For me, "small government" means "Not restricting freedoms and rights." Like no laws against abortion.
I'd also argue that having your rights abridged by the government and having your rights abridged by a corporation are different only in that you got to vote for the government. To me, a government that is too small to regulate, say, comcast or health insurance agencies, that's really pretty similar to "big government."
Finally, with wealth inequality reaching the robber barron age, I can't fathom how people would still be saying "government shouldn't redistribute wealth." FFS the fastest way to a situation we'd all consider to be "big government" is through an oligarchy.
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Abortion is tricky (I'm pro-choice in case it matters) as there isn't a clear cut definition of where life begins. (We know the arguments back-and-forth)
Corporations live only by customers using them. We could kill Amazon or Walmart in a heart-beat by not buying things from them.
Wealth inequity is a tricky issue.
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We could kill Amazon or Walmart in a heart-beat by not buying things from them.
The oceans could all be drained in a heartbeat if all the water molecules decided to evaporate simultaneously. They won't of course, they have an extremely long history of not simply deciding to do that except when there's a lot of heat. Likewise, most people won't vote with their wallet against corporations, they have a long history of not voting against anything but the worst corporations when a lot of other stuff is going on.
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I NEVER go to Citgo. I would rather pay more at another station than go there.
The energy you spend getting government involved is far better spent in go
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I support 75th trimester abortion rights...
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It should fall to the guidance counselors. Either parent makes the call and the brat just doesn't come home.
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leave abortion out of "small government" (Score:3)
You're never going to persuade anyone on that. The choir will nod, and your opponents will glare at you.
Pro-choice people see one person's rights at stake (the woman's) in an abortion decision. Since there is only one person, there is no possible conflict, and the common-sense policy is for government to stay the fuck out of it.
Pro-life people see two people's rights at stake (the woman's rights and the fet
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Wanna fight for pro-choice? Help create that consensus. Get people to think about "what is a person?"
I agree it's important to think about. However I disagree that a consensus is necessary, important, or even possible.
Look at climate change. That's not something that's based on opinion of something undefinable like when does life begin, it's pretty basic chemistry and physics. A few charlatans have been paid off to say "Nah, it's not real." Everyone with an open mind and a basic understanding of the facts agrees it is a problem that must be dealt with. But uninformed voters root for their "team" and po
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A strong consensus could be achieved on abortion by limiting situations where legal abortion is legal, limiting the time frame with a health exception, and then making the parts in between that an enumerated right.
That's the thing, it is over 70% agreement in the middle on the specifics, but the conversation is driven entirely be opposing fringe views. Same as every other issue in American politics.
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My job is in NY. I have property in NH and good friends in the Littleton / Whitefield area.
What a joke (Score:2, Informative)
The notion of republicans standing for small government and democrats standing for big government is laughable. Here's why.
Over the past century, American politics has been fully dominated by the republicans and democrats. But neither has dominated over the other; instead, they have shared in the domination of American politics roughly equally.
Now, if one party stood for small government and the other big government, with both parties having roughly equal influence over American politics over the past centu
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Republicans are generally pro smaller government except when it comes to military. In a post 9-11 world, that balance is all out of whack.
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No, she was another of the many incompetents in this administration. She was hired on February 13th [washingtonexaminer.com]. Guess who was in the White House on that day?
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From personal experience, I know that link is incomplete. Even mere Secret level clearance takes weeks, Top Secret takes much longer. So her security clearance evaluations started sometime in 2016, guess who was in the White House that year.
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Who the fuck names their kid "Reality"
The same flavor of idiot who labels that shit on TV "Reality".
Re: Here is how this will play out (Score:3)
I wish I had a crystal ball. :-(
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Damn, there was no reason to go anonymous for that bon mot.
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I dunno...apparently if you get a sex change in prison, they let you out in about 7 years or so....
Maybe this is "Reality's" scheme....to get a free sex change operation on the tax payers dollar...?
It has worked before....
[rolls eyes]
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Disrespecting politicians, even the sitting president, doesn't factor into whether or not a person can be granted a clearance.
Even siding with an 'enemy' on some issue or other doesn't matter all that much. You could actually publicly be a communist or an anarchist and support constitutional reforms to align it with those beliefs. The limiting factor is usually membership or real support for organizations that work to violently overthrow the US government.
Other than that the main emphasis of a clearance inv
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You could argue just the same that we should deny clearances to anyone that is or was opposed to the invasion of Iraq because of Lawrence Franklin, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
Or the same for anyone with a pro-Israel stance because of Jonathan Pollard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org].
If we tried to limit clearances to just people that espoused the most American of American ideals, based on someone's arbitrary opinion, much of the military, DoD, State Department, and the various intelligence agencies