Recently I saw this post on Ace of Spades about Reality Winner. I've seen a bunch of questions on a variety of sites. First is how did a moonbat like that get a clearance? In my travels I read two good points:
- She got the clearance due to language school (Pashtun, Farsi and one other) and apparently had good skills in translation. Any thing useful she'd be looking at would have been Top Secret (TS) likely because of sources and methods .
- Political views (conservative vs liberal) are generally NOT of interest in a clearance search unless you clearly have a leaning for a particular target country (e.g you or your spouse were foreign nationals or you were a card carrying communist in the "good" old days)
However her behavior once employed by Pluribus seems odd to say the least. There are several things at play here
- In security there's a concept called adverse information. If you know something that argues against a fellow clearance holder you are supposed to report it. For example if you know that a fellow clearance holder is having an affair or is a heavy drinker or is spending money they don't have or anything else that seems to argue against they're maintaining their clearance you should report it. You have a positive duty to report it. To not report it is a potential security breach on your part. Ms. Winner's behavior in social networking seems to fall into that class and it seems likely that some of her (cleared) coworkers would have seen it.
- The information was printed out from a top secret computer. These are maintained in an "Information System" usually in a closed area (sometimes SCIF, Secure Compartmented Information Facility) with limited access. These systems are CONSTANTLY monitored and everything is supposed to be logged with respect to printing and copying materials. Devices like USB ports and CD/DVD recorders are either removed, disabled or tightly monitored.
- In security there is the concept of need to know. There doesn't seem to be a reason why Ms. Winner would have need to know for the document she accessed. In the Information System information is supposed to be secured so that those without need to know can't access it and if they do it is logged. Those logs are supposed to be checked at least weekly in a Secret IS, I don't know the standard for a Top Secret IS but I'd expect it to be more stringent. Looking at things (let alone printing them) should have set alarm bells screaming.
DOD contractors of any sort are usually incredibly paranoid about this stuff. Their closed areas are inspected by the Defense Security Service (DSS) at least once yearly and that inspection is dreaded. I heard tell of a case where an employee was told to take the 3-4 days of the inspection off as their behavior was so sloppy the DSS investigators would key on them. Losing your certification to deal with classified information is a death stroke to a DOD contractor. So how the heck was Pluribus so darned sloppy? Were they NOT a DOD contractor but State or Homeland Security? Are their standards that different from DOD standard? And secondly has Pluribus gotten more than a slap on the wrist for such failure to identify the issue?
Some have speculated that the microdots printed by the color printer was how the document was identified. These we added back in the late 1990's when color printers got really good and the Department of the Treasury began to worry about wholesale counterfeiting. It may be this is how things were tracked back, but it makes me wonder what Pluribus' ISSO and ISSM were doing that this didn't show up in their oversight.
As for Ms. Winner she may have been a stellar translator but she's got NO common sense. She talked to people other than her attorney about this over the jail phone. Unless you're a raving idiot it should be known that those phones are recorded and are NOT protected How do you end up so deluded, and how do you end up both bright enough to master three complex languages and yet still seem to be dumber than a box of rocks?
Tregonsee (L2) signing out for now
