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Friday, August 23, 2013

Chelsea nee Bradley Manning

I was going to post something snarky about Bradley Manning's desire to now be Chelsea Manning, but I couldn't do any better than what The Diplomad had to say:
The real issue, however, is not the mental state of this little weasel. The question is how did he get through the recruitment and clearance processes? Nobody, nobody, nobody during his background check, or during his time on duty noticed that he--may I use that word?--was just a few degrees off level? Nobody? His commanding officers? His colleagues? Bueller? Bueller?
He apparently spent a lot of time in some weird internet chat rooms using government computers for that. The NSA, the same folks collecting on my wife's Vonage calls to her mother in Spain, did not catch Manning's odd surfing activities?

3 comments:

  1. It's pretty clear that they knew Manning's secrets. Manning probably knew they knew. I expect the trick is that they thought that gave them power : intelligence communities self-select for the sort of people that think you can control someone that fears you.

    Twenty years ago, or against a forty-year-old, that'd even be applicable here.

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  2. I'm not so sure. NSA suffered a pretty serious defection problem back about 1960 because of a couple of soldiers assigned to them were closeted, and for ideological reasons, defected to the Soviets. (Details can be found in James Bamford's The Puzzle Palace. It could not have been their homosexuality; the Soviets weren't any more supportive of that back then than the West.

    Yet NSA had never done a lie detector test to see if these soldiers were a security risk because they were not civilian employees -- and NSA didn't think that they had the legal authority to require draftees to pass such a test.

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  3. This is additional evidence that reality has been replaced by an extended episode of Monty Python.

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