I usually lurk in the background of this subreddit. At times, I’ve used it as a resource well/information center, and branched off of it in order to keep myself up-to-date.
As you may have noticed, there’s something that’s becoming a bit of a trend in the past while, and it has to do with protection of whistleblowers. This is by no means an unexpected occurrence if you’re familiar with the general attitudes of governments, and the actions which they take to reprimand enlisted and employed individuals, be that in the military or in the intelligence communities.
We now arrive at a general crossroads where, in the face of further (moderated) disclosure, we are unable to continue due to the adamant safety risk it causes, both to journalists covering this matter, as well as the whistleblowers themselves. In my best estimation, some of these sources are likely from within the intelligence community, as well as from various areas of the military. At least one or two firsthand sources from the OGA seem very likely, as it got quite a bit of light shone on it.
What I’m making this warning post for, since I know it has the potential to be seen by a lot of people here as well as some of the whistleblowers and journalists themselves, is this: be very careful with how you enforce these kinds of protections, lest you repeat the same hysteria of secrecy we’ve all seen from inside the government and Lockheed/Boeing/Raytheon. Having one system dominated by that hysteria is a monumental challenge to deal with – having two, with the second one being crafted by you all, would be nigh-insurmountable to get over.
You need to start building actual disclosure frameworks and systems – I don’t mean simple little 10-20 year long things like at Sol, but real, genuine hard disclosure-assisting and time-based release networks that propagate the information you wish to release in a few years, not ten or twenty. You might not even have a few due to the current sociopolitical tensions, and believe me, you don’t want to start back at the beginning as a result of the United States crumpling into civil war, or using some third global conflict as a distraction. Listen to Douglas MacGregor on this, and don’t be naïve. MacGregor may not have the best sociopolitical positions on various matters, but he had a considerable amount of insight that is in the correct ballpark for asserting tension spillovers et al.
Assange gave you a practical example of it with WikiLeaks, though a platform/framework based precisely on WikiLeaks is most likely far from ideal for these purposes. Assange had colleagues and people close to him, including on the computer programming and optics side of things – if guidance is what you need, seek them confidentially (consider asking them about quantum-proof ciphers, specifically lattice-based ones). You can still continue the stuff at Sol, but given what’s happening currently, it is 80-90% a fruitless effort, insofar in the scenario that it’s not theater (which I’m making the good-faith assumption that it’s not, and I’d like for that to be true, obviously).
This is the part you can’t screw up at and only have one shot with in the short (2, 3, 5 years) and medium term (10, 20, 30 years) – getting the alignment and timing of things right. And while I understand the anxious need to proceed step by step in a cautious manner, and retain information flows where applicable to some extent, both you and me know that the variable for that is not static, it’s modular. You ARE going to have to move that needle so to speak further from the center of the bar more frequently in the direction you don’t like, and like any responsible citizen, I want you to do that with proper organizations, measurements, and security in place, so please for the love of god make it easier on yourselves, not harder.
There is a chance you’ll scoff at me bouncing in out of nowhere as though I own this joint – I don’t. I’m just really lucid with these systems and how they work at this point, and I’ve realized that in general, the speed we’re moving is not sufficient for what the end goal is. Ask yourselves, you’ve been so efficient at what you’ve done, and yet even within communities like this one, very few people (out of the 2.2 million subscribed to this subreddit) know who Christopher Green is. Very few people in the general public know what happened to James Forrestal in 1949, even fewer know of the struggles in that period to open-source all this information early (re Roscoe Hillenkoetter and Ben Rich).
How about more examples, such as Kissinger’s death being celebrated by the entirety of the union, except for Washington, with nobody asking why Washington was so stubborn on cherishing him? Or how about Dulles receiving the National Security Medal while doing what he did, how is it that virtually nobody knows about any of that, be it here or in the public? Perhaps this subreddit knows of the latter of these two slightly more, but it would be by a very modest amount – hardly enough to give credit to any of you as though you were all responsible for informing this subreddit and the general public to that end.
I am critical not because I don’t value you as journalists, whistleblowers, and people who are doing the morally right thing – I am critical precisely because of what has been mentioned above, and precisely because there is an air of superiority gathering in some of you not unlike the air that was found in the Old Guard responsible for administering government secrecy to the actual projects, including Zodiac.
And yes, I mention its name in public, many people already know it anyway – the reverse engineering program is called Zodiac. It has been called multiple other names in the past; the only one I know is Majority (with the FBI discrediting it, as they themselves were not read in). You refuse to even refer to it by name, when it has already been leaked into the public domain independently – you are experiencing the SAME bloody sieve leaking you’ve seen occur in the government and intelligence communities at various points in the past.
Regardless of whether the claims have a 100% line up for accuracy in corroboration here, the base logic still stands – speed up. You don’t have the time you think that you do, and the people of the world don’t have the time that they think they do.
I’m not going to end this on some silly cliche one-liner like “may god be with you” or “godspeed” or something. You know why; activities like this pretty much have a lower-to-upper percent chance in the nineties of being past notions such as biblical gods. I’m also not going to end it on a tl;dr (too long; didn’t read) because it is meant to be sober and genuine.
Do what you need to do, just don’t keep doing it in the current way that you’re doing it. Step back and reconsider certain elements of the disclosure process; refactor them where needed and redo them where needed.
And most importantly, NEVER take anything for granted.
Kudos and have a good evening/morning/afternoon.
submitted by /u/SnapFlash
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