Ladies and gents, I present the brilliant US national security establishment

Reality Winner, ex-NSA noob

In the wake of the recently announced documents leak arrest, these initial observations about "Reality Winner" and in turn, reflections on the state of the American establishment in general.

1. The National Security Agency, due to both sides of the duopoly and their hypercapitalist fetish for privatization, has to use ever more private contractors. (Remember, Snowden was one.)
2. These contractors, in their own idiocy, hire ever more younger employees, and in turn give ever more of them Top Secret clearances (remember Snowden) on the thinnest of grounds and at pre-30 ages when they can’t have earned them.
3. In this case, the idiot, with the charming name of Reality Winner, was dumb enough to email the Intercept from a work email. She was also dumb enough not to realize the document she sent really wasn’t worth all the trouble to which she went.
4. Sidebar — If the NSA itself weren’t that dumb, I’d almost believe it wrote a fake document to see what “Putin Did It” noob would bite. (FYI, the actual document doesn’t move any actual “Putin Did It” findings one iota forward. Allegedly penetrating 100 election officials out of 3,000-plus county, parish and independent cities that conduct elections? Nothingburger. Plus, the piece is caveated beyond that from here to Sunday.)  Don't believe me? Here's the Intercept's story. Yes, the NSA unequivocally claims the GRU was hacking, but, within that, it's caveated all to hell. Beyond that, the hacking, to the degree it did happen, was after early voting was done in most states that have it. And a bigger derp? The piece quotes Alex Halderman, the Michigan prof who gulled Jill Stein into her recount.
5. Top this all off by one of Glenn Greenwald’s minions at the Intercept, Winner’s media target, sending a photocopy of the document itself back to the NSA when asking for comment. The folds on the doc are what helped lead to Winner’s arrest. Worse? Glenn's staff numnuts also asked another NSA contractor about the doc, Justice says. And, per the Washington Post, that contact burned them; I'm assuming the contact's claim the docs were fake was itself a ruse. Of course, the Intercept ain't alone in being stupid in this way. I present The New York Times outing a CIA officer. Meanwhile, some wagon-circlers on Twitter are claiming this couldn't have been handled any other way. Tosh. Snowden himself might have pointed out some of the mistakes, if he'd been asked, and had wanted to. And an ooops that this isn't a first-time deal:

   .@theintercept should be ashamed of itself. Matthew Cole burns yet another source. It makes your entire organization untrustworthy.

   — John Kiriakou (@JohnKiriakou) June 6, 2017

   Speaking of Snowden ...
6. Regional readers of this blog should remember that I’m not 100 percent convinced of Snowden’s bona fides, anyway. Likewise, I wasn't convinced of Glenn's brilliance on all matters related to this, either. Look up some stuff online from Mark Ames and / or Yasha Levine for more. None of the four bylined reporters are fly-by-night newbies. This is a fuck-up, pure and simple. I mean, I've never heard of sending back a physical copy of an actually leaked document like that. NEVER. Smartly, Greenwald himself is pretty much keeping his yap shut.
7. Does all of this add up to a suggestion for more skepticism? I think not. This is a 20-something Dem voter who surely bought lock, stock and barrel into DNC claims that "Putin Did It." Snowden had more brains than that, though more deviousness as well. Glenn's staff, beyond the dumb shit above, should have read the document more carefully and vetted her background better. Any NSA leaker who normally post to "public" on Facebook is an idiot anyway. But, like Snowden, she's at least a small-l libertarian; at a minimum, she doesn't recognize that Rand Paul and Bernie Sanders aren't that close politically (and neither are Sanders and Ted Cruz; always suspect people with incoherent political beliefs), that Bill Mahar is a racist as well as an idiot, and other things.
8. Sadly, the fact that one of the Intercept's advisers on the story was Halderman now has Stein doubling down on "yes, my recounts." And the Green Party retweeting, just as party staffers had Bob Fitrakis write an uncritical account of the recounts a month ago, about which I blogged. I swear, I get ever closer to moving my official third-party allegiance to the Socialist Party USA.