Computer Espionage: Our Spies are Spying on Your Spies

We don't want your spies to spy on our spies.

Courtesy: jimcraven10.wordpress.com

(PORTLAND, OR) - Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg are possibly the best known recent figures who have been seduced into this kind of intelligence dirty work in which they all considered it abhorrent and said so.

Spying as an instrument of government and war strategy has been going on even before we had written words. The computer has just made it easier. The U.S. has spies all over the world and while they do make errors of omission and commission, they are a well established mode of operation.

Currently we have at least two well publicized spy actions going on. Both of the spies were in essence, buck privates in or out of the army. It is not strange to me that neither were monitored by their superiors. In fact, it seems they were both smarter than their superiors going up to at least major and maybe bird colonel, which after living in that milieu as a buck private in WWII, I recognized the environment and the consequences.

My second lieutenants from ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps) in college, had been taking the easiest gut courses, in opposition to brain courses in college. They didn't show me much cerebration, but passed along orders from the next two echelons up. This was dangerously true in combat infantry, but also in Eisenhower's headquarters where I, as a private was the statistician for the medical branch of military government. My superior was a medical officer captain who was not qualified to be a statistician and had no idea what I was doing or how I did it.

I recognized a parallel situation here. Private Bradley Manning was obviously much smarter than his upper chain of command, but unfortunately did not recognize the danger he caused to his other privates of combat infantry which he seriously put in danger, a point well contended. His superior officers, if you can call them that, did not have the cerebral function to know or even monitor his actions.

In the case of Edward Snowden, a former army private, was in several similar severe intensely classified situations. Nobody obviously monitored him either.

This takes me back to former Marine Captain Daniel Ellsberg, who disclosed the Pentagon Papers in 1971, indicating how screwed up the Army intelligence in Vietnam was.

Daniel Ellsberg was a very intelligent person. He received academic scholarships to several universities including Harvard, Cambridge and others. He volunteered for the Marine Corps and served three years as a rifle platoon leader, operations officer and company commander. He was later hired by the Rand Corporation as a strategy analyst and then as a consultant to the Commander and Chief Pacific and later to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and ultimately to the Secretary of Defense. His responsibility was to create plans for the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He was there from 1965 to 1967.

He worked on a top secret report for Defense Secretary McNamara which ended up as the 7,000 page condemnation of the war in Vietnam called "The Top Secret Pentagon Papers".

He leaked a copy to Congressmen but they refused to touch it. He sent an original copy to the Washington Post which printed it, and then to 15 other newspapers.

President Nixon and Henry Kissiner had a cow. The FBI tried everything to destroy him (Ellsberg) like they are trying to do with Snowden and Manning. The case went as high as the U.S. Supreme Court, where the case was dismissed.

Ellsberg was ultimately responsible for President Nixon's disgrace and resignation.

If it comes to legal punishment for Snowden and Manning, let's hope it gets to the Supreme Court and dismissed.

WHY DON'T WE REVISE OUR INTELLIGENCE SYSTEMS. THEY PROBABLY WON'T.

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