I've got multiple thoughts about this story, but the biggest one is that Robin Raphel answered FBI questions for quite a while BEFORE thinking that she should get a lawyer.
For anyone who's not as politically connected as she is (say, if you're Martha Stewart, or - God help you - a mere mortal like any of us), this is a sure fire way to end up locked in a cage. ...and make no mistake: if you read the article carefully, it's clear that the one thing that kept her out of jail is the fact that she was heavily connected to DC elites and worked a campaign of back-channel pressure.
I knew what this youtube link was before I clicked it.
This is so important, my family and I watch it several times a year.
As far as I'm concerned, it should be taught in school, though that's so politically incorrect as to be unthinkable.
As are most of us, law enforcement are professionals who are rated on various metrics. The main metric is getting convictions. Guilt or innocence is not even a secondary concern.
Are there any studies that quantify the effect this has on the distribution of outcomes? Or how / whether the results vary by economic or social class (or race, since it can be a proxy for those)?
That was a rather entertaining article, both for the story, but also for the subtext about the dangers of SIGINT-only intelligence gathering. The NSA hoovers up everything it can get automatically, but that data is used without context. In this story, the context of being a diplomat, the context of being in Pakistan, and the context of being conversational partners with a HUMINT source.
I'm sure the NSA is (at this point) aware of this problem, and trying to make the collected data more context-aware. I wonder to what extent the content of just phone calls, texts, emails, and facebook posts can be used to learn small-group dynamics. (Like the fact that the people of E-7 in the story consider talks of a Pakistani coup to be normal idle dinner talk.)
You might be interested in Robert Baer's books for a perspective on this problem within the CIA. HUMINT seems to have been drclining significantly over the last few decades and it's the opinion of some in these organisations that this is a tragedy and won't work.
The problem, though, is that it will always be in the context important to an algorithm. But we don't surveille or converse to serve algorithms (Facebook and Google notwithstanding). We do it to promote human needs.
The most important context is human context, and the best human context interpreter is humans. The fact that each individual human emphasizes different parts of a context is a feature, not a bug.
Imagine you're a bureaucrat with little to no oversight. Your power is a function of your budget. You can hire a thousand people for $500,000 each or spend $1bn on a single contractor. With the former you have a thousand people to manage. With the latter, one.
The attitude of the FBI towards diplomacy portrayed in the story is pretty alarming. I generally have a positive view on the Obama administration, but their pursuit of "leaks" post Wikileaks & Snowden is deeply upsetting to me.
Counterintelligence people trying to build careers.
Suppose the US government database says the US drone program in Pakistan is classified top secret and she did not have official permission to speak about it. Except that everyone who is anyone knows about it. So the difference between how the US wants something to be classified and how secret it actually is allows FBI to say she talked about things without permission, when her bosses in State know she didn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know.
Spot on.
I think the most interesting thing in the article was (paraphrasing): You can write up a report on a conversation you have with a Pakistan official, and it becomes classified. Are you then expected to no longer discuss the same topic on your next meeting, because the report you wrote has a classification on it?
To me this whole SNAFU boils down to the two FBI agents assigned to the case not doing due diligence in their investigation.
Charlie Savage's book "Power Wars" goes into this quite a bit.
The tl;dr is basically this: administrations before Obama definitely wanted to crack down on whistleblowers, but were limited in their ability to do so. The fact that whistleblowing related arrests/convictions have increased under Pres. Obama is largely due to the fact that we can track people and information much more thoroughly than was previously possible. In the past, you may know who had access to any one piece of information (that leaked) but you would be hard pressed to identify communication channels and specific, time-logged access, etc. Investigational tools have improved so more convictions happen.
This doesn't address the civil liberties expectations/promises of Pres. Obama, but it's one factor at play.
So, normally in the West we assume that some form of "collective responsibility" principle applies to government agencies. That the views and actions of the government can be talked about as if it were a single coherent entity.
Pakistan is very much not like that. The intelligence agencies are extremely autonomous and unaccountable. It's a large country with underpopulated "bandit country" uplands (FATA) where all kinds of armed groups can hide. And there's substantial evidence that, while Pakistan has formally been a US ally since the Cold War, internal factions have been supporting the Taliban.
Now it appears that the US is replicating this structure, as factions within one intelligence agency start arresting members of another as a means of influencing foreign policy. The Hilary Clinton email controversy that everyone has now forgotten was another similar move; maybe it wasn't aimed so much at her personally, but an attack on the State Department?
(And of course now the FBI director's favoured candidate has won, and is conducting diplomacy in a manner that completely bypasses the State Department ...)
(Edit: this post seems to be bouncing up and down in the voting. Feel free to take the analysis with a pinch of salt, the general point is to be aware of the political actions of intelligence agencies.)
A far too subjective article. Diplomats of her ilk have messed up several countries because they didnt give a hoot about the commoners or long term scenarios, and dealt with only the rich and powerful for short term political gain, whilst flaunting their partying and wealth and immunity. Case in point Iran. Case in point Pakistan, which might be going the same way. The implementation may require work, but the impetus for accountability for diplomats is a fucking good thing.
I have a little off topic question. The article says that after months of investigating a career diplomat with 40 years of service under suspicion that she turned and now works as a Pakistani spy in the US...
>> Two FBI agents approached her, their faces stony. “Do you know any foreigners?” they asked
Why do cops ask such questions? What is this investigative technique supposed to achieve? Make the suspect angry so they would be less careful in phrasing their answers? Let the suspect assume the investigator knows nothing so the suspect would think they can blatantly lie and the investigator would not realize? Something else?
I don't think there are any elicitation techniques the FBI has that she hasn't mastered, so why do that?
If they ask "do you know any foreigners" and you say no, and then they can prove you know a foreigner, that's it: they've got you guilty of a federal felony (lying to an FBI agent about materially relevant matters in the investigation), and since there were two FBI agents one will act as the witness for the other. Then they don't need to investigate anything else; your career is over and you're going to prison.
That's weird, it sounds like this technique is designed to just find someone guilty of something - not the perpetrator of a specific crime, just sweep up a guilty person. Like is the goal of an FBI agent or Policeman simply to be tricksy enough to make someone slip up, so they can sling them in jail?
As mentioned in the other path, it is partly about tripping people up.
The diplomat already provided a list of all known foreign nationals that is supposed to be kept somewhat up to date. If foreign nationals are known that aren't on that list, it raises a red flag.
Why didn't you mention you banged this person? Why are you doing business with that person? Were the questions that this third person asked pressing enough that they should have been added to the list?
It is one of those things that makes perfect sense if you have even a basic understanding of these kinds of processes but that makes for a good narrative for the masses who don't.
they ask some of the most ridiculous questions trying to trip you and make you say stuff you don't mean or isn't true.
Like, "do you know any foreigners?" turns into "why didn't you disclose that telationship, did they pay you money?"
No matter what you say it opens up a new line of questioning for the investigators. That's why lawyers tell you to never talk to them, not even to try and clear things up.
It's also a very ambiguous question that's hard to answer properly without asking for far more detail.
For example - what do they mean by "know"? What you think it means can be very different from how the investigators interpret it. Do only close friends and associates count? How about that co-worker who sits three cubicles away from you, who you don't consider a friend but talk about football with a few times a week while waiting for the coffee machine? Or the barista at Starbucks who has seen you every morning for the past 3 years and 'knows' you well enough to ask how you family is doing?
And then - what do they consider a foreigner? Anyone who has born in a foreign country, even if they are a citizen? Or landed immigrants? Or only people who currently reside in foreign countries?
It would be easy for someone to believe they were honestly answering 'no' to the question without realizing their assumptions about what is being asked are incorrect.
I don't blame investigators for asking questions like this, but people should think very carefully about answering the questions without legal counsel. There's usually just too much ambiguity in most questions (even simple ones) to be able to comprehend all of the possible meanings and implications of every word. Relying on your ability to recall things on-the-spot while being questioned in a high-stress situation also seems like a bit of a lose-lose proposition.
There is a common sales technique to ask customers questions where the only possible answer is yes. The point isn't to gain information, but rather to build rapport with the customer and get them into a positive frame of mind.
Presumably the same approach is helpful in criminal interrogations.
Not every single question needs to be potentially incriminating. They can also just be part of gathering information. Maybe you know an honest and hard-working immigrant. Maybe you know an employee of the ISI. They don't know, that's why they ask.
It's typical for law enforcement to ask about your neighbors, but that doesn't mean having neighbors is incriminating, or that starting with "do you know your neighbors?" would be part of some underhanded interrogation tactic.
Someone is going to have to start up some type of syndicate at some point to make it easy for publishers to put up paywalls and easy for readers to subscribe and unsubscribe to them.
Whoever does that will do pretty well for themselves.
Obviously I can't directly see exactly what you're doing, but there's always a way to get to these articles by using the right combination of techniques to appear as a new visitor arriving via a Google search.
Web link from incognito usually seems to do it for most people (it does for me on this occasion, as it always does for me on WSJ), but if that fails perhaps you need to try it from a clean browser instance.
Update: I'm in Australia. It may be different for you depending on what country you're in. Some people get around geographic restrictions by using a VPN or Tor Browser.
This story is obviously sourced mainly from Raphel and her friends/allies. Personally I view the FBI investigation as them just doing their jobs. In the end this wasn't really a failure on their part, assuming the innocent reason for all the suspicion was true, they investigated her as they were tasked and the DoJ ended the investigation when they realized there was no case.
I think the interesting story is the change in culture at the State Department which has the effect of getting less human intelligence. I'm not sure if that's because they want to be cooped up in their embassies because they feel less safe meeting with people in certain host countries, or if security requirements are being imposed on them. Clearly in this case Raphel felt restricted and she had no problem, but I'm not sure other State Deparment employees feel the same.
Benghazi and the Camp Chapman attack [1] are pretty good reasons why they should be concerned about security.
"Doing their jobs" misses a huge part of the story. Someone illegally leaked the details of the ongoing investigation to the New York Times, changing what could have been a temporary unpaid leave for Raphel into a front page story with damaging after effects.
Had this been investigated and resolved secretly, as per the rules, Raphel could have reapplied for her job after the FBI concluded there was no espionage case.
> Someone illegally leaked the details of the ongoing investigation to the New York Times, changing what could have been a temporary unpaid leave for Raphel into a front page story with damaging after effects.
Pending further information, I suspect that it was someone in Raphel's camp who leaked those details. The best case situation for her was for this to be argued in the court of public opinion.
I do not share your suspicion. The initial 20161106 wapo article had this: "U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing."
Pleading "ongoing investigation" suggests the source was in law enforcement, not authorized to discuss the case, discussed the case anyway, and used anonymity to avoid the consequences. A victim or friend can safely go on the record with a reporter, an investigator cannot.
In any case, the friends of Raphel seemed quite upset about the leak when they were spoken to for follow-up articles.
For anyone who's not as politically connected as she is (say, if you're Martha Stewart, or - God help you - a mere mortal like any of us), this is a sure fire way to end up locked in a cage. ...and make no mistake: if you read the article carefully, it's clear that the one thing that kept her out of jail is the fact that she was heavily connected to DC elites and worked a campaign of back-channel pressure.
Never, ever, EVER answer police or FBI questions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE