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The Last Diplomat

wsj.com

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Re: The Last Diplomat

#41

Post by wtbob »

lefler wrote: post #38
IBM wrote: post #34

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 chang…

"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.

Re: The Last Diplomat

#42

Post by pjc50 »

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.)

Re: The Last Diplomat

#43

Post by germinalphrase »

bearcobra wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: The Last Diplomat

#44

Post by eternalban »

pjc50 wrote: post #42

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 ki…

> Pakistan is very much not like that. The intelligence agencies are extremely autonomous and unaccountable.

This was [US] news in 1973: https://ia802601.us.archive.org/12/items/pdfy-JnCrjsoqI22z8p...

It's well worth the read. In fact, possibly required reading. The author was retired military and directly involved.

Re: The Last Diplomat

#45

Post by mikeash »

wolf550e wrote: post #14

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 t…

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.

Re: The Last Diplomat

#46

Post by Warp__ »

the-dude wrote: post #18
CamperBob2 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It exists and is called Blendle

I use Blendle, personally find it really good.

Re: The Last Diplomat

#50

Post by a3n »

leodeid wrote: post #5

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 p…

Yeah, I guess we could and should do that.

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.

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