STAYING OUT OF THE LINE OF FIRE: The Dead Drop generally tries to steer clear of politics for oh so many reasons. Actually, just one really important one though: if we can’t all come together on national security issues – regardless of our politics – then we’re only playing the game half as well as we could and that’s just un-American. That’s why we’re not gonna even comment on the megaton of nominees who were announced this week for national security-related positions in the next administration (though our cheekier side could’ve had a field day with a couple of them). What we couldn’t’ resist though, was calling out something we saw that desperately needs a fact check. The Washington Times reported that the President-elect’s nominee to run the CIA, former DNI John Ratcliffe, was expected to target ‘politicization within the Agency’ as a priority and (here’s the surprising part) – that Ratcliffe would “replace Gina Haspel, who has been the agency’s director since 2018.” This will come as news to many – including that Bill Burns guy. Or maybe Haspel has been running the ‘deep state’ version of the Agency for the past few years.
DECODING NSA’S FOIA COMPLIANCE: Jason Leopold, an investigative journalist with a long history of filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to government agencies, now works for Bloomberg News. He reported last week of successfully prying out of the National Security Agency some inspector general reports as part of a 20,000-page data dump he got from NSA as the result of some lawsuits. Among the nuggets he found was an investigation into an employee’s “side hustle” in which they tried to justify using the agency’s unclassified computer system to support a separate (apparently private sector) job. The person reportedly “spent about 20% of their time on their second job. NSA investigators found they sent 233 non-work- related emails, printed 17 documents and worked on 52 others between September 2021 and February 2023 using the NSA’s unclassified system.” At least they weren’t using the classified system for the side gig, eh? The employee was reportedly unhappy about being investigated saying he/she did not “see this as any different than if I’m going to the restroom.” Spending 20% of your workday in the restroom? Probably not the best career move, either.
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