CIA employee’s quest to release information ‘destroyed my entire career’

It seems like that as time has gone on, the intelligence apparatus in the US and closely allied countries has come to depend more and more on holding any and all information on anything.<p>It&#x27;s their leverage and it&#x27;s their ability to control and influence events. Even small concessions are probably felt to be too much, and I imagine to many in the CIA and elsewhere, a cold war domino effect mentality still permeates.<p>It&#x27;s ridiculous, and it undermines a free flow of knowledge that our society desperately needs to function effectively. However, it only seems to be increasing in scope, and I believe the people related are more concerned about their positions and power rather than the long term viability of our country.<p>Addenum: Perhaps worse, is that behaviors like this from the CIA, FBI, and NSA give ample diplomatic ammunition to every totalitarian and oppressive state on the planet and it legitimizes their actions. Even more so, they can argue that they were at least transparent about it rather than lying to the public. It&#x27;s sad to think that a place that used to stand for freedom from oppression can more and more be used as a justification for it.

I dislike many of the recent revelations about the intelligence community&#x27;s activities, but if this guy based a freedom of information request on information that he only knew about due to his access to classified information, then he did in fact mishandle classified information. You are only allowed to use classified information to perform your duties at work.<p>I agree that there should be things in place to protect legitimate whistle blowers, but that doesn&#x27;t even seem to come into play here.<p>Then again, we don&#x27;t know the complete story, so I reserve judgement.

This is amazing:<p>&gt; <i>The CIA disbanded the Historical Collections Division last year, citing budget cuts</i><p>How much have we increased overall intelligence services budgets in the past 10 years? And they can’t afford to keep paying their internal historians?

This is less an issue of an agency that lost sight of legal requirements to allow documents be released to the public than it is an indicator of an institution stuck with boys-club hierarchy where any questioning goes against the parental nature of things.<p>And despite the washington posts desire to paint this with the same stroke they did the email cache from snowden, the two are entirely different issues. this juxtaposition along with how overboard the post went in considering &quot;ongoing intelligence operations&quot; in the snowden case, just feels like ass covering.

&gt; In an interview, Scudder, 51, cast his ordeal as a struggle against “mindless” bureaucracy...<p>I think this is wrong.<p>Bureaucracies are made up of people. Some of those people choose to persecute whistle-blowers. They don&#x27;t have to, they have a choice. They are not automatons.<p>Blaming it on bureaucracy wrongfully absolves the individuals.

It is troublesome that I am afraid to comment on this article in fear of my NSA_SUSPICION_INT rising.

He should have used parallel construction. Had someone else actually submit the requests for the docs he found that he figured should be public.

Getting your home raided for submitting a FOIA request seems to neatly summarize the state of freedom of information.

This should be pushed over to swintonreport.com. Not to push it as a site, but it does carry this type of pertinent information.

What did he think was going to happen? He acts like an idealistic and naive attention grabbing princess.

&gt; histories of long-dormant conflicts and operations that <i>he concluded</i> were still being stored in secret years after they should have been shared with the public.<p>Ya, I&#x27;m trying to figure out what he thought would happen.