I'm Waiting For My Man
Press junkies and the junkie press
Links are at the end, having a smoke.
Yesterday I asked what I’m doing wrong that people aren’t following the links collected at the end of these posts. The answer appears to have been at least in part, “not whining about it enough.”
“The notes warned that so many different agencies were conducting operations inside gaming services that a “deconfliction” group was needed to prevent them spying on each other by accident.”
Clearly we should all encourage the nation’s spymasters to continue trusting the nation’s young people with the nation’s secrets.1
Although the scale and sensitivity of the leaks are significant, this is not the first time that an intelligence breach has been traced back to an argument about video games. One game in particular, the vehicular combat simulation War Thunder, has become notorious for the sheer quantity of leaks linked to it.
[…]
In October 2021, for instance, classified design details about the French Leclerc tank were posted to win an argument about turret rotation speed. In July 2021, a user claiming to be a tank commander in the British army posted documents about the armour structure of the vehicle to win an argument. In January this year, design documents covering at least five separate fighter jets were posted by four different users.
The document warning of the need to keep U.S. spies from spying on each other in video game circles was among those released by Edward Snowden—who began working for the CIA at 23—at the ripe old age of 30. The source of the most recent leak appears to be a 21 year old gamer and National Guardsman.2
Many of the secrets disclosed by the gamer were of the “this is fucking embarrassing” kind, such as spying on putative friends and saying nasty things about them, as in junior high school. Others appear to be more serious, but one shouldn’t leap to the conclusion that the parties involved don’t know what we know, or that they don’t know that we know what they know.
Yr. editor remains convinced that the best way to handle national secrets is to release the daily presidential brief in the morning editions of surviving newspapers, preferably before the president sees it—they can read about it with the rest of us. This would not only short circuit embarrassing revelations like the ones in the news this past week, or at least take the sting out of them, but would reinvigorate the printed press industry. Win-win. Win.
The former president is furious
The rampant stupidity of the press, both in print and in pixels, were most responsible for the smidgen of fame yr. editor achieved back in the day. A little bit of cleverness and a lot of rage could take one pretty far back then.
Did the broadcast and cable news networks every apologize for their roles in stoking the fires of empire during the Bush administration? Some of the newspapers did, as noted here recently;3 the New York Times with some sincerity, the Washington Post with less.
The cable news nitwits tend to hold agony aunt-ish sessions at the end of the year to discuss what they fucked up and how, which serves more as a blueprint for how to fuck up the next year than how to avoid it; they seem to regard collective apologies as signs of weakness, worse than leaving a trail of blood in the snow where wolves or ambitious journalism grads can find it.
Pretty much everybody who covered Trump from 2015 through Biden’s inauguration, with the exception of Maggie Haberman, has apologized for what they did, and then, if they’re still on the beat, has gone ahead and done it again.
(This doesn’t include reporters at, for instance, Vanity Fair, whose job descriptions include gleefully reporting on and sometimes adding to schadenfreude-rich gossip;4 other, mainstream reporters do that too, but they don’t cop to it.)
The former president is furious, says everybody with a platform. You’d have to amputate both hands and throw them to the sharks to count on your fingers the number of days during the past decade or so when he hasn’t been furious about something, but people keep reporting it as if it were news.
Which is not to blame the reader if they somehow missed it.5
“What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.”
That’s ProPublica on the Clarence Thomas beat again, this time reporting that the justice's billionaire bestie, Harlan Crow, bought the home Thomas’s mother still lives in, according to neighbors, and significantly upgraded it, with no disclosure from Thomas.6
One expects the Chief Justice to excoriate these assaults on the dignity and impartiality of the court, any minute now.
Yr. editor is in fact a press junkie.
Music hither and yon
I like all of these. Anna B Savage is sort of folky; Imperial Teen and Giant Drag may have shown up here before—I don’t remember, but I especially liked the Giant Drag performance linked here because I really thought she was going to fall over before it started but she didn’t. Emily Breeze has a remarkable voice. Anyway: here they are.
Imperial Teen, “Now We Are Timeless;”7 Giant Drag, “Waking Up Is Hard to Do;”8 Emily Breeze, “Rapture;”9 Anna B Savage, "in|FLUX."10
That, Comrades, is all there is
Still not feeling tip of the top, but it is what it is. If you like what it is, please share it around, and consider subscribing if you’ve not already.
Be well, take care.
One can argue that much that is classified shouldn't be. It's more difficult to argue that nothing is worth classification and everything should be in the public domain.