Secretary Clinton's Sounding Board, Primarily a "Cathartic" Outlet for Employees?

ca·thar·tic [kuh-thahr-tik]

1. of or pertaining to catharsis.

2. Also, ca·thar·ti·cal. evacuating the bowels; purgative.

3. Psychiatry

a. psychotherapy that encourages or permits the discharge of pent-up, socially unacceptable affects.

b. discharge of pent-up emotions so as to result in the alleviation of symptoms or the permanent relief of the condition.

An FSO once called the Sounding Board, "one of the greatest things to come from Secretary Clinton's reign over the foreign affairs."    He explained that it is "a message board where people can post ideas on ways to improve the State Department and other people can viciously shoot them down.  It is high entertainment." 

I don't know about "high entertainment" but according to a December 2009 issue of State Magazine, the Sounding Board, at http://soundingboard.state.gov (behind the firewall, sorry!) provides Secretary Clinton a window into employee concerns at the State Department, but that it also serves another valuable purpose: "It promotes communication between employees, alerts management to problems and concerns and gives management the opportunity to provide feedback or dispel myths."

Here is how it works (extracted from State Magazine):

• First, employees submit ideas about how to better achieve our foreign policy goals (with an emphasis on the “how,” not necessarily the “what” or the “why” of foreign policy). The ideas should discuss the impact or cost savings, resource requirements and any obstacles or challenges. Colleagues can then comment on the ideas, adding perspective, highlighting concerns and filling in details that may be missing.

• Unlike an e-mail suggestion box in which only a few people see an idea, question or response, an online forum such as The Sounding Board opens the conversation to everyone who is interested. The interactive dialogue fosters a community of ideas where employees can share thoughts and best practices.

• Since its launch in February [2009], employees have logged more than 250,000 visits to the site and submitted more than 900 ideas, which have generated more than 3,200 follow-up comments. The response has been so overwhelming that The Sounding Board staff has been unable to keep up with submissions.

The article includes a couple of its touted results:

"The Bureau of Administration implemented a bike-share program to facilitate local trips to interagency meetings and will also build more showers for bicycle commuters. The Harry S Truman Building and the Foreign Service Institute cafeterias introduced “greenware” disposable food packaging and committed to reducing non-biodegradable waste."

Also, some nine months after it was launched, the Sounding Board reportedly was recognized as "a model for employee outreach and was one of three innovative programs studied by the National Economic Council and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy."  Apparently, other agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, were looking to the Sounding Board for good ideas as they launch their own initiatives.

Fast forward to December 2010.  Below is an excerpt from Everything Is Broken: My Two Years at the U.S. Department of State, written by Brendan O’Connor, a master’s student in Community Development and Action at Vanderbilt University. He worked in the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations from July 2008 to July 2010:

"[B]efore resigning to attend graduate school in the summer of 2010, I had the chance to meet one-on-one with a high-level manager (and now ambassador) involved in oversight of the Sounding Board. He stated that the Sounding Board, which had been sold to us as a bottom-up tool for employee ideas in early 2009, was primarily a “cathartic” outlet for employees. Someone might want to explain that to the mass of State employees who cropped up to suggest specific, often in-depth ideas online — over 1,500 by the summer of last year. Indeed, when I left there was no meaningful process in place to review and take appropriate action to either reject or on some level adopt these employee suggestions."

Read in full here.

So hundreds of ideas later -- a senior official of Secretary Clinton's staff called the Sounding Board a "cathartic" outlet?"  Cathartic as in "purgative," as in "strongly laxative."

Sounds dirty.

We have a few nosy questions concerning this new model of employee engagement:

How many ideas have been submitted to the Sounding Board since its launched in Feb 2009?

How many submitted ideas are currently under official consideration?

How many ideas have been implemented?

How much cost-savings have been realized through the implemented ideas?

Is the amount of the cost-savings more than or equal to the cost of manhours to run and manage the Sounding Board?

What process is used by the Sounding Board Team to screen the submitted ideas for review and action?

Since the Board provides Secretary Clinton "a window into employee concerns" how many ideas have been brought to her attention?

If you had luck getting your idea to stick using the Sounding Board, we'd like to hear from you - on the record or on background.



Related Post:
Oh, No! The Sounding Board is in WaPo's In The Loop

State Dept CA CIO Kirit Amin Rants on FSOs, Cronyism, Nepotism, "Doormats"... Two Days Later, Apologizes

In June, I wrote about the OIG review of the Consular Affairs Bureau's Consolidated Consular Database (CCD) ran under the umbrella of CA/CST.

To recap, the OIG arrived at the following conclusion:

The CCD is the backbone of all consular applications and services and supports domestic and overseas passport and visa activities. The CCD is the repository for data from all the individual consular sections and passport office databases. It uses state-of-the-art technology with agile and robust design for scalability and availability. The CCD is accessed by 11,000 Department users, as well as 19,000 users in other agencies (for example, DHS, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Social Security Administration.). The CCD is the personally identifiable data repository for American citizens services, passports, immigrant visas, and nonimmigrant visas. Because of the CCD’s importance to national security, ensuring its data integrity, availability, and confidentiality is vital

CST does not have adequate oversight of CCD operations. [REDACTED]

The report also reviewed leadership and management issues and its impact on CST, and points out that of the total 68 personnel working at CST only 6 are Foreign Service Officers.  Make a mental note of that. Read more here.

On October 5, 2011, Federal News Radio reports that "State's Amin leaving CIO role temporarily."  That's Kirit Amin who has been CIO at the Bureau of Consular Affairs for four years.  Excerpts below:

Kirit Amin, the chief information officer of the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, said he will take a 120-day reassignment with the State Department CIO.

He cited frustration with senior management decisions and the refusal of employees to change the way they work as some of the reasons for the move.

"I think we've made a tremendous difference in spite of opposition from people entrenched in the government for years," Amin said in an exclusive interview with Federal News Radio. " ... I was saying State was doing some contracts which are bad contracts — that was costing us far more than it should. I said 'Wait a minute,' and they want to cover it up. There is a lot of cronyism and nepotism going on at State."
[...]
"The State Department is ruled by the foreign service. These guys go overseas and have a good time and come here and have no idea what they are doing," he said. "The agency is ruled by them, and even Secretary Hillary Clinton is starting to admit to that. I think the civil service employees are treated like doormats. You fight with them for what's right and they can't take it."

The American Foreign Service Association has objected to Amin's comments, calling them "outrageous."

Read in full here.

Federal News Radio then reports that Daniel Hirsch, state vice president of AFSA, took exception to those comments. Also dated October 5, AFSA objects to Amin's characterization of Foreign Service:

In an emailed statement to Federal News Radio, Hirsch wrote, "These outrageous comments raise serious questions about whether Mr. Amin even understands the basic mission of the agency he is working for, much as protesting that the Department of Defense is "ruled" by the military would raise questions about whether a person understood the purpose of that agency."

On October 6, by great coincidence, Bob Gourley of Sys-Con Media has a piece on the Department of State’s Consular Systems and Technology: A Track Record of Innovation, and Kirit Amin.   

This year, CST also won two awards from the Association For Federal Information Resources Management (AFFIRM), a Leadership Award in Service Excellence for the CEAC team and a Leadership Award in Service of the Country to Kirit Amin.

Leadership Award for Service to the Country: Kirit Amin, CIO, Bureau Consular Affairs, Office of Consular Systems & Tech, US Department of State Presented for excellence in government information services improvement or effectiveness on a national level by leveraging information for mission accomplishment.

On October 7, Mr. Amin released an open letter to AFSA, published by Federal News Radio.

On Wednesday, Federal News Radio reported that I was to be seconded to the Information Resources Management Office within the State Department. That was not incorrect. An article based on the phone conversation that I had with Jason Miller, Executive Editor of that outlet, contained elements of an interview that characterized my opinion on a number of concerns within the State Department, including my comments about professional, Foreign Service Officers who work here. It is worth mentioning, that those comments as stated in the article had nothing to do with, or any relationship to that new assignment.

To my colleagues and peers at AFSA, I offer my complete and sincere apology. The phone conversation with Miller, someone who I have worked with and known for some time, could not have come at a more inconvenient time. I had just learned of my new assignment and was working to put together a transition strategy to honor that obligation, when I took the call. It is never wrong to work with members of the media however in this age of instant communications I should have remembered that an instant answer is not always required.
[...]
During my four years of working at the Bureau of Consular Affairs, I have had the honor to work with talented, dedicated and brave FSOs as they were serving their country, often in very dangerous postings around the world. I have been privileged enough to become close friends with a number of them. Because of that special consideration, I sincerely regret and apologize if my words brought discredit to them or Foreign Service Officers in general.
[....]
I am confident that those of you that recognize the work represented by my team are also aware of my professional frustration of not being able to make the changes more quickly; especially, when I am so sure that they would enable us to serve the FSO community more expeditiously. That every manager, director and senior leader that I know, in government and the private sector, shares this frustration, is little solace.

Read in full here.

I don't know how this will end. But one of the possible scenarios would be Mr. Amin's resignation to spend more time with his family.

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GPS Tracking for State Dept Staffers in the Danger Zones of Iraq, Af/Pak and Yemen

Wapo's Walter Pincus recently wrote about a new high-tech system to track U.S. staff on risky tours:

The State Department is installing advanced, classified security systems in Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and Yemen to monitor staff movements in those countries where moving among local populations remains dangerous, according to department budget and contract documents.

The Blue Force Tracker system uses a small transmitter mounted on a vehicle, an aircraft or an individual that sends continuous signals to a Global Positioning System satellite and back to a computer in a secure command post. The command post computer shows precise locations within a 10-foot radius of tracked individuals, vehicles or aircraft on ever-changing map displays.

“This critical technology provides department personnel with the confidence to travel into highly dangerous areas, knowing there is an over-watch and a reaction capability to help them at the push of a button,” according to a State Department fiscal 2012 budget document presented to Congress. About $9.4 million was being sought to support the tracking system in Iraq next year.

No State Department official would discuss the systems on the record.

Read the whole thing here.


It's supposed to give staff confidence because the watchers will be able to pinpoint their location -- and give the State Department an "over-watch and a reaction capability to help them [(staff] at the push of a button."

So -- if we have another Raymond Davis incident in any of those four countries, this would allow for a quick extraction of personnel in danger, is that the idea? Because -- really, unless you can retrieve/extract the personnel in danger, pinpointing location is just that - a dot on the screen. 

The report did not say what type of GPS system this might be -- a wearable item like a watch, a smart phone with GPS locator, an implantable device more or less the size of rice, a waist-clip on GPS enabled thingee like a pager or I don't know -- a fake eye, a third eye, an earing, an anklet ....


If a GPS rice implant is available, that might be the best choice - nothing to remember, nothing to forget, nothing to misplace or pack or hide when you travel. And if you ever get into a tussle with overly excited security agents of the host country, nothing that may break (that Uncle Sam can then charged you with). Of course, since this is the government, they probably will have somebody check out your GPS rice implant every year for the annual inventory. Be prepared to be scanned like Ms. Kitty.

It does look like the Blue Force Tracker Program (BFT) is deploying into the hot zones of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen since Olgoonik Global Security, LLC is hiring Security Specialist IIs for all four countries; it says so online:

Subsidiary:     Olgoonik Global Security, LLC
Location:     Pakistan
Organization:     BFT
Requisition Number:     2010759

Overview:

The Department of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), Office of Security Technology (ST), is responsible for the Department's Blue Force Tracker Program (BFT). BFT utilizes GPS satellite tracking for personnel, vehicles and aircraft. It is designed to maximize visualization of designated assets traveling and conducting operations in hostile or hazardous areas.  This position will be responsible for working with DS/C/ST and Embassy personnel on-site and providing technical guidance on both the BFT tracker hardware and monitoring software.

Among other things, it requires that applicants have "Bachelor’s Degree plus seven years of experience preferred; High School Diploma plus 12 years of experience can substitute for a Bachelor’s Degree." Also the following:

Security Clearance:                                       

TOP SECRET Clearance with SCI Access Required

• Must have a current US Government TOP SECRET Personnel Security Clearance and be able to qualify for SCI access

• Must have a current US Government Single Scope Background Investigation (SSBI) (less than 4-1/2 years old) or be able to successfully complete a U.S. government administered Single Scope Background Investigation.

• Must be a U.S. Citizen.

• Must be eligible for and able to obtain and maintain required Security Clearance/access approvals.

Physical Demands:

The physical demands described herein are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this position.  The employee must be able to stand, walk and sit for a prolonged period of time; use hands and/or fingers to handle or feel objects, tools or controls; operate office equipment; reach with hands and arms; climb stairs; balance; stoop; kneel; talk and hear. Specific vision abilities required by the job include close and distant vision.  The employee must occasionally lift and or move up to 50 pounds.  Medical conditions or physical impediments may disqualify candidates from overseas work where comprehensive medical care may be limited or unavailable, or where the condition or impediment would put the individual at unacceptable risk.  Duties may be performed in an active combat zone where the employee would be required to seek shelter. There may be stress, psychological and physical hardships, and the possibility of living in field conditions associated with this position.

Travel:

Overseas travel will be required up to 90% of the calendar year in high-threat areas.  Domestic travel may be required for training and program coordination.
Work Environment:  Full-time, 84-hour week usually under hazardous conditions when deployed in a theater of operations.  Personnel meeting the provisions of Department of State Standardized Regulations, Chapter 650 – Danger Pay Allowance, and performing in a location determined a hazardous duty area are eligible to receive danger pay up to 35% over basic compensation.

Living Environment:  Lodging, meals, medical and basic life support services will be provided while in a theater of operations, as well as the prevailing per diem rate for incidental expenses (IE).

Work Location:  The location of high-risk environments will be disclosed upon interview.

Interested? Check it out here. You have to locate each job vacancy using the location country drop down menu on its website.

A side note -- DOD has been using Blue Force Tracking (BFT) for years.  In 2006, Popular Science did a piece on BFT used in Iraq. Read "Winning-and Losing-the First Wired War."

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Inadequate Oversight of State Dept's Consolidated Consular Database-- Is This WikiLeaks Waiting to Happen, Again?

The State Department OIG has just posted online its Inspection of The Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of Consular Systems and Technology (CST). (See Report Number ISP-I-11-51, May 2011; pdf file here)

The inspection took place in Washington, DC, between January 18 and March 4, 2011. The reports includes a whole lot of things but below is one of the most striking items:

Oversight of the Consolidated Consular Database

The CCD is the backbone of all consular applications and services and supports domestic and overseas passport and visa activities. The CCD is the repository for data from all the individual consular sections and passport office databases. It uses state-of-the-art technology with agile and robust design for scalability and availability. The CCD is accessed by 11,000 Department users, as well as 19,000 users in other agencies (for example, DHS, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Social Security Administration.). The CCD is the personally identifiable data repository for American citizens services, passports, immigrant visas, and nonimmigrant visas. Because of the CCD’s importance to national security, ensuring its data integrity, availability, and confidentiality is vital.

CST does not have adequate oversight of CCD operations. [REDACTED]

Bold emphasis added.  Since the rest of that had been redacted, there is no way to tell just how inadequate is the oversight. If somebody downloads 500 gigabytes of personally identifiable information (PII) into a Lady Gaga CD, would anyone notice?

The OIG report provides a background of the Office of Consular Systems and Technology (CST) and why the inadequate oversight of this sensitive data is not good news:

CST succeeds in a very daunting mission. Every aspect of modern consular work depends on automated consular systems. CST systems in FY 2010 enabled CA to issue 13.8 million passports and 6.4 million visitor visas, respond to crises in Haiti and elsewhere, and protect the millions of Americans traveling abroad. The office maintains the CCD, a critical operational and national security database, which contains over 137 million American and foreign case records and over 130 million photographs and is growing at approximately 40,000 visa and passport cases every day. Serving 11,000 users in the Department and more than 19,000 users in other agencies, primarily the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and various law enforcement elements, it is accessed more than 120 million times every month.

To carry out its mandate, CST must provide uninterrupted support to 233 overseas posts, 21 passport agencies, 2 passport processing centers, and other domestic facilities, for a total of 30,000 end users across 16 Federal agencies and in nearly every country. CST faces 24/7/365 service requirements, as any disruption in automated support brings operations to an immediate halt, with very serious implications for travelers and the U.S. image.

A snapshot of its staff:

CST is led by a director and is staffed by 68 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees (62 Civil Service and 6 Foreign Service). There are 12 positions (3 Foreign Service and 9 Civil Service) currently vacant. CA recently authorized CST 19 additional FTE positions. There are also more than 850 contractors operating under nearly 30 different contracts. In FY 2010, CST’s annual operating budget was approximately $266 million.

Other Key Findings:

• The Office of Consular Systems and Technology (CST) succeeds in its mission of supporting consular operations around the world, enabling the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA) in 2010 to issue 13.8 million passports and 6.4 million visitor visas, respond to crises in Haiti and elsewhere, and protect the millions of Americans traveling abroad. However, there are areas that require attention.

• The director has a clear, well-articulated vision for his office as an exemplar of information management in the Federal Government. He deserves credit for his accomplishments and leadership role. His larger-than-life persona dominates the office. Although the director possesses strong technical skills and a fierce determination to achieve his goals, his managerial approach has created tension within CST and friction with other bureau and Department of State (Department) offices. Now that CA leadership has weighed in and the Department’s Civil Service ombudsman has begun a dialogue with CST, tension levels have eased; however, there is need for continued effort in and oversight of this matter.

• The Consular Consolidated Database (CCD) is central to all consular operations and is an important element of U.S. national security systems. Although CST provides outstanding critical consular data delivery to the Department and other Federal agencies, [REDACTED]

• Contract oversight is a major function of CST. The director takes great personal interest in this area, but contracting officer representatives (COR) vary in the effectiveness of their oversight. CST needs to ensure that all CORs are correctly trained and designated. CST also needs to carefully follow procedures for modifying existing contracts and task orders and to establish a procedure for periodic independent audits of CST contracts. To assist in this effort, CA has authorized 19 new positions for CST. The OIG team acknowledges the need for additional personnel but with the caveat that these increases be implemented within the context of a plan that reevaluates CST’s current organizational structure and is based on a strategic assessment of the office’s future needs.

• Access controls for assigning and tracking user accounts in various critical systems in CST need to be strengthened.

Leadership and management issues and its impact on CST:

Possessing strong technical skills, a driving personality, and a fierce determination to achieve his goals, he deserves much of the credit for CST’s recent accomplishments. The Bureau Assistant Secretary and his supervisor, the principal deputy assistant secretary, support him and have signed on to his vision for CST and its IT strategy for supporting bureau stakeholders.

The director has instilled his sense of mission in many of his CST staff members, who generally, but not universally, respect his intellectual and technical skills. He takes pride in his commitment to broadening the professional skills of his technical staff. He dominates the office by his force of personality and rules with a blunt, no-nonsense, top-down managerial style that is punctuated by sporadic emotional public outbursts, often directed against individual staff members, as well as tirades occasioned by bureaucratic encounters with other CA and Department offices. At times, he has issued diktats to members of staff, prohibiting or restricting their contact with other entities in the Department (in one instance, the Visa Office came under his interdict). Whatever the efficacy of these prohibitions, they have constrained CST’s relationships within CA and have created an atmosphere in which some of CA’s other offices and some bureaus try to avoid personal encounters with the director. Unsurprisingly, communication and coordination with CST are often described as difficult and frustrating experiences. On the other hand, relations with other agencies, such as DHS, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Social Security Administration, appear excellent. The director and the office are also well respected in the broader IT community.

Elsewhere in the report, the inspectors point out that the former deputy of CST, an FSO who apparently had left his position 18 months earlier had to be brought back from overseas to coordinate the preparation for the OIG inspection:

CST’s handling of the OIG inspection is illustrative of the problems that it faces in dealing with cross-cutting management issues. Before the inspection, CST brought back the former deputy director, now minister counselor at Embassy New Delhi, for three weeks to coordinate preparations for the inspection. During the inspection itself, the inspectors had to chase down documents and items relating to basic management issues. The OIG team explained to the director that the procedures related to the OIG compliance process would require the creation of an ad hoc staffing/procedural structure to manage the process, as the present organizational structure is inadequate for the task.

With the office facing a major expansion in personnel over the next 2 to 3 years, CST badly needs a structured management support unit in place now to plan for and handle these issues effectively and to provide the necessary oversight for and supervision of the contractors.

Morale, Emotional Outbursts, and Here the Ombudsman Steps In

Morale in CST can best be described as mixed. Some of the CST staff view the director’s management of the office as stimulating and challenging; others resent it. Even those who admire the director’s leadership and accomplishments most, view his emotional outbursts as embarrassing and inappropriate. Issues relating to the director’s management style, particularly his penchant for public emotional outbursts, came to a head in September and October 2010, when the Assistant Secretary and principal deputy assistant secretary reacted to reports of yet another angry eruption directed against individual employees at a CST meeting.

As a result, the Office of the Ombudsman established an ongoing dialogue with CST. A senior CA official also provided firm written guidance to the director on the need to curb his emotions and work on anger management. In the ensuing 4 months and through the OIG inspection, staff members confirmed that, although not perfect, the atmosphere had improved, with a perceptible easing of emotional tension within the office. Staff members expressed relief and hope that the improvement in the atmosphere would persist beyond the presence of the OIG inspection team.

The Leadership Tenet Not at Work -- Communicate

"We help others understand the mission and their role in accomplishing it. We also listen actively to each others concerns and encourage innovation in consular work by listening intently for suggestions."
-Consular Leadership Tenets

CST stands at the nexus of everything that CA does, and every part of the bureau praises CST’s technical expertise and accomplishments. At the same time, however, the interaction between CST and the business process stakeholders (the other directorates and offices within CA), is spotty, with frustration on the part of CA business units concerning a lack of a clear process for communicating and for establishing priorities for the maintenance, development, and support of automated systems. There is fault on both sides. The business process owners themselves need to take greater responsibility for establishing these priorities. At the same time, CST has sometimes made decisions for technical or budgetary reasons without coordinating with the operators in the field or the business process owners. One such decision seriously affected billing operations at the National Visa Center and required significant effort to redress.

Now, if you have ever used any of the consular systems, and pulled your hair in frustration at times at how nutty and unintuitive some of the functions within these systems are or why added keystrokes are there when they're not needed, here is your official answer.  The second answer has to do with the number of FSOs working at CST -- 6 out of 68! 

The OIG report includes 35 official recommendations, with recommendations #19-#25 redacted. It also contains 6 informal recommendations.

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Oh, No! The Sounding Board is in WaPo's In the Loop

The Office of eDiplomacy runs several knowledge-management and new media technology programs for the State Department: Diplopedia, the VPPs, Communities@state and the Sounding Board. Here is a quick description of the Sounding Board:

The Sounding Board is an initiative, launched by Secretary Clinton that enables domestic and overseas employees to submit ideas for Department innovation and reform. Employees are invited to contribute their ideas and suggestions for how to make the Department work in new, smarter, and more effective ways to advance our nation's foreign policy goals. The end goal is to provide clear and well-defined proposals for review and action by Department management. Secretary Clinton and other senior Department officials consider both the initial proposal and the management response to determine if additional action or implementation is feasible and necessary.

The Sounding Board is, of course, located behind the great firewall and only available to folks with real logins.  No, we're not allowed to read what they write about us over there.  That does not mean, it does not leak at times. Recently a discussion on abolishing the Board and WaPo's In the Loop column, made an appearance, where else? In Al Kamen's In the Loop.

Oh, dear, you're now living your fears.  Excerpts below:  

Seemed fairly inside baseball for the most part, with many discussions about “overseas comparability pay” or medical evacuation policies or improving visa procedures and such. A good tool for internal discussion, though not worth spending a lot of time perusing.

But a recent discussion on the Sounding Board — about abolishing the Sounding Board itself — seemed worth a look. There was this posting, submitted by “Anonymous.”

“My real concern is the potential the Sounding Board has to embarrass the department,” the writer said, noting that “department employees are constantly derided as entitled, pampered bureaucrats who attend cocktail parties and live it up in Europe at the expense of the hardworking taxpayer.”

Some of that may be due to the inordinate media attention given to political ambassadors serving in fine European capitals vs. the majority of employees who work in unpleasant and even dangerous places.

The “stereotype is completely untrue,” the anonymous poster said, “but a casual perusal of the Sounding Board, particularly the many threads in which posters argue for more benefits, on top of the generous package we already have, could convince one otherwise.”

Then this warning: “A single ‘In The Loop’ item could damage the Department’s image for years to come.” (Demonstrably false.)

Another employee agreed. “I live in fear of the Washington Post reading one of the less-than-professional posts and having a field day!” she wrote.

(Note to file: Start paying more attention to the Sounding Board.)

Read in full here.

We can understand the sentiments but man, the Sounding Board is like mass email in sheep's clothing.  It is internal, it is unclassified, it gets lots of eyeballs and it is electronic data that is cut copy and paste-possible and emailable.  

The Washington Post Front Page rule of thumb should still apply. I supposed, you now can realistically call it the -- In the Loop rule of thumb, too. 

 

Related articles

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State Dept eMED data breach: info not disclosed to others but advises employees to get credit reports

We've posted previously about the data breach at the State Department relating to approximately 250,000  medical records of its employees and other USG employees working at other agencies (see Alleged Fake Amcits Had Contract Jobs at State Dept, Held Security Clearances)

We sent off the following questions to the State Department Medical Director (got an out of office response), the Medical Records Office (got a canned response thanking us for our medical clearance submission), and a couple of other offices:

• What type of information was obtained?
• What happened to the information illegally obtained by the contractor?
• When and how was the breach discovered?
• If the defendant was not discovered to have committed the alleged immigration fraud, would the State Dept Office of Medical Services have discovered the breach in its medical database?
• Now that eMed had been breached how do employees and family members protect themselves?

The following is the response we got from a State Department official:

During the course of an unrelated investigation, Federal investigators informed the Office of Medical Services (MED) that a long-term IT contractor employed in MED had improperly retained personally identifiable information (PII) from a State Department medical database.  The contractor's employment had been terminated by his company last year.

The information retained by the contractor includes personally identifiable information (PII) associated with our medical clearance database,  such as name, address, and in some, but not all, cases, social security numbers and employing agency.  In some instances, the status of medical clearance - worldwide, limited, pending or not cleared for overseas - was included.  In addition, some entries included medical clearance blood test results.

The data that was in the possession of the contractor has been reviewed by the Department.  From information received to date, there is no indication that this information was disclosed to others.  The investigation is ongoing, and we are monitoring the situation closely.   MED's review to date shows that the information retained by the contractor did not include physician notes, treatment records, emails, scanned documents, or financial information.

The Department has provided guidance to its employees on this situation.  We have sent letters to other agencies of those employees who may be affected by this incident.  We are advising them to obtain a credit report (www.annualcreditreport.com) and be alert to any unusual activity in credit card or bank accounts.  State and non-State staff can send specific inquiries to a specially designated email address.  We are also working to inform retirees who may be affected.

Because this incident is still under investigation, we cannot comment further at this time.

The response we got did not include the specifically designated email address, presumably that and the guidance to employees are available in the intranet. If you are an eligible family member with a deployed spouse and no access to the intranet, check with your Health Unit or your admin officer.

Note that you are entitled to receive one free credit report every 12 months from each of the nationwide consumer credit reporting companies (TransUnion, Equifax, Experian). You can order all three credit reports at the same time and compare them but won't be able to request the free credit reports for another 12 months.  You can also request one credit report every four months so that you can keep track of any changes or new information that may appear on your credit report. Read more here.

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• Who Else Is Reporting Your Credit? The "Other" Three Bureaus (mint.com)
• The Epsilon data breach affected millions - so what happens next? (thetechherald.com)

OIG reviews social media in 22 embassies -- says use extensive, but labor-intensive

State's OIG recently released its review of social media use by the State Department, however, the report only examined the use by US embassies in its FY 2010 inspection cycle and excluded use in its domestic operation. The stated focus of the inspection was more general such as a) extent to which embas­sies were using social media, b) the chief challenges they faced, c) the degree to which the use of social media was connected to the Mission Strategic and Resource Plan (MSRP), d) methods of measurement, and e) the quality of technical support. 

Some not/not so surprising highlights below:

• In reports on social media at 22 missions in 2009-10, OIG inspectors found that the use of social media is extensive, but labor-intensive. Many embassies required additional staff or had to reprogram an existing position in order to use social media in an active way—for example, to generate original content for the social media site, update it daily, and respond to users. Those who primarily relied on Web site content for their social media sites generally cited lack of sufficient staff as an impediment to creating fresh content. At a number of embassies, American and local staff said they needed more training to use social media effectively. Depending on the country, a more active use of social media would require more content in the local language, which would greatly increase the need for translation resources. Public affairs sections generally took primary responsibility for mission social media sites and sometimes found it difficult to get other sections involved—a necessity for serious discussion of consular or policy issues.

• With regard to site content, public diplomacy staff members are engaging in a balancing act. They know they are supposed to focus on the MSRP, but they fear that too great an emphasis on serious issues will make the site heavy, boring, and unable to attract an audience. Some have developed lighter, more creative content, reasoning that if their MSRP goal is to reach a younger audience, anything they do to achieve this automatically falls under the MSRP.

• Some embassies have had problems with users posting questionable material on their social media sites, such as postings by supporters of a terrorist group and U.S. partisan political screeds. Others were uncertain about how to handle postings that were severely critical of U.S. society or policies. Embassy staff would welcome more discussion and guidance on this issue.

• In view of local conditions, some embassies have avoided putting a lot of resources into social media. Others have gone ahead with it anyway, either because they think it is what Washington expects, or because they believe that the limited numbers of people they do reach still represent a key audience: educated youth.

• [I]f the goal is to change attitudes, then additional measuring tools are needed. The Office of Policy, Planning and Resources of the Office of the Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs is sponsoring a study (now in its initial stage) to measure the Department’s public diplomacy social media efforts and assess attitudinal and behavioral changes.

• The new Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM) subchapter on social media provides useful and needed guidance on social media, but missions will need additional reminders of requirements.
  
• Some portions of the new FAM subchapter are complex or not easily interpreted, and missions will need further guidance and advice.

The report is surprisingly thin and although it provided some recommendations, it did not identify the missions reviewed, nor broke it down according to regional bureaus. It also provided no insight on social media funding sources. 

The review covered only 22 missions which are a small fraction of embassies/consulates/American corners with social media presence. A May 2010 survey by the Office of eDiplomacy cited by the report found that over half the U.S. missions had Facebook accounts, and a quarter had Twitter accounts. There are, in fact, over 220 State Department Facebook pages which includes not only embassies/consulates but also American Corners, IRCs, and others.  Some missions also have Flickr, YouTube and blogs.

The report says that the on-the-ground inspections took place before the issuance of the new social media FAM subchapter, so inspectors could not measure embassies against the new regula­tions. 

Read it in full below:      

OIG_Social Media Use Review Feb 2011


I hope the subsequent reviews will give us more things to chew than what we have here.

First Ever Byte vs. Brain Jeopardy! Competition

To air February 14, 15 and 16


After seven years of research and planning, thousands of hours of testing and over fifty champion-level sparring matches, IBM's Watson is finally ready to face the two greatest Jeopardy! champions in history - Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.  The first-ever man vs. machine Jeopardy! competition will air today and the next two days. The grand prize for this competition will be $1 million with second place earning $300,000 and third place $200,000. Rutter and Jennings will donate 50 percent of their winnings to charity, and IBM will donate 100 percent of its winnings to charity. 

IBM's Watson page says that preparing Watson for the Jeopardy! stage posed a unique challenge to the team: how to represent a system of 90 servers and hundreds of custom algorithms for the viewing public.


The result? A dynamic visual avatar based on the smarter planet icon. A speaking voice that clearly pronounces a vast vocabulary. And an answer panel that reveals the system’s top responses and confidence levels. Watch the video IBM - The Face of Watson to find out more about each of these elements.


Last week, PBSNewsHour's science correspondent Miles O'Brien   challenged the machine to a JEOPARDY! duel. Watch Miles, Watson and David Gondek, one of Watson's many creators, face off over unusual animal phobias, presidential tongue twisters and ... laundry detergent ... here.

Related articles

• IBM's Watson To Smash Its Human Opponents On Jeopardy Tonight (crunchgear.com)
• Humans had a good run: Watson to debut on Jeopardy tonight (engadget.com)
• Tonight: Man vs. Machine in Jeopardy Showdown (datacenterknowledge.com)
• Human-Cyborg Matchup on Jeopardy: Ken Jennings vs. The Supercomputer (wired.com)
• IBM's Watson Supercomputer Set to Take on Jeopardy Champs (wired.com)

Auto-respond email gets some bad press, and by the way, US Embassy Tunis is now on Authorized Departure

It used to be that if an American citizen is upset about the attention or service it receives from an American Embassy, he/she would have to write or fax a letter of complaint to the US ambassador, congressional reps or his/her newspaper. In the 21st century, he/she can still do that but can also blog about it, tweet about it or quickly pass any complaints to an almost infinite number of media outlets.

It also used to be that when you leave work, you get down time at home.  Now with the ever present gizmos, you don't really leave work since you are hook up in one way or another to the work place. Life now happens in real time even online. But its hard to ditch an old habit from the 20th century. So you are still reminded to turn on your auto-respond email when you are out of the office for an extended amount of time.  In three day-holidays, you turn it on to inform/remind whoever needs to reach you that you are not at work, at work, even if you are considered to be on duty 24/7. At times, you provide not just the emergency telephone number of the embassy's duty officer but also the name of the person in charged of the office if you are on extended absence,  But how you write your auto-respond email, can still get you some bad press. Like this one from US Embassy Tunis: 
 
Via Gawker:

U.S. Embassy Isn't Letting a Coup Get In the Way of a Vacation Day

In case you haven't noticed, Tunisia's fallen apart. Its president just fled the country after weeks of riots, and the military has taken control. The U.S. Embassy will still be closed on Martin Luther King Day, though. Holidays are holidays!

A tipster in Tunisia—go here for a good explainer on what's happened there—sent an e-mail just a few hours ago to Stephen Ashby, the U.S. consular officer there and third-ranking embassy staffer.

He got an auto-respond e-mail, sent at noon eastern time, saying that Ashby was out of the office and that the embassy will be closed on January 17, 2010 to honor Martin Luther King Day.

Read the whole thing here.


The consular section at the US Embassy in Tunis according to a three year old OIG report was rightsized not too long ago. At the time of the inspection in 2007, the OIG expected that the position of the deputy section chief would be eliminated the following summer. If all that went according to plans, the consular section would have one midlevel FS-02 officer as section chief, two entry level officers on their first assignment overseas and five local staff at this time.

We don't know the Tunis consular chief and we can't tell if he went on vacation this MLK's holiday weekend. His auto responder email is, however correct in indicating that Monday, January 17 is a holiday and the embassy will be closed.  That's dictated by Uncle Sam, people.  That the embassy is closed to the public does not mean, the staff is not at work. Of course, the general public would not know that.  Presumably, given the developments in the country last week, the embassy would have activated its Emergency Action Committee (EAC). Since the consular section chief is the only midlevel officer in a section of three officers (two on first tours), covering a consular district with some 600 American citizens, we expect that this past weekend was not a vacation for him or anyone posted at our embassy in Tunis.

The public (perhaps even the warden folks) may not always understand what's happening behind the walls particularly in times of crises. If we had no regular contact with our US embassy representatives and we got the following email from our consular officer, we probably would be as anxious as Gawker. Like -- whaaat, things are falling apart and you are on a holiday?!!!

Image from Gawker

So how about if your auto respond email says:

I will be out-of-office from Saturday, January 15 until Tuesday, January 18, 2011.  Although the US Embassy will be closed for the XXXX holiday on Monday, we are closely monitoring the situation in XXXX. Please read the recent Travel Advisory//Alert/Warning here dated XXX and take appropriate precautions. For updated information on security situation/guidance, check this website XXXX.  In case of an emergency, please contact the embassy's Duty Officer at xxxxxx.

At the minimum, that's what we hope we'd get from our embassy if we were stranded in a country amidst a revolution.  The canned auto-response above although accurate comes across as if the US official is detached from the reality on the ground.    

Now would be a good time to review your auto response email. Take appropriate care with the text especially when there are fast moving local events that can turn critical.  Prepare alternate text for when there is an emergency so you have a draft ready to go when you need it.  Be mindful that your email, whether on auto response or not, always reflects on your employer.

US Embassy Tunisia is also on Facebook, but it's effort there viewed from a private American citizen's perspective is not any better. It posted the Travel Warning dated January 16, but fails to engage with many questions posted online. On a question on services, obviously referring to services in relation to the alert that was just issued, FB Tunis points fans to a link in the embassy's website, telling them to look up "the "U.S. Citizen Services" page for information about services," which has really no additional details on the events unfolding in the country or what the embassy might do to assist.  Its booklet on General Guidance for American Citizens Living in Tunisia is of course, useful, absent a coup or a revolution. Nothing in the embassy's website talks about emergencies except a list of emergency telephone numbers; nothing on possible evacuations, or crisis preparedness.     

It wasn't totally surprising that when US Embassy Tunis posted its Warden Message on the authorized departure of the embassy's family members from Tunisia, you see the following comment:

This is what is so absurd!

1.) They send this warden message out late last night - I didn't receive it until I woke up this morning. The flight is for tomorrow morning at 9am. That gives little time for people to decide if they want to go,... to prepare their things, AND for those outside of Tunis to make the trip.

2.) We have to repay the ticket to Rabat without knowing the price! It could be double what it normally is due to the fact most airlines are restricting flights to/from Tunisia at the moment.

3.) They don't take us to US soil - they dump us in another foreign country and won't offer to help with any accommodation, or travel plans, etc once we are there.

I really do not see how this is a valid alternative to staying here in Tunisia. Or maybe that's the point - they want to say they OFFERED transportation out of the country, but they are counting on most people not taking them up on it.

And there was nobody from the Embassy Tunis FB team to explain or clarify any confusion on the part of the reading public.  Most Americans generally assume that the US Government will send in the Marines to rescue them when they are in trouble overseas. That assumption seems to be true whether the host country is in political turmoil, in a natural disaster or when an  American traveler is in jail.

22 U.S.C. 2671(a) does provide that the Secretary of State is authorized to make expenditures [...] for unforeseen emergencies arising in the diplomatic and consular service. 22 U.S.C. 2671(b)(2)(A) provides that such activities include “the evacuation when their lives are endangered by war, civil unrest, or natural disaster of:

• (1) “United States Government employees and their dependents; and

• (2) “Private United States citizens or third-country nationals, on a reimbursable basis to the maximum extent practicable, with such reimbursements to be credited to the applicable Department of State appropriation and to remain available until expended except that no reimbursement under this clause shall be paid that is greater than the amount the person evacuated would have been charged for a reasonable commercial air fare immediately prior to the events giving rise to the evacuation.”

Evacuation is not free:  U.S. citizen evacuated on United States Government funded transportation, whether embassy commercial charter or military transport, must execute the promissory note and loan agreement on Form DS-3072 prescribed by the Department to cover the cost of transportation for all family members, including alien family members.

Everyone fills out a promissory note: With few exceptions, even USG employees fills out DS-3072 to enable post to generate a manifest.

Evacuation loan: A U.S. citizen abroad is eligible to receive an evacuation loan if the Department of State is evacuating U.S. citizens from a country where their lives are endangered by war, civil unrest, or natural disaster.

Repatriation loan: If the crisis evacuation loan recipient arrives at a safe haven outside the United States, and then requires a repatriation loan in order to return to the United States from the safe haven, the safe haven post, unless otherwise authorized by the Department, should process a repatriation loan for eligible U.S. citizens, cancel the previous U.S. passport, and issue a limited validity passport limited for direct return to the United States. (See 7 FAM 370.)

Read more here.

The regs advise that post publicize Form DS-3072 requirement via town hall meetings and warden messages to all potential evacuees. Also to provide copies of the form which is also available electronically at the Department of State Internet Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) forms page under American Citizen
Services as far in advance of an evacuation as possible. Advise evacuees to bring filled-out forms with them to the evacuation site in order to shorten required processing.

Of course, there is never enough lead time for an evacuation. It can happen within 24-48 hours. By that time, post is busy with the logistics of evacuating non-essential personnel and family members, as well as private Americans.  Here's a couple of thoughts:

• Include a Frequently Asked Questions on crisis preparedness on the mission website dedicated to private Americans.  This could include information on crisis evacuations, loans and evacuation documents. Encourage American citizens and wardens to read and disseminate the information. Provide links to the relevant regulations in the Foreign Affairs Manual highlighting information on what the embassy can and cannot do. By doing this, public expectations can be managed more effectively. (Note: This would make a very useful special project for an ELO out there).

• Given that evacuations seem to be happening with more frequency these days, the functional or regional bureaus might consider putting together small emergency digital teams based in DC who is tasks with taking over post's web and social media outlets for the duration of the crisis. The embassy employees will already be challenged with the impending evacuation and swamped with work demands. Having a back up, on call media team would help ensure that there is continuity with public engagement at the time when the public demands it the most.       

Why bother?  One can never be too prepared.  Political turmoil of every flavor continues to roil Africa and natural disasters can strike anywhere as the floods in Australia and Brazil. And who knows what's next in Africa and the Middle East in light of what's happening in Tunisia ....     

  
 
 

Related articles

• US says citizens should consider leaving Tunisia (alternet.org)
• New Tunisian government, but some old faces (msnbc.msn.com)
• Citizens hopeful as new Tunisian government forms (cnn.com)
• Amid gunfights, Tunisia set for new government (msnbc.msn.com)

Quickie: Security predictions for 2011 on Internet censorship and control

Security predictions for 2011 via Andreas M. Antonopoulos of NetworkWorld:

This past year has been a doozy in the security world. We kicked off the year by discovering operation Aurora, saw the first national-industrial sabotage attack with Stuxnet and are closing the year with Wikileaks about to become a constitutional crisis between the First amendment and a 1917 espionage law. Reality has well and truly become weirder than fiction.

Let me dive in and make some predictions for security in 2011:
[...]
Internet censorship and control:
The "free" Internet is annoying too many governments and corporations. In 2011, the U.S. government will try much harder to impose controls, censorship, prior restraint and eavesdropping on the Internet. Expect to see unconstitutional laws passed and then challenged. Freedom of speech is far less popular in practice than it is in the abstract and it will be up to a small minority to vigorously resist pressure to abandon principles of free speech, net neutrality and content neutrality.

Read the whole thing here.

Related articles

• Brace Yourself for More Censorship, Data Breaches and Devices in 2011 (pcworld.com)
• 2010 Trend Watch Update: Global Internet Censorship (bespacific.com)
• US Has Lost All Moral High Ground On Internet Censorship (techdirt.com)

Quickie: State power and the response to Wikileaks

Via The Monkey Cage (Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage. - H.L. Mencken), a blogpost by Henry Farell (associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University):

The US response to Wikileaks has been an interesting illustration of both the limits and extent of state power in an age of transnational information flows. The problem for the US has been quite straightforward. The Internet makes it more difficult for states (even powerful ones such as the US) to control information flows across their own borders and others. It is much easier than it used to be for actors to hop jurisdictions by e.g. moving a particular Internet based service from one country to another, while still making it possible for people across many countries to access the service. This makes it much harder for the US and other actors to use the traditional tools of statecraft - their jurisdiction does not extend far enough to stop the actors who they would like to stop.
[...]
Even if states cannot directly regulate small agile actors outside their jurisdiction, they can indirectly regulate them by pressganging big private actors with cross-jurisdictional reach. A few years ago, the US found itself unable to regulate Internet gambling firms which were based in Antigua and selling their services to US customers. But the US was able to tell its banks that they would suffer legal and political consequences if they allowed transactions between US customers and Antiguan gambling firms, helping to drive the latter out of existence.
[...]
And this is exactly what the US is doing in response to Wikileaks. US political pressure caused Amazon to stop hosting Wikileaks, EveryDNS to break Wikileaks.org's domain name, eBay/Paypal to stop facilitating financial transactions, Swiss Post to freeze a Wikileaks bank account (in perhaps the first instance in recorded history of a Swiss bank taking residency requirements seriously), and Mastercard and Visa to cease relations with it. This is unlikely to affect the availability of the information that Wikileaks has already leaked. But it may plausibly affect the medium and long run viability of Wikileaks as an organization. This will be a very interesting battle to watch.

Read the whole thing here.

The downside to better information-sharing: the human factor aka rotten apple with a security clearance

Via WaPo by Ellen Nakashima: With better sharing of data comes danger: Excerpt

The American intelligence community came under heavy criticism after Sept. 11, 2001, for having failed to share information that could have prevented the attacks that day. In response, officials from across the government sought to make it easier for various agencies to share sensitive information - effectively giving more analysts wider access to government secrets.
[...]
"One of the consequences [of 9/11] is you gave a lot of people access to the dots," said Jeffrey H. Smith, a former CIA general counsel. "At least one of the dots, apparently, was a bad apple."

While WikiLeaks has not identified the source of the more than 250,000 cables, suspicions have centered on a 23-year-old Army private, Bradley Manning, who was also the suspected source of the military intelligence documents from Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a series of chats with an online companion, Manning said this spring that "*someone* i know" - apparently a coy self-reference - had gained access to 260,000 State Department cables from embassies and consulates around the world "explaining how the first world exploits the third, in detail."

"Hilary Clinton [sic], and several thousand diplomats around the world are going to have a heart attack when they wake up one morning, and finds an entire repository of classified foreign policy is available, in searchable format to the public," he said.
[...]
To prevent further breaches, the Pentagon announced Sunday it had ordered the disabling of a feature on its classified computer systems that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices. (Manning reportedly told an associate that he once copied data onto a CD labeled as Lady Gaga music.)

The Defense Department will limit the number of classified systems from which material can be transferred to unclassified systems. It will also require that two people be involved in moving data from classified to unclassified systems.

Such efforts "should have been done long ago before any of this happened," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists. The rush to knock down so-called "stove-piping" without hardening operational security "was asking for trouble," he said.
[...]
A former senior intelligence official said that over the past decade access to Siprnet has ballooned to about 500,000 or 600,000 people, including embassy personnel, military officials from other countries, state National Guard officials and Department of Homeland Security personnel.
[...]
He said that the answer to network breaches is not to restrict access but to improve the vetting of personnel by strengthening the clearance process.

"The fact that you've got someone exfiltrating information doesn't mean you've got a technical problem," he said. "You've got a human problem."

Read the whole thing here.

The FS blog, Dead Men Working has an item here on the the leaks and security clearance.

We must confess that we fell off our horse when we read this item above: "Pentagon announced Sunday it had ordered the disabling of a feature on its classified computer systems that allows material to be copied onto thumb drives or other removable devices."

Even after the previously war log leaks, the Pentagon only ordered the disabling of this function yesterday?

Holy mother of goat and all her wingnut nephews!
    
Elsewhere in the interwebs, it has been reported that Hillary Clinton has "ordered" FSOs to spy on diplomats in the UN, because see there's a cable out there with her name at the bottom.

Ughh! Are they saying that she wrote all those cables that have her name on it?  Really? But ALL cables coming out of the State Department when the Secretary of State is not traveling will have "CLINTON" as sign-off signature, approved through multiple layers of the alphabet soup, functional and regional bureaus, etc. She does not actually write them, dudes. And when she is traveling, the sign-off signature changes to whoever is in charge of the building, like "STEINBERG" or "BURNS" (since new D/MR "NIDES" has not been confirmed yet).Yes, that building has a life of its own.

The same is true with the embassy cables. The leaked cables were the transmitted ones; they usually do not include the names of the writers.  And like the State Department cables, they all have the embassies' chiefs of missions in the sign-off lines. Does it mean the ambassador is XYZ country wrote all those cables? Goodness, no! Would they be able to go anywhere else or do anything else if they were all tied to their desks?

We suspect that this leak will have several repercussions on process, access and and more, and most probably for the short term, make the embassy reporting jobs more difficult than they already are (Already, OMB under newly confirmed director, Jack Lew has issued a Nov 28 memorandum on WikiLeaks and the Mishandling of  Classified Information).  But after reading some of the published cables, we feel that this is middle bad, not top bad. That could quickly change if anyone, including sources named in these cables end up in a pickle, i.e. gets whacked.  Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations did call the leak "somewhere in the middle" when asked to rate this "diplomatic disaster" whether "bad, not so bad, or somewhere in the middle." 

Benedict Brogan, the Daily Telegraph's Deputy Editor writes about the embarrassment of the leak which we thought makes some sense: 

[H]owever much the Guardian, the New York Times and Julian Assange assure us that this represents a shattering blow to every assumption we hold about foreign relations, the fact remains that it’s a collection of little substance that will do nothing to reshape geo-politics. The Saudis would like someone to whack Iran? No kidding. Afghanistan is run by crooks? Really? Hillary Clinton would like to know a lot more about the diplomats she is negotiating against? You surprise me. The Russian government may have links to organised crime? Pass the smelling salts, Petunia. The Americans are secretly whacking al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen? What, you thought the Yemenis were doing it? Muammar Qaddafi has a full time, pneumatic Ukrainian ‘nurse’? Nice one. Diplomats are terrified of Pakistan’s nukes? Me too. And so on, ad infinite boredom. Perhaps something better will pop up, but nothing I’ve read since last night’s surprises.
[...]
Effective diplomacy involves all the transgressions Wikileaks is exposing. Embarrassment is just the consequence of exposure. Perhaps the more sophisticated response is to stand firm, to assume a degree of worldiness from those involved in the world of diplomacy (who will for example enjoy seeing the US Secretary of State squirming about her UN spying operation, but only because theirs hasn’t been exposed as well), and to accept that occasional embarrassment is an occupational hazard in a 21st century marked by vast quantities of information circulating in all too accessible digital form.

True. Dat.  It's not totally technology or system error, but also user error, the human factor aka: the rotten apple with a security clearance syndrome. Should information sharing now take a back seat for fear of rotten apples with thumb drives?  

Former diplomat and Wilson Center scholar Aaron Miller writes that "The republic will survive the WikiLeaks brouhaha; but there's a lesson here for all of us: whether you're in Washington or Kabul, think and think hard before you draft." We agree about the survival of the republic but -- do we really want our diplomats to be more politically correct than be brutally candid when reporting to our policy makers? What used would that be to our decision makers? 


And here the cables are called "insulting [to] world leaders." You should read what foreign diplomats wrote about George W. and our congressional leaders.  Oh, right, you can't -- those are all in secret diplomatic channels going overseas, too.  Secret for now until WL gets there.

We do think that in the future, it would be nice if there's a well tested fire extinguisher right over there before somebody shouts the order to bring the "stove-pipe" walls down.      

In any case, to those who are shocked, shocked at reading these leaked cables -- a simple perspective on the diplomatic tradecraft:  The foreign diplomats in WashDC, the UN in NYC and elsewhere around the United States are there for the view. Really.



Update @ 8:31 pm.
The Secretary of State has just completed her 1pm EST press appearance addressing the leaks. We will post video/text here as soon as they are available.

Related articles

• WikiLeaks hampers U.S. diplomacy (washingtonmonthly.com)
• With better sharing of data comes danger (washingtonpost.com)
• Newspapers Reveal Diplomatic Cables, While WikiLeaks Buckles Under Cyber Attack (wired.com)