National Security? The Most Boring Tumblr Ever
Who doesn’t love, or love to hate, Tumblr? The popular I-Hate-My-Parents-And-Love-Porn-And-Sherlock platform is home to more raw emotion per pixel than any other site.
It just got a whole lot more grey flannel.
On the orders of POTUS, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has created a Tumblr. Yes, this is what orders from the president consist of nowadays. And it is hella dull.
“May you live in interesting times” goes the ancient proverb, and indeed we do, although it’s not clear which ancients we pissed off to get here. But this Tumblr actively seeks to put the lie to that, posting such dazzling entries as “Additional Declassified Documents Relating to Section 702 of FISA,” a pair of PDFs dating back a year and more, festooned with a gaudy DECLASSIFIED header in acid yellow and allcaps, featuring a prominently unlocked padlock.
Of the releases, a letter from James R. Clapper, the Director, says:
In June, President Obama requested that Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper declassify and make public as much information as possible about certain sensitive NSA programs while being mindful of the need to protect sensitive classified intelligence and national security.
Consistent with this directive and in the interest of increased transparency, DNI Clapper has today authorized the declassification and public release of a number of documents pertaining to the Intelligence Community’s collection under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). DNI Clapper has determined that the release of these documents is in the public interest.
These exciting documents are the testimony of major players in the national Intelligence scene, and were formerly Top Secret. They have now been declassified, which would be interesting if they didn’t consist almost entirely of lego-like walls of black redaction, paragraph after paragraph, page after page. Virtually the only text which isn’t redacted is the list of authors.
Well, thanks, Office of the Director of National Intelligence. You’re doing a heckuva job! Doing that “disclosure and openness” thing without, you know, disclosing or opening anything, it’s a tricky thing to get just right. And they haven’t.
As they say in the parody commercial, there are some people who don’t like change. For everyone else, I guess there’s WikiLeaks.
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