By Bill Fairbanks
Special to YNOT
WASHINGTON – As the great Alexander Pope once wrote “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” Nowhere is a small degree of information more dangerous than when it finds its way into the mercurial, capricious hands of a journalist, where facts and information are twisted and bent beyond recognition until they fit the agenda of the scribe in question.
This week, for example, VICE News published a deeply irresponsible article in which the writer suggests contractors working for one division or another of the national intelligence bureaucracy “kill time by viewing pornography on their classified government computers, browsing online dating services, engaging in ‘sex chats’ with minors, and playing games on Facebook.”
While the actions described have been taken by private contractors employed by agencies like the NSA, Homeland Security and the CIA, what VICE fails to realize is all of these actions were accomplished in furtherance of completely legitimate intelligence operations.
With respect to pornography, for example, it’s a well-established fact porn represents not just a public health crisis, but a potent weapon of mass destruction. Porn might not level city blocks or leave behind toxic levels of radiation in the aftermath of its “detonation,” but it’s no less threatening to society than nuclear bombs, biological warfare agents or chemical weapons.
Accordingly, when a contractor surfs a porn site for six hours on end, he’s merely doing his job, even if his official duty is to scour intercepted phone calls looking for signs of trouble or securing an NSA server against hackers.
How can this be? Well, in order to protect America against all threats foreign and domestic, the national security agencies and employees are trained to think outside the box.
Sure, from the outside looking in, it sounds pretty bad when a contractor admits 95 percent of his online activities could be categorized as “personal use.” If you think about it, though, how can he be certain his wife and kids aren’t a terrorist sleeper cell unless he keeps a close eye on them at all times? You have to admit, it’s damn hard for someone to snap naked selfies and assemble a suicide bomber’s vest at the same time.
In other words, this innovative, self-motivated contractor, this American hero, is now being excoriated in absentia as some kind of time-wasting pervert. The truth is he’s simply demonstrating exactly the kind of hyper-vigilance we need in a post-9/11 world.
What of the other contractors VICE highlights in its ill-informed hit piece, you ask, including the one assigned to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) who evidently engaged in “graphic sexual chat” on a “near-daily basis”?
Just like the contractor who took his work seriously enough to extend his scrutiny to friends and families, the actions of this other ODNI employee have been seriously — and perhaps intentionally — misconstrued.
According to the report relied upon by VICE, this contractor “often engaged in as many as 20 exchanges per day seeking sex partners. The majority of [his] sex chat included attempts to establish after work sexual encounters, descriptions of desired sex acts and graphic descriptions of his genitalia.”
Again, this sounds bad on its face, but if you’re a contractor who has been tasked with thinking outside the box, what could be further outside the box of “Science Applications” than seeking out possible terrorists lurking on sex-chat platforms?
While the VICE report focuses on the tender age of the terror suspects this contractor targeted with his “let’s get together and have sex” ruse, my hunch is he merely received a hot tip about radicalized teenagers living in Virginia and Colorado. Then, showing the sort of initiative and can-do spirit that would be applauded by a more objective press, the contractor bravely forged ahead with his seduction/investigation without mentioning it to his supervisors or team members.
Finally, there’s the case of a General Dynamics subcontractor previously employed by ODNI from 2005 to 2012 who allegedly didn’t do any work “at all.”
This is a bit harder to explain than properly investigating one’s own family or seeking out radicalized masturbators in online chat rooms, but I think it’s a simple matter of the subcontractor selling himself short.
I’ve often thought one man’s sitting on his ass is another man’s time of deep contemplation. Clearly when he says he was “doing nothing,” what the subcontractor is talking about is time spent painstakingly doing his job in his head, crunching numbers, analyzing data, scrutinizing presidential birth certificates or whatever it is people at ODNI are supposed to be doing when they’re not eliminating the possibility that their own two-year-old is a member of al Qaeda, ISIS, ISIL or ABBA.
My point is this: When it comes to reporting about the goings-on inside a secretive sector like the national intelligence bureaucracy, you can’t take at face value anything the media says about misbehavior or misdeeds. Journalists are necessarily on the outside looking in, which means they’ll never really understand what’s going on.
The bottom line: Like it or not, spy work is a complicated, difficult, tricky business. It’s also occasionally very ugly … especially if the suspected terrorist with whom you’re having daily sex chats is a blood-relative of Ramzi Yousef.
Bill Fairbanks works for the Information Strategies department of the National Security Agency. He enjoys fishing, long walks on the beach and discrediting critics of the national intelligence bureaucracy through venal lies and “leaked” misinformation.
