On Thursday, a federal watchdog agency determined that an FBI agent posing as a reporter did not violate their undercover policies. Personally, I think such a ruling not only makes legitimate journalism harder, it makes it more dangerous. In a way, it justifies any group that claims that American journalists are spies.
From the article:
Again, I am against them doing this at any time, but is this really an effective policy if we have no way of knowing how many(if any) such requests are turned down?
I feel similar about this and agents posing as health workers in foreign countries. It’s wrong and the agencies shouldn’t do it. Whatever legitimate purposes the data an agent could collect using these covers support aren’t as important as the work the actual health workers/journalists do. The chilling effects on the acceptance of legitimate health aid efforts and/or journalists investigating a story far outweigh the temporary and limited additional benefits of an agent’s mission.
It’s not that the intelligence agencies missions aren’t important, just that a single fake health agency has repercussions far beyond that one mission. Similarly a fake journalist makes all journalists seem fake, and that diminishes us all.
Enjoy,
Steven
Any list of criminals supposedly caught using this method should be countered by the long list of journalists and care workers whose jobs(and lives) have been put in danger because of the distrust sown by such actions.
Well, if we’re talking about an FBI agent pretending to be a medical doctor when they aren’t … then, yes, we have a serious problem. However if we’re talking about an agent pretending to be an orderly cleaning out bedpans, I don’t think that’s a problem at all. In effect, we’d be prohibiting a real orderly from reporting crime, and that’s not going to work. Does not the criminality pose a far greater danger to health care workers?
Journalists do not carry the level of “sacredness” as medical doctors. Anyone who puts out a newsletter is a journalist. I’m trying to image Bruno, the head mob boss of Cincinnati, spilling his guts to some local reporter. Does that really happen? I understand that the reporter has no legal obligation to report what he hears to the police, but then again it’s not prohibited either.
Remember … journalists tend to report the dangers of journalism to a far greater degree than the dangers of any other profession … the “black and white and read all over” line.
Let’s not downplay what really happened: This FBI agent wasn’t posing as some small local reporter or newsletter blogger-He was posing as a “staff publisher” for The Associated Press, a major organization with many reporters in dangerous areas of the world.
I’m not going to discount that it probably makes real journalism harder, but I think its equally silly to say that law enforcement’s undercover work cannot overlap with a certain industry because they’re too important. Whatever danger to the profession that the agent pretends to be should be weighed on a case-by-case basis with the importance of the crime they are trying to stop. Would any of us have the same objection if the FBI posed as a journalist to uncover a child porn ring, or a human trafficking ring?
As to the danger for the professions, let’s not simply give journalist a pass. No matter what job law enforcement pretends to be, that profession would be in danger. It could be a garbage man, a taxi driver, or chimney sweeper, next time the criminals are gonna suspect them if they were caught by an undercover postal worker at one point.
I felt the same way when I heard about how the CIA used fake doctors to catch Bin Laden. Whether you think that was simply a moral victory or a real one (since he wasn’t actively engaged in terrorism anymore, just putting out propaganda videos mostly), I felt that the cost of putting some people in danger to get Bin Laden was worth it. If people suspect doctors now, so be it, because it was more important to catch Bin Laden. Eventually, perhaps, the suspicion will ebb and we may need to spend that political capital for someone else.
What do you mean “dangerous areas of the world”? Do you mean criminality? Since when do reporters blabbing their mouths off about criminals to the public get a pass on being rubbed out? In what sense would a mafia boss look at a reporter and think “I better be careful what I say, this guy could be an FBI agent”?
Journalism in is dangerous … that has nothing to do with agents pretending to be journalists … journalists go to places that are dangerous to get better stories … these dangerous stories sell more antacid.
ETA: Fake doctors is over the line, unless the agent is a qualified doctor.
Such actions do not only put doctors in danger, it puts the people they are trying to help in danger, also. Generally, when people talk about putting innocent lives in danger to accomplish a goal, it is discussed in terms of somewhat immediate vicinity and time, not in terms of a non-localized area over an unknowable period of time. The problem here is that those who are making these decisions have absolutely no vested interest in caring about the problems they cause, and apparently no prior(and precious little post) outside oversight. They might as well be saying “People we’d rather not have looking into our actions might be harmed by what we’ll do? Well, that’s a sacrifice we’re willing to take.”
The reason that it was wrong for the CIA to pretend to be conducting a Hepatitis B vaccination program in order to get blood samples to confirm his presence, is that such things feed fears that vaccinations in general are a Western plot, perhaps to sterilize girls, perhaps for another purpose. Real vaccination workers in Pakistan were murdered, others were murdered in Nigeria. See this article from Scientific American about the dangers of such sham campaigns.
This is where the gain from the intelligence gather is minimal compared to losing the trust of the population. These poor folks are already afraid of Western medicine and sending bogus doctors creates a danger where none existed before.
Comparing this to sending in bogus journalists … I don’t see it … doctors go there to help, journalists go there to cause trouble … if anything I think the dignity of our law enforcement community is heavily degraded by posing as journalists … better they pretend to be drug-runners or serial killers than reporters.
If it weren’t for the journalists you so thoroughly despise, how would you have found out about the doctors being impersonated?
Well, that’s my point … journalists are already hated, despised and murdered by criminals … their job is already very dangerous … FBI agents posing as journalists does not make that situation any worse than it is.
Yeah, if it wasn’t for them journalists paying the Palestinian kids to throw rocks at the IDF check-points … we won’t have had all that great video footage for the network newscast (brought to you by Luxteltinfate™, today’s new treatment option for MKD related baso-furmensiol, talk to your doctor TODAY to see if Luxteltinfate™ is right for you).
That’s how they’re causing the trouble, see? If we didn’t have all these pesky ‘journalists’ we would just have to rely upon whatever official government statements tell us. And those are always unbiased and completely factual.
Meanwhile, the CIA ruse, which was intended to allow operatives to collect DNA from members of the family (it is unclear if this ever actually occured) have put the World Health Organization and UNICEF program for universal vaccination against poliovirus and eventual worldwide eradication of Poliomyelitis in jeopardy. Polio, a disease that often leaves childhood victms disfigured or disabled, is vaccinated against by an easily delivered oral vaccine and which the developed world has enjoyed since the 1960s. Since it is only hosted by primates and two treatments of the oral virus provides lifelone immunity to all three serotypes of the virus to better than 95% of recipients, it is entirely possible to eradicate polio in the wild worldwide with universal vaccination. There is literally no other cause threat short of apocalyptic destruction of nations (which al-Qaeda may desire but has been wholly ineffectual in achieving) that would justify action retarding the goal of eliminating polio, especially against the chance of the virus developing a novel serovar resistant to conventional innoculation.
Undercover operatives and their agents by definion work under a falsified cover (“legand”) or surreptitiously engage in espionage activities under their notional identity. But when they use a cover or adopt an identity that puts hundreds or thousands of other people at risk of undue vengence, or disrupts a program intended to assure public welfare for millions, it is difficult to come up with any rational justification beyond purely self-serving and short-sighted efforts. In the case of bin Laden, it was clear that his leadership of al-Qaeda was already fragmented, and the urgency to terminate hhim was more politically than strategically driven. In disrupting immunization programs as a response to the CIA ruse, the US has, if unintentionally, created a blowback response that may end up being as destructive to human life and welfare as anything al-Qaeda planners could have dreamed up and executed on their own.
Stranger
The government needs to stay the f*** out of the media.
This is the Fourth Estate–how we-the-people hold government accountable.
Pound a few Hudy D’s and eat some Skyline. It happens.
From their point of view, the people who made this decision serve the people of the US, not the people of Pakistan. I sympathize, I really do, but we all know that if we’re talking about the goals of the US vs. the goals of Pakistan or another country, US agents are going to go with what’s best for the US. Now there should be a line, of course, I don’t at all condone randomly murdering foreigners if it helps some small group in the US a tiny bit. But in this case, I think Bin Laden was worth it. He was a big target, its not like we knocked over a hospital with a cruise missile to get the #8 guy in Al Qaeda. Given the value of taking him out, a little mistrust of doctors in another country seems to be worth it. If you don’t think so, that’s fine, but how far would you go with that?
I don’t deny it happened. I’m saying it was worth it to get Bin Laden.
How far would you blame the US for something terrorists are doing? If a person is evil enough to harm health care workers because they think they might be American spies, he probably doesn’t need a whole lot of motivation to harm anybody. Today it was American spies, tomorrow he’ll be lopping off the heads of barbers who shave beards, or bombing stores that sell music. I don’t believe for one second that the overall amount of harm caused by these types of people would go down if the CIA didn’t do this fake health screening. These people would have found some other reason to kill people. So I’m not at all concerned about what the fake health screening program did, crazy people will crazy
In this case, it wasn’t intelligence, it was to get the #1 US terrorist of all time, the guy responsible for 9/11. I think when you have such political capital, you have to use it eventually, otherwise its wasted. I may not support a plan if the CIA merely said they wanted to gather local ISIS intelligence, too much risk, not enough reward. But dangle Bin Laden in front of me and its worth it.
And how much responsibility should we really take to help people in hostile areas? We give them money to stabilize their governments. We ally with them to protect them against worse threats. When they need food or aid, we ship it to them by the tons. I think we’re fine occasionally, not all the time of course, using some of that built-up goodwill to advance our own goals. Again, I’m not heartless, I would never support something if its for vague “intelligence gathering” or allowed too many people to suffer (for example, I would never support carpet bombing a city for Bin Laden). But I think this time was worth it
Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic? I don’t think this one small program run by the CIA to catch one guy is going to endanger the entire world’s global vaccination efforts. If it were so easy to disrupt such things, then these people would have never let westerners help them after so many times we’ve betrayed their trust in the past. This will blow over, and possibly through desperation after seeing how bad unvaccinated diseases are, they’ll warily invite us back. I think that maybe it had some short-term blowback by some already-bad people, but its nothing that will last and certainly America’s CIA is not the WHO or the UN or any number of other entities still trying to help people.
But they already knew, or suspected, that Bin Laden lived in that house in Abbottabad. The ruse was meant to confirm it was him. They could have done so a different way, or proceeded without such confirmation. An unknown number of people will die because they no longer trust vaccination campaigns.
Sure, there probably would have been some way to confirm it without using fake health screenings. But how far do you go to minimize risk? Maybe you could confirm it 99% if you changed plans and waited a month. Or maybe you could confirm it faster through some method, but you would only get an 80% chance. Maybe they thought he might be tipped off and will run soon, and they went with the faster plan instead of the slower one. Who knows? But that’s armchair quaterbacking. What we know is that they had a method, used it, confirmed it was him, and got him. I think that speaks to how effective that method was given that it worked
The articles I’m finding say that the ruse did not confirm his presence in that house.