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Time once again for Off The Hook.
And a very good evening to everybody.
The program is Off The Hook.
Emmanuel Goldstein here with you, joined tonight by Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Alex.
Howdy.
And Kyle.
Hiya.
Hello.
What a day.
I guess you'd call today a good day for democracy, would you not?
I don't know.
I thought it was kind of a slow news week.
Has something been going on?
A lot's been going on, Rob.
Yeah.
I'll let you read up on the website there.
Yeah.
Pay attention to the show tonight.
Yeah.
If you listen to the show, maybe you'll catch up on some of the things.
There might be bits and pieces of...
Yeah.
Well, our president learned a new phrase, which is always a good thing for all of us.
He learned quid pro quo.
Quid pro quo.
Yes.
That is...
Now, Alex, you're a lawyer.
Yes.
What does that mean?
He keeps saying it in tweets constantly.
Yes.
It's no longer collusion.
He's discarded that word and replaced it with quid.
He's saying no quid pro quo.
I don't think he knows what it means.
Yes.
Well, it's the Latin for this for that, actually.
No this for that is what he's saying.
Yeah.
Quid pro, I believe, takes the ablative form of the noun, so I think that would go with
the quo, but quid and quo are essentially the same thing, so it's like a this for that
type of situation.
But this is not that.
It could be, but in this situation, it isn't.
Right.
This is the opposite.
It could be the opposite of that.
It could be that for this.
It's like this and like that.
Robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Yeah.
That's exactly right.
Which he's also accused of, by the way.
Well, yes.
Among other things this week.
Well, yeah, it has not been a good day for the current administration, and we're going
to focus on some of the technical aspects of that, as we are prone to do.
But you were going to tell us something about the whole whistleblower process, I guess,
because you had some experience with this, I believe.
I did.
Yeah.
As a matter of fact, when I was chief compliance officer of a very big luxury conglomerate.
Chief compliance officer.
I was, if you can believe that.
Yes, I was.
I can't believe that.
I was a chief of many things.
You're usually the person that's not complying.
You know, some might say that.
It depends on whatever we are supposed to be complying with, I guess.
Chief compliance.
Does that mean there's many compliance officers?
There were many compliance officers around the world, but then I was the chief compliance
officer.
Wow.
But I focused mostly on legal issues.
I am sufficiently intimidated.
You should be, because you are, if nothing else, non-compliant.
Yeah.
I've been told that on a number of occasions, and I have several letters, too.
Non-conforming.
You should try something new one day and conform.
I don't know.
I think it's too late for me.
Anyway, so what were your responsibilities?
Well, you know, among other things, I actually ran the worldwide whistleblowing line.
And we had about 30,000 employees, you know, scattered in.
Hang on.
You mean you ran the world?
Every whistleblower came through you?
Yeah.
Every whistleblowing complaint came through me.
But for who?
For what agency?
For any of the companies that the conglomerate for which I used to work owned.
Okay.
So if they made a complaint about fraud, waste, abuse, things like that, then it would
go to the whistleblowing line or retaliation.
We're not going to mention the conglomerate, I take it.
No, we don't have to.
I don't think so.
Okay.
Let's not do that.
People can look it up.
People can use their imagination.
They can use their imagination.
As bad as you think it is, it's worse.
Yeah, it's in fashion and things.
But, you know, these things are very important in a corporate setting, but also very important
in a governmental setting.
I just have to interrupt you one more time.
Kyle's got a whistle and he's going to blow it.
That friends is an authentic Captain Crunch whistle dug out of a 1960s cereal box and
used to route phone calls for many decades until they fixed the whole system.
But Kyle, you would not have gotten much from that because that's not a 2600 hertz tone
that you just blew.
I don't think it was.
No.
You want to blow a little harder and maybe a little further away from the microphone
too, so we don't have to replace them.
Good Lord.
I think you've gotten the attention of everybody in the building, but no free phone calls,
I'm afraid.
I think this was actually 3D printed.
Are you kidding me?
So that's not even authentic.
It looks so authentic.
That's not authentic?
Yeah.
This was actually given to me by our cover artist.
Can I drop it on the table or will it break?
You can.
It's very durable.
It doesn't bounce.
Hold on.
Let me try it again.
Wow.
You could have fooled me.
But these are modeled, I guess, on the authentic Captain Crunch whistles.
That 2600 is pretty much kind of named after.
That's right.
This was a toy included with cereal that emitted that tone.
Yeah.
Named after the frequency.
Not necessarily the whistle.
We've had a whistle blowing on the show now.
All right.
So now we're ready for this.
We've blown the damn whistle.
So yes, Rob.
And for those interested, I believe that 3D model file is available on repositories of
free 3D model files if you'd like to have one for yourself and you're into 3D printing.
For all the good it'll do you.
So you fielded calls and submissions to this mechanism within this conglomerate.
That's correct.
Yes.
And just as an aside, I do have to say and comment on this whole whistle blowing fiasco
here.
You guys have been planning this for years, it seems like.
Just waiting for the right moment.
Yeah.
We've had that thing in our pockets.
I know.
At all times.
At any moment.
So congratulations on finally getting that done.
This, I think, is the week of the whistle blower, to coin a phrase.
I felt compelled to express myself in that way, especially given the topic at hand.
Yeah.
And I'm glad you surprised me with it, too.
I'm sorry for that.
There's a kind of a sealed indictment and two men waiting for you out in the hallway
now.
Okay.
That's true.
You deal with that and we'll get on with the show.
I accept the consequences.
I'm sorry for the terrible joke.
I know.
I'm a good lawyer.
Alex, back to your history.
Yeah.
Sure.
So, sure.
Ran the worldwide whistle blowing line.
So any complaints about business practices, fraud, things like that would come to me.
And then we would investigate the complaint.
We would determine whether or not there is merit to the complaint.
We'd write a report about this particular complaint.
And interestingly enough, when you file a whistle blower complaint, you become protected
from retaliation.
And certain countries have different laws about confidentiality in whistle blowing.
The EU is much more private about these things.
And confidentiality, even in the United States, has to be very much safeguarded.
However, it's not always possible to safeguard the confidentiality of a whistle blower because
the specific allegations that a whistle blower makes may give enough information to a third
party for them to identify that person by name or function or to a small subset of people,
something like that.
And sometimes these whistle blowing lines can be misused, especially if an employee
feels as if they might be on the chopping block and they make a whistle blowing disclosure.
And then they become sort of protected from retaliation.
It becomes very difficult to terminate an employee who's made a whistle blowing complaint
because it can look like retaliation.
And this is in a corporate setting, but whistle blowing in the federal setting is very similar
in the way in which it's structured.
And whistle blowing disclosures can save lives as well as billions of taxpayer dollars.
They play a critical role in keeping our government honest, efficient, and accountable, recognizing
that whistle blowers root out waste, fraud, and abuse and protect public health and safety.
Federal laws strongly encourage employees to disclose wrongdoing.
Federal laws also protect federal employees from retaliation.
I was just reading from the Know Your Rights When Reporting Wrongs sheet from the Office
of Special Counsel, which is an independent federal agency that is or rather was created,
I believe, in or around 1979, specifically for the purpose of people reporting wrongdoing
in the federal government.
And there are two other outlets to report wrongdoing in the federal government.
Most every federal agency and even sub-agencies of federal agencies will have, depending upon
how many employees they have, OIGs or Offices of Inspector Generals.
And the Inspector General's charge in every one of these agencies is to deal with these
types of whistle blowing complaints and look for FWA, fraud, waste, and abuse.
Fraud being perpetrated on the government, double billing, triple invoices, cost inflation,
things like that, waste of federal resources, and thirdly, and I think most importantly
for today's conversation, abuse.
What is abuse?
Abuse could mean abusing your gas privileges, abusing your per diem privileges, or it could
potentially amount to an abuse of authority of a federal position, perhaps engaging in
things like quid pro quos for a benefit to yourself or to others.
And so that's the three different outlets for a federal whistleblower to go to.
Things get a little bit more complicated, though, when you are a federal employee working
in a classified environment because you can't just call up the whistleblower hotline.
You can't just, you know, go to your Inspector General.
If you are working in a classified environment and let's say you're dealing with information
that may be at the TSSCI level, the top secret, with sensitive compartmented information level,
you have to be extraordinarily careful about how you blow the whistle, unlike Kyle, who
just, you know, blows whistles willy-nilly or in radio stations.
He's still out in the hallway, so we can't talk about him while he's still being questioned.
Oh, okay.
Very good.
And so it's a little bit trickier because you have to make sure that if you are going
to make a whistleblowing complaint that involves classified information, that you give it to
a person who would also be able to have access to that information.
So you may want to call the Office of Special Counsel and coordinate your whistleblowing
disclosure so that it can be made to a proper party who has the right authorization to actually
receive that information.
So now, is that what happened in the case everybody's talking about now with the president?
Quite likely.
I think that's what happened.
Because he went to the Office of the Inspector General, and we know that based on the transcription
of the telephone call that was released earlier today, that this was urgent.
Was that the statement?
You're talking about the transcript of the call.
The person that this complaint was, the complaint part was submitted to, that I think is important
to kind of clarify where in that chain of declaration of making this statement, where
they then were making the public aware or where their assessment of it being urgent,
how that escalated through the House and judiciary and oversight in the House.
I think that's interesting or curious given what you're describing.
Yeah, it is.
And what will happen is, you know, the Office of the Inspector General probably received
this complaint.
They had to investigate it.
They saw that this was, you know, somewhat urgent and really pressing, and it had to
do with the president of the United States, so obviously politically charged as well.
So they investigated this and came up with a report, and then obviously that report was
what was withheld from Congress until just, you know, an hour and a half ago or two hours
ago.
Yeah, actually it's happening.
They're reading it as we speak.
And it was illegal for them to not provide it, correct?
Yes, they're supposed to provide it by statute to Congress, to members of Congress who are
authorized to receive it.
That's the complaint itself.
The transcript was then offered once this began to become a possibility.
I think the White House then released the transcript, if I'm correct?
The transcript was released this morning, and it was supposed to exonerate Trump, and
it certainly didn't.
Well, that's right.
And I mean, it's bizarre to me that he had thought about that.
But so...
Well, it's not bizarre to me.
You know why?
Because what he did was wrong.
That's the key thing here.
He thinks his way of dealing with people and pressuring them and intimidating them he can
get away with.
Of course.
And obviously he can't.
Now he's learning that, and it's a little bit too late.
The rules don't apply.
That attitude is...
Well, guess what?
They do.
They do sometimes.
And finally, finally we're seeing some changes.
That's why I say it's a good day for democracy.
Not only did Parliament reconvene in England because of their Supreme Court, which ruled
unanimously that Boris Johnson broke the law in dissolving Parliament, but now we
have this.
It's almost like, you know, the dawning of a new era.
Yes.
But back to this particular transcript, though, and I appreciate your reference to 70s music
and things like that.
But, you know...
It's actually 80s.
80s?
80s.
The specials came out.
You know what?
It might be the late 70s.
You know, now I have to look it up.
Yeah.
Dawning of a new era.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's a curious thing.
The version we played last night was actually the Coventry Automatics, which was the specials
name before they became specials.
Wow.
That's a little bit of trivia there and a bonus bit of information for off-the-hook
listeners.
Wow.
We are just full of digressions this evening.
We're full of something.
Yeah.
That's true.
But to go back to Kyle's original question here, which is, you know, the information
that we're dealing with was of a classified nature, which means that it would have to
have been provided to people who were authorized to receive it in order for the whistleblower
not to be then prosecuted for the disclosure of classified information to a person who
wasn't authorized to receive it.
And we know that it's classified because what was released, you know, was marked as no unclassified
at the top and you have all the hallmarks of classified documents.
When you actually look at the document itself, it was classified at the secret level and
it was compartmentalized.
It had Orcon and no foreign written at the bottom of the document.
It said no eyes or don't copy or something like that as well?
Yeah.
It said do not copy.
But yeah, it's unclassified.
Now it's unclassified.
Okay.
So that's a new stamp they put on it.
That's right.
Got it.
So now it's unclassified.
They strike through the previous classification so you can reference what it was prior to
being unclassified.
Yes.
And there's something interesting about this previous classification is you don't very
often see this.
Well, you don't see one of these tags.
No foreign is very common.
Having worked in classified environments, no foreign just basically means no foreigners
are allowed to see this particular document, right?
You know, even if they're allies and they might have clearance.
Is that what they call it?
No foreigns?
No foreign.
That's what it says.
Are you saying foreign or is it F-O-R-N or something?
F-O-R-N.
It's N-O-F-O-R-N.
No foreign is the classification.
And no foreigners are allowed to see that document.
I'm amazed that white supremacists haven't seized upon that word as a way of referring
derogatorily to foreign people.
Well, you are just full of ideas.
Foreign.
Yeah.
I can just see it working for them.
Yeah.
I believe it too.
Save that for off the xenophobia.
That's our Friday night.
That's our Friday show.
But okay.
Right.
The other classification is ORCON.
O-R-C-O-N.
I haven't a clue.
What's that?
Which is pretty interesting actually.
It means originator controlled.
And originator controlled means that whoever generated this document can track everybody
to whom it has received, everybody who has received this particular document.
Oh my God.
I read it this morning.
Yep.
Well, it's not classified anymore.
But I'm sure that, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
But my understanding of the transcript is that it was aides,
duty service officers,
so guys that stand and open doors and stuff,
their recollections,
there's actually a preamble warning about this,
but also, and I think mainly,
the National Security Council was responsible,
and I think a little bit of voice recognition was used
from the audio parts,
and then that combined with the contemporaneous notes
of duty officers that were in the room
is where this transcript was generated.
So essentially, those who control this
would either be National Security Council or White House
or some combination of both, like cabinet.
Yeah, I think this would probably belong to the White House,
and therefore, anybody who had access to this document
or read it or anybody to whom it was sent,
ORCON means that the originator of this document
would then be able to get a list
of everybody who had that document.
And I think that's important
for this particular document as well,
because it is, when you read it, extraordinarily damning.
I mean, there is a very obvious quid pro quo going on here.
And so ORCON having been part of the classification here,
I think is really quite telling,
and I'm sure our listeners find it interesting
as part of the technical components of this document.
But so does this ORCON status also mean
that whoever originated this document
theoretically has the whistleblower on their list
of people who've had custody of it?
Quite possibly, yes.
Yes, in fact.
However, it seems like the whistleblower
might have been in the room,
it might have had some other access to this as well.
Yeah, the transcript is not part of the complaint.
It is, again, this is something the White House added,
and from all reports,
it seems to have been a preemptive thing
given the statement from the House Judiciary
that they are going forward with a formal investigation
or inquiry, whatever you wanna call it,
and that the White House did this
were to believe them to be upfront,
or as you indicated,
that they really don't believe there's anything there.
I think a lot of the statements yesterday
from minority representatives of the House
was that, you know, be prepared to be underwhelmed.
I think somebody said that in the media.
I said that last night.
I thought it was gonna be something
that completely cleared Trump in most people's eyes,
but it certainly didn't work that way.
So who is the originator?
Of this?
It's difficult to say.
You can't really tell exactly from the document itself.
It says, you know,
the note takers are the White House Situation Room,
so we're not entirely sure of that,
but so we know that, you know,
there is a whistleblower.
The complaint was made to an inspector general.
I believe it was Department of Justice,
and we know that we're dealing with classified information,
so disclosures are by their nature very limited,
or rather the recipients of these disclosures
can be by their nature very limited
to people who would have access
to this type of classified information,
but all this hubbub about Congress
getting the document itself raises another issue here,
and that's on the basis of, you know,
what the Office of Special Counsel
has released over to the public.
If you read their documents here,
I mean, let me read their actual words here.
For whistleblower disclosures
involving classified national security information
or other information protected from public release by law,
for example, patient privacy information,
whistleblowers must use confidential channels,
such as an IG, which stands for Inspector General,
OSC, which stands for the Office of Special Counsel,
or Congress, in order to be protected
from adverse personnel actions related to their disclosures,
so that raises this really interesting issue
is if Congress was jumping up and down
about getting this report and getting the information,
the whistleblower could have gone to either HIPSC or CISI,
which is the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
or any members thereof, to make the same disclosures
because they would, by their very nature,
have the clearances that would authorize them to receive it.
So, you know, I feel like we've been given
the runaround here for quite a few days,
and, you know, perhaps this whistleblower
was reticent or reluctant to go directly to Congress
because maybe it would seem to be
too much of an overtly political act,
but Congress is supposed to be a party
to whom you can always go to.
There's federal law protecting us,
and the fact that we are so polarized as a nation,
it seems to foreclose Congress
from being able to receive this anymore,
and I think that's an incredibly dangerous situation
that we have on our hands now
because Congress is supposed to have an oversight function,
not only of the federal agencies
for which their committees have these responsibilities,
but of the president himself,
and this had to deal with the president,
and I feel like this whistleblower
was afraid to go to Congress
specifically because it would be seen
to be an overtly political act
and would not be taken seriously,
which is the complete opposite
of the reasons why we have Congress
available for whistleblowers.
Well, I mean, we have seen such an outpouring
of support for Trump from the Republican side,
saying that this is all made up,
that the Democrats are just coming after him
with absolutely no evidence,
when clearly there is something here.
Any legal expert will tell you this,
but they are showing that no matter what happens,
they are going to stand by him.
In fact, I even saw one,
I think this came from Trump himself,
one tweet that said the lawyer of this whistleblower
donated to Biden,
and for some reason,
that's supposed to be condemning information,
but just shows you how low they will go
to dig up anything that they can use
to make it appear that the motivation here was not pure.
So I'm just curious what you think,
what are whistleblowers left to do
when this system breaks in this way?
I mean, gosh,
it seems like there's nowhere to go with this information.
Well, I mean,
that's always been a problem with the federal government.
That's why we've had whistleblowers
going outside these channels for a number of years,
and it's very, very difficult to navigate,
especially when you're working in a classified environment,
because disclosing this information
outside of these proper channels
can result in criminal action.
But thankfully,
there is still the Office of Special Counsel
and the inspector generals,
and this inspector general is taking this very seriously.
But to Emanuel's point, though,
I do wanna read something to you.
I'm gonna read to you a quote from an article today,
and you can guess where this came from afterwards.
I'm not gonna tell you the source of this right now,
but so, quote,
and it's talking about the transcript that was released.
Quote, the transcript provides proof
that Trump made a completely improper request
that the president of Ukraine
work with Trump's personal counsel
to investigate a political rival.
It provides strong evidence
that this took place in the context of a quid pro quo
for desperately needed military aid.
That's pretty strong condemnation right there.
I mean, and I think that the facts
of the transcription bear that out.
One hazard to guess from what publication this came?
What publication?
Yes.
Came from a publication.
Gosh.
Commercial publication?
Or it's a government publication.
Okay.
Okay, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say National Review.
You're absolutely right.
Really?
You are absolutely right.
Wow.
Did you see this?
No, I did not.
I tried to think of a conservative publication
that has some degree of integrity.
David French wrote this in the National Review today.
It was published at 2.43 p.m.
You know what I heard?
I heard from, well, I didn't hear directly from a senator,
but I heard a senator tell a report,
a senator told a report of this.
I don't know the names,
but they said that 20,
either 20 or 30 Republican senators would vote to impeach
if it was an anonymous vote.
And that tells you where we stand.
That tells you where we stand.
Just amazing.
To Kyle's point, there are places
that we can submit whistleblowing reports.
I believe we even found a webpage here on osc.gov.
OSC is what again?
The Office of Special Counsel,
which is different from the special counsel
that's appointed by the Department of Justice
to investigate things.
But how is the Office of Special Counsel
different from the special counsel?
Well, there's a special counsel
that can be appointed by the Department of Justice
to investigate certain things
that there may be inherent biases with respect to,
maybe things like election interference and meddling
and et cetera.
Yeah, it's the distinction between being able
to convene a special counsel
and then having a special counsel in-house.
Yeah, that's right.
The Office of Special Counsel exists all the time.
It's always there.
They're always there for you.
They're here to help whistleblowers
and make disclosures,
figure out how to do this in the best way possible.
But when one is convened,
it's an independent special counsel, right?
Separate from this in-house.
That's correct, absolutely.
This is as interesting as anything hacking related
that we usually do,
because there are just so many systems at work here
and so many ways to route around them and break them
and just use them in manners that they either were
or were not intended to be used.
Oh, absolutely.
I'm learning so much just by listening to this.
But okay, so we have this website open now
and I understand there are,
can you explain what these numbers are
that I'm seeing in front of me?
Yeah, there's one for PPP,
which stands for Protected Personnel,
I can't remember. Practices.
Practices, right.
That's like reprisals.
That's exactly right.
From coworkers.
So let's say you're a whistleblower,
you make a disclosure
and you can then not be subject to PPP,
Protected Personnel, what was the last?
Prohibited, Prohibitive.
Prohibited Personnel Practices.
Prohibited Personnel Practices, that's correct.
I also see one below it,
Whistleblower Disclosure Hotline.
Oh, you know what?
The phone numbers are the same.
Okay, so nevermind.
That's right.
So the PPP applies if you're a whistleblower,
you are entitled to not have retaliation
been made against you.
You can't have any adverse personnel actions
made against you because you are a whistleblower,
you have essentially protected status.
But there has to be a causal element here.
If you're a terrible federal employee,
you can still be fired independently
because you're a terrible federal employee,
but you can't be fired because you're a whistleblower.
So you have to have that causal nexus
to engage the PPP prohibition.
I believe there's another phone number
for the Hatch Act violations.
The Hatch Act prohibits political activities
of federal employees while they're on duty and on premises.
Wait, isn't that not political activities,
it prohibits commercial activities
while serving in the office?
Am I thinking of something else?
Yeah, that might be something else,
or there might be something under the Hatch Act.
That's emoluments, right?
That's emoluments.
All right, so are we gonna try
and call one of these numbers or not?
Yes. Should we do that?
Yeah, so the PPP number and the whistleblower number
are the same number.
All right, we have a dial tone here.
Should I call the 202 number or the 800 number?
Does it matter?
No, they go to the same place.
Let's do the 202 number.
And you can figure out what these numbers are, I guess.
It's on a website,
so I don't think I'm really revealing anything.
All right, let's listen carefully.
Okay, and we have a ring.
Hello?
Is there anybody there?
Let it go.
Let it go? It answered.
I know.
There's nobody there.
There's somebody listening without saying anything.
There's somebody listening without saying anything.
That's kind of spooky, a little bit.
Well.
Hello, I'm a whistleblower here.
I got something to say.
I have a feeling there's gonna be something coming soon.
I hope so.
I'd be losing patience now.
Well, you seem to be losing patience already.
You wouldn't, would be losing patience.
Well, we're halfway through the show,
and we're trying to whistleblow here,
and nobody's listening. Those guys left.
I can get my whistle again if you guys need me.
No, no, don't do that.
Don't do that.
I'm just checking.
Let's listen without us talking
and see if there's a sound.
Something, I think, will change.
No, it's just complete silence.
Keep it going.
Wait, how long do you expect this to be connected to this?
First of all, they can hear everything we're saying.
This happened earlier.
Uh-huh, you called this earlier, and what happened?
I did.
I got the same pause. You got silence.
I got silence, and then I got hold music.
How long did you stay on for to get this?
For a while.
Okay, you know what?
This is radio time in New York City.
We don't really have that much.
It was about maybe a minute, minute and a half,
something like that.
Then I heard hold music.
Hold music lasted approximately one minute.
Uh-huh.
Okay, what's going on right now
is there's a room full of men
with all those military insignia on their jackets
around the table listening to us right now
deciding whether or not it's worth picking up the phone
or sending a missile our way.
I don't think we should give them the satisfaction.
Why don't we move on?
Well, at least we know they're very good at transcription.
One of them's in a wheelchair, I know.
All right, fine.
Good for them, but you know,
I'm gonna call the 800 number and see.
Maybe that was a fluke.
I was hoping to actually reach a human being.
Okay, that one didn't even ring.
It just went right to silence.
Wow.
Your mailbox is full.
Hello, is there anybody there?
Are you in trouble?
Do you need help?
Blink twice.
Maybe they're just overloaded.
Okay, so this is what happens if you're a whistleblower
and you try to call and you get nothing.
I guess there's nothing more symbolic than that.
So, yeah.
Well, and there's a number of these hotlines.
Some of the hotlines have very terrible hours as well.
For instance, I called one today
that was open from 10 a.m. till 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
What's wrong with that?
That's a good time.
It's not, I mean, you would think
that a whistleblowing hotline,
well, you know, let me get this document out.
Let's go back to the know your rights when reporting wrongs.
Whistleblower, this is the words
of the Office of Special Counsel.
Whistleblower disclosures can save lives
as well as billions of taxpayer dollars.
You would think that there would be a hotline
where somebody would be able to answer a phone,
a human being, take a whistleblower complaint 24-7,
or at least have voicemail.
Well, let's not forget, too, that in this situation,
let's say we're hypothetically the whistleblower
in the case at hand here,
and this complaint is urgent and, you know, important,
and I'm really, really concerned about, you know,
declaring this to people with the appropriate level
of clearance and so forth, and I'm getting nothing.
Yeah, well, it makes you think twice
about whistleblowing in the first place.
You know, I know how much we all love telephones here,
but is there perhaps alternatives to that available?
Do they have email, SecureDrop, Pigeons, anything?
Tweet, yes, I do, yeah.
In fact, if you're a whistleblower
and you want to make a disclosure,
you can always email info at osc.gov.
Okay, but you might get the same silence,
except you wouldn't know you were getting silence.
Coincidentally, I did email earlier today a query
to info at osc.gov.
And did you get anything back?
I did not.
I mean, I emailed them, I don't know,
maybe it was 3.30, something like that, you know,
so I probably only had 30 minutes left
in the federal workday, but, you know, again,
you would think that you would get some kind of response,
something saying, we received your query,
we're gonna respond within X number of hours.
Or an automated reply.
Some kind of automated reply,
something that just goes into the ether,
you don't know if anybody's receiving it,
and so it's sort of unnerving, too.
Imagine being a whistleblower in a classified environment.
Oh, wait a minute, I just thought,
if you're a whistleblower in a classified environment
and you emailed something, do you want email
from the whistleblowing agency coming back to you?
Probably not to your government account.
No.
And you certainly wouldn't wanna put
any classified information in that email,
because you could be breaking federal law in so doing.
And that would be very, very bad.
So even, and that's another important thing, too.
If you, let's say you're in the intelligence community,
you wanna make a whistleblowing complaint,
it's hard for you to use these hotlines,
even when they are open,
because you can't have a frank conversation
with the person on the other end.
You'll have to tell them,
oh, I work at this level of clearance,
I need to talk to somebody,
maybe they'll get back to you in a day or two,
try to schedule something.
But because of the classification of information,
it can become very difficult to find the right people
and do this in a timely fashion.
And since this all seems to be
two-way communication that's needed,
are you able to, is there any possibility
of doing this with any type of anonymity?
The Office of Special Counsel is supposed to
safeguard your anonymity to the best of their ability.
Do they use SecureDrop?
I don't think they use SecureDrop, no, I do not.
But in terms of, once the disclosure is made,
you are entitled to confidentiality
unless certain exceptions apply,
like there's a public health or safety exception.
And just like corporate whistleblowing lines,
they can't necessarily guarantee that anonymity
because the specifics of whatever the allegation are
may give rise to your identity.
And I feel like that's the situation
we're in today with Trump.
Yeah, that's a really good point
because a lot of what you know
can really outline your level of access.
And just like browser fingerprinting
can take certain details of the information you're divulging
or details of your configuration,
that can kind of paint a picture of you
to the point where it's unique enough to track.
Much in the same way, I could see that working easily.
If everything's need to know
and someone knows what you know,
or you're divulging what you know in some way,
and someone who knows only a select few people
know these things, on and on it goes.
You could deduce it
depending on the sort of layers of access.
Absolutely, and that's what compartmentalization
of information is designed to do,
is to limit to a very small subset of people.
So once you get higher than the top secret level
and you get into SCI,
sensitive compartmented information,
it is by its nature a very small subset of people
that would have access to that.
I'd like to focus on another aspect to this story
that we haven't mentioned so far.
And this draws from a story
from our friend Lorenzo over at Vice Motherboard,
titled, What is CrowdStrike?
And why is Donald Trump blabbering about it to Ukraine?
And you might've noticed this.
They released the transcript this morning
between Donald Trump and Ukraine's President Zelensky.
And in that call, Trump congratulates Zelensky
for his victory in the elections,
the two exchange pleasantries.
And then Trump said,
it would be great if the new Ukrainian president
could help investigate
Democratic presidential front runner Joe Biden
and his son, who was on the board
of an oil company in Ukraine.
But that's not the only request for a favor Trump made.
In a confusing ramble,
Trump told Zelensky he'd like him to look into the server,
the server, and name dropped CrowdStrike,
the cybersecurity firm that investigated the hack
on the Democratic National Committee in 2016.
For what it's worth,
people at CrowdStrike are as confused as we all are.
I got nothing.
Adam Myers, the Vice President of Intelligence
at CrowdStrike told me in an online chat
when asked why Trump may have referred
to the company in the call.
A company spokesperson said they were working
on an official response.
My media monitoring tool has been blowing up,
the spokesperson said in an email.
In a statement sent to reporters,
CrowdStrike said that with regards
to our investigation of the DNC hack in 2016,
we provided all forensic evidence and analysis to the FBI.
As we stated before,
we stand by our findings and conclusions
that have been fully supported
by the US intelligence community and opposed by Trump.
How Trump managed to remember the name CrowdStrike,
which is mentioned only four times in the Mueller report,
each in footnotes, is anyone's guess.
And honestly, who knows what Trump
is actually trying to say here.
It's unclear why he believes Ukraine has the server
and what server he's even talking about.
Presumably, Trump is referring to the DNC server
that's at the center of a conspiracy theory
completely made up by Trump's imagination.
Perhaps he's thinking
of Hillary Clinton's private email server.
Where is the DNC server
and why didn't the FBI take possession of it?
Deep state, question mark, Trump tweeted last year.
And according to this conspiracy,
the FBI and CrowdStrike failed to seize a DNC server
that supposedly holds important information
related to the hack.
In reality, there's no missing server
and both CrowdStrike and the US government concluded
that Russian government hackers broke into the DNC.
In a 2017 interview with the Associated Press,
Trump said CrowdStrike is Ukraine-based.
Fact check, it's based in Sunnyvale, California
and has a big office in Arlington, Virginia,
not currently part of Ukraine.
That's what I heard Trump said.
I heard it's owned by a very rich Ukrainian.
That's what I heard.
So to recap, it seems that Trump is saying
that CrowdStrike, an American company,
is actually Ukrainian.
That's why he's asking the new president of Ukraine,
a former comedian, by the way,
to help him find a missing server
that actually does not exist.
And for the record, CrowdStrike is a cybersecurity company
that makes an antivirus-like product called Falcon.
This is a cloud-based software that monitors computers
and protects them from malware.
The company also investigates data breaches
when customers hire its researchers
to respond to an incident.
Brilliant story by our friend Lorenzo
over at Vice Motherboard, but wow.
That is something that a lot of people
are talking about right now, especially in our community.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's worth
reading Trump's actual words here on CrowdStrike.
So something important to remember, too,
is that this conversation happened one day
after Robert Mueller testified before Congress.
Remember the big hullabaloo about that?
So prior to this statement, President Zelensky
was saying to Trump that they want more Javelin missiles
from the United States for defense purposes.
And those Javelin missiles are relevant
for anti-tank operations with the Russians,
sort of causes that allows them to hold the line.
That clears up some confusion,
because he said Javelins in the conversation.
I was wondering why he wanted those,
but okay, they're missiles.
It's a shoulder-fired guided missile
that's really easy to aim and fire.
That I didn't know, but now I do.
So the president, in response, says this,
according to the transcript.
Remember, this isn't exactly verbatim,
but it's pretty damn verbatim, in my opinion.
The president says this, quote,
"'I would like you to do us a favor, though,
"'because our country has been through a lot,
"'and Ukraine knows a lot about it.
"'I would like you to find out what happened
"'with this whole situation with Ukraine.
"'And then comma, they say CrowdStrike, dot, dot, dot.
"'I guess you have one of your wealthy people,
"'dot, dot, dot, the server, comma.
"'They say Ukraine has it.
"'There are a lot of things that went on,
"'the whole situation.
"'I think you're surrounding yourself
"'with some of the same people.
"'I would like to have the attorney general
"'call you or your people,
"'and I would like you to get to the bottom of it,
"'as you saw yesterday,'
referring to the Mueller testimony.
That whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance
by a man named Robert Mueller,
an incompetent performance,
but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine.
Whatever you can do, it's very important
that you do it, if that's possible.
And we'll have little Paulie and big Tony
come and talk to you later.
Wow, I mean, this is like listening
to an organized crime transcript.
It really is, because it's not what's said directly,
it's what's hinted at,
that you have to be pretty thick as a brick to not see.
It also seems like someone was telling the president
this sort of parable or story, parable, I don't know what,
and then in order to manipulate him
into making whatever kind of diplomatic or strategic move
this call or this pressure would be,
that's, I think, overly sinister, though.
It seems more just foolish,
especially the whole private attorney angle and all that,
but go on.
Oh yeah, and then going further into the conversation
is where the real quid pro quo comes up.
And again, this is after they make the request
for the javelins, and Trump says the other thing.
There's a lot of talk about Biden's son,
that Biden stopped the prosecution,
and a lot of people want to find out about that.
So whatever you can do with the attorney general
would be great.
Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution,
so if you can look into it, dot, dot, dot,
sounds horrible to me.
And there's speculation as to what those dots mean.
Does that mean that something is redacted?
Does that mean that his voice trailed off
into more confusing hints of something?
We don't know, but my guess, an educated guess
based on lots of experience listening to the president,
is that he just trailed off.
It sounds like his thought process just.
It's stream of conscious and not finishing a sentence
or having incomplete sentences and many run-on sentences
in his stream of consciousness.
I mean, it's like the audible version of Ulysses
trying to follow the Donald Trump conversation,
or maybe Finnegan's Wake, actually.
And interrupting yourself constantly, right?
Well, that's Biden's.
No, yeah, I was trying to think of who you had pointed out.
Listen to Biden talk when he gets to the end of a sentence
and then all of a sudden he goes into another thought
and never finishes the sentence.
But that's a whole other.
You know what I'm saying, but the point is that.
Well, the annoying thing is he's answering a question
and then he never gets to, you know what I'm talking about?
Wait, come on.
He never finishes.
Come on, guys, we're better than this.
Kyle, stop rubbing my shoulders.
All right.
Anyway, as if today wasn't Keystone Coppish enough for you.
Yeah, get this.
The White House sends some impeachment talking points
to Democrats and then tried to recall them.
I'm not exactly sure how you do that,
but basically what happened was a White House official
accidentally sent talking points for allies
defending the president to Democratic officials
and then tried to recall the memo.
And in that email, the White House laid out guidance
for how supporters should publicly discuss
Trump's July phone call with President Zelensky of Ukraine.
An allegation that Trump tried to use that conversation
for political gain contributed to the decision
by House Democrats yesterday
to announce a formal impeachment inquiry.
The White House list of concise points and counterpoints
was also sent to the offices of Speaker Nancy Pelosi
and other Democratic lawmakers.
According to Representative Bill Pascrell, Jr.,
Democrat of New Jersey,
they're complete Orwellian lies and toxic trash,
but maybe you'd like to read them
to appreciate their corruption.
And then he tweeted the whole thing
to anyone who wanted to read them.
And that, my friends, that is healthy.
That is democracy in action.
Wow.
Representative Brendan Boyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania,
said that his office had also received the email.
I will not be using their spin
and will instead stick with the truth, he said on Twitter.
But thanks, though.
The email sent, you know, I'm not gonna give her a name
because she's probably going through
a bad employee review process right now.
But basically, it was sent
by a White House communications staff member,
argued there were myths being spread by Democrats
about the phone call which had triggered a media frenzy
of false accusations,
portrays a conversation between two leaders
as entirely proper,
and the handling of a related whistleblower complaint
about the call as being absolutely by the book.
The email also made reference to the deep state,
a phrase that has fueled conspiracy theories
of government bureaucrats working to undermine Trump.
Sharing such messaging guidance with allies
is common among both parties in Washington.
What is not so common is sending those messaging
guidance points to people that are your adversaries.
That's a new tactic.
And yeah, so now people know how other people think, I guess.
Well, I mean, it's clear she should have just sent them
to the Office of Special Counsel.
Honestly, in this administration,
these have been leaked before.
I love how they just cut out the middleman
and they just, somebody there just gave up.
They're like, all right, you know what?
This is gonna be a happy accident.
Someone there is just,
it just seems too perfect to be a mistake.
I tend to agree with that.
I mean, it seems like it's too many stars aligning here.
So now we're talking about whistleblowers, obviously,
and their relation with the hacking world
and democracy and things like that.
And it brings us back to one of our speakers
at the HOPE Conference, Edward Snowden,
King Whistleblower, I guess you'd call him.
And Kyle, I know you've been reading the book
that just came out last week.
Yeah, I got a copy.
I think the other copies for the show got lost in the mail.
But suffice to say, I was able to flip through.
I read the preface in the first chapter.
And yeah, it's really interesting.
He talks about family and stuff
just in the small sampling I've had.
And it's interesting,
because we were able to meet part of some of his family
when he spoke with us.
And that was really exciting
to read more about what his childhood was like.
And it's just so cool.
There's just a couple of sections.
Edward Snowden as a child.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm trying to imagine this.
He said, I don't want to give out too much,
because I'm sure a lot of people are reading this,
but it is in the first couple of pages.
So I'm sure if anyone's picked it up,
they've read it too, even out of curiosity.
But he talks about being six years old
and how his first taste of hacking
and direct action had to do with bedtime.
It was a little injustice, right?
And he felt as though bedtime,
watching his sister stay up,
watching his parents stay up,
why did they get to do it, but he couldn't?
And after his sixth birthday, and he goes into detail,
basically he didn't want the party to end
and the celebration, and this was a milestone,
his milestone, and he had this thought
that he could use direct action
to get past this rule about bedtime
that he totally disagreed with.
And he went around and changed all the clocks,
all the clocks in the house.
And it was on the longest day of the year, so it worked.
It absolutely worked.
And I thought that was just an adorable
and a brilliant, brilliant anecdote.
Anybody, any hacker with a family
would probably be able to relate,
or yourself having grown up with crazy rules
and little injustices, and you find ways
when you're pressed like that.
We used that trick to get an extra hour
of the show last year,
but I didn't think anybody else was actually trying that.
Did he say how long he was able to get away with it for?
Did he stay up till four in the morning?
The next day, all the clocks were synchronized
with his father's watch.
Well, you know what he should have done?
He should have gotten up in the middle of the night
and put them all back,
and just gotten an hour less sleep or something.
You gotta, yeah, work on your footprints there.
Yeah, so I think that was great.
And he also talks in the first part
of a really beautiful section
that I find really relatable about millennials,
and really people that grew up in the 80s
being the last generation that is not digitized, right?
Like our heights were measured on door jams,
these things that are falling out of fashion.
Children are documented from birth, it seems,
on these platforms,
and there's no part of your life
that someone outside your family
could just go back and read what happened on a given day,
or see a picture, or a story, or a video
of your emergence as a young person
on into a adult human being.
We didn't have that.
We had privacy, relative privacy, from the digital age.
And then we grew up around the emergence
and along with this digital age.
And I think he gets very kind of wistful
and romanticizes it a little bit.
And I, as someone who was born around the same time,
I find that a very distinct thing,
and really beautiful the way he put it,
that we're the last generation of humans
to not have our upbringing digitized
in nearly the same way,
and with the same breadth and scope
as what young people grow up with now.
You know, there's a real misperception, though,
about digitization and how permanent it is.
I mean, you know, look up your LiveJournal post
and tell me how they're aging.
You know, things get erased, things disappear.
And oftentimes, something that you think
is gonna be there forever isn't
because some server went down someplace,
maybe the server that Trump is looking for, who knows.
But when you measured your height on a door jam,
it stayed as long as the house was there.
It's true, and he did, he kind of described
much of what has captured our upbringing
as slowly deteriorating on formats like VHS
and in negatives and photographs
that eventually, they kind of deteriorate over time.
But it's also not searchable in the same way.
So there's a distinction there
that it does rot and degrade,
but at the same time, it's not portable
unless it is digitized,
and unless and until it's vulnerable
and not vulnerable in the same way
as the systems that he was contracted with building
had backups of themselves.
So yeah, there's all information
and what was termed bulk collection,
all of that stored in one place,
but he was building backups for that
so that if one part of the US gets completely flattened
and leveled, there's a copy of it
for whatever spooks remain.
And that in and of itself is, yeah,
that's not people privately owning their stuff digitized.
That's not even private companies owning that.
That is straight up the government itself
having bulk collected all information
and all communications all the time
and without permission, without a vote or consent
from the creators.
And that's a really eloquent
and I think an interesting way
of essentially what pushed him to become a whistleblower.
Well, something else that will be deteriorating
quite rapidly, I think,
is the, or rather are the profits
from that particular book as well
because the Department of Justice
is going after Snowden to disgorge
all of the money that he would have made
from the sale of that book
because he did not go through,
and we're talking about channels tonight,
he didn't go through the proper channels
to get the information pre-reviewed
before it was published.
But the six-year-old, I mean,
do you need to get that approved?
Not necessarily.
That's why people are buying the book.
No, there are, well, let me ask you this.
You're a reasonable person.
You're an egalitarian.
So my, excuse me.
Let's go with that.
Let's go with that.
Go ahead.
Do you think that all laws
should apply equally to everybody?
It would be nice.
I'd like to try it for a change, see what happens.
And that would apply to regulations as well,
I would presume.
Well, it depends.
I mean, regulations,
you can make all kinds of rules and regulations,
but are the rules and regulations just?
I mean, you know,
Trump is saying people have a nondisclosure agreement
when they work for him in the White House,
which is something that most people would not say is just,
but yet it's enforced.
But they should apply equally to all,
whatever the rules are,
they should apply equally to everybody.
Right.
So Snowden is a former federal employee.
He used to work in the intelligence community,
had access to top secret information.
Anybody who has access to top secret information
signs a secrecy agreement.
I'm one of these people.
I have the same disclosure
and compliance obligations as Edward Snowden.
If I were to publish a book
that would touch on national intelligence,
classified information,
I would have to submit that manuscript.
And in fact, when I was at Oxford,
my dissertation,
before I gave it to my dissertation supervisor,
I had to submit it to an agency,
an intelligence community to have it pre-cleared.
But Alex, the difference is
that what he's talking about is no longer a secret.
It's been reported on many, many times.
Not necessarily.
There could be things that he's going to write about
that could still be classified.
And that's the reason why pre-publication review
exists in the intelligence community.
Has he revealed anything in this book
that has not already been revealed?
We don't, well, I don't read the book.
Yeah, I just want to point out,
he explicitly says at the end of the preface
that nothing in his publication
is about a specific system or technical thing
that is a big sort of top secret thing.
I understand that,
but my point is that you need to have somebody
with other access to classified information
to validate that.
We can't just take their word for it.
Why should we take the word of Edward Snowden,
somebody who stole massive amounts of information
from the government,
released it to the media?
I don't deify him the way everybody else does.
I have mixed feelings about him, obviously.
But my point is,
if that secrecy agreement would apply to me
and Department of Justice could come
and disgorge profits from my publications,
if I didn't go through the proper channels,
I think they're right to do it to Edward Snowden.
Well, everybody has to follow the rules.
Even if he's a whistleblower,
he's still a former federal employee.
The rules still apply.
Do those rules include prison?
No.
Well, aren't they rules though?
Aren't they the same?
Isn't that the penalty?
I thought you were talking
about pre-publication review rules.
No, this is a civil thing.
They can disgorge your profits
if you don't follow those rules.
But, you know, sure, he could be indicted.
Oh, yeah, well, he would be, you know,
subject to confinement and prosecution
if he were to come back in the United States.
But he can submit his manuscript from afar.
It wouldn't matter.
And I think that he must have thought of this beforehand.
This could not have come as a shock.
So on the other hand,
I do think it's laudable for him
to go and publish the book knowing full well
that he won't be able to profit from it.
Well, this is what one of his attorneys,
I guess, Ben Weisner from the ACLU says,
this book contains no government secrets
that have not been previously published
by respected news organizations.
Had Mr. Snowden believed
that the government would review his book in good faith,
he would have submitted it for review.
But the government continues to insist
that facts that are known
and discussed throughout the world
are still somehow classified.
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter whatsoever, all right?
You still have to go through
that pre-publication review process.
If you disagree with it,
you can have a back and forth with that agency.
Could I write the book though?
Because based on what I've read in the newspapers,
so only Edward Snowden can write this book,
but anyone else can write the book with the same facts.
Well, anybody can write the book,
but they have to submit it for pre-publication review.
I don't have to do that.
You don't have to do that.
But you didn't have access to classified information.
So they don't know that you're revealing something
that you shouldn't be revealing.
This sounds like a real Catch-22 conversation here.
So you're saying that,
look, I can basically access newspapers
and reports of things that Edward Snowden revealed
and write a book about that.
And I'm in the clear,
but Edward Snowden can't do the exact same thing.
Even though he is the source of the information,
it became public afterwards.
It just seems like maybe there's a different offense
that he would be accused of,
but it can't be revealing secrets
because they're no longer secrets.
It could be he's revealing secrets
that he didn't previously reveal
because he had access to a massive amount
of classified information.
And I mean, that's obvious from his disclosures.
But wouldn't they know just by reading the book
that there are no new secrets here?
Yes.
So why don't they read the damn book
and come to that conclusion?
Nobody gave it to him.
That's exactly my point.
All right, so send them a book.
Send them a book and this all can be resolved.
But the book has to be sent to them.
A manuscript has to be sent prior to the publication.
Fine, get a time machine and we'll do it that way.
That's what you agreed to.
You sign up for that.
And unfortunately, it applies equally to everybody.
Whether it's a prior restraint on freedom of speech
is another issue.
We're gonna have to leave it there.
I wish we can go on for another hour or two.
But great conversation.
Write to us, oth at 2600.com.
We might be back next week.
We're not sure.
Fundraising time.
All kinds of craziness happens around here.
But keep listening, WBAI New York.
It's awesome conversations going on all the time.
We'll see you next week or the week after.
Good night.
Why don't we just build another castle in the sky
And shake out the end
You don't have to worry
I am sure we can make it through
You don't have to worry
I am sure it's gonna work out like you planned
How dare you catch me
How dare you