Leak On Me

It's OK. I'm into it.

First things first. I don’t give one single damn if I’m going viral on TikTok for asking people who work for the federal government to send me evidence of illegal and unconstitutional actions taken by their agencies. I’m not putting the app on my phone. It is a security nightmare, and if there’s a time for me to be conscious of electronic security, this is it.

The irony, of course, is that federal employees were ordered to remove TikTok from their government-issued devices almost two years ago. But if you work for the feds, especially if you work for the CDC, Homeland Security or the Department of Defense, I want you to leak. The republic is at stake.

In the very instant that I am typing this post tonight, an anonymous source is informing me that layoff notices have started to land in the inboxes of staffers at USAID. This morning, two other anonymous sources told me that the State Department sent out an email telling staff that no personal service contractors — people who work for the department but aren’t quiiite full staffers — were to have their contracts renewed.

That includes security contractors, like the ones who got killed in Benghazi, which became the recurring explanation on the right for why Hillary Clinton could never, ever be allowed to become president.

That, and her emails. By the way, Elon Musk has ordered his DOGE staff of small-bore racists and others to cease using Slack as they move the entirety of the federal financial information infrastructure into a system that is not subject to a Freedom of Information Act request.

I have a short piece for the Guardian on it.

I’ve heard from a few people from the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Administration, the IRS and others over the last 24 hours. I’m putting as much of what I’m hearing together with other source material. I’m focused on things that are illegal, unconstitutional and immoral. Things that are just … bad … or that I might disagree with as a policy consideration may have to wait in line.

The dismantling of USAID is being challenged as plainly unconstitutional by the American Foreign Service Association and the American Federation of Government Employees. “These actions have generated a global humanitarian crisis by abruptly halting the crucial work of USAID employees, grantees, and contractors. They have cost thousands of American jobs. And they have imperiled U.S. national security interests,” the brief reads.

Well, sure. But the President can make bad policy decisions. The question is whether he’s breaking the law. Or at least, that should be the question.

USAID was established first by executive order, and then by law in 1998. Congress said that the agency … well, exists … and lays out its statutory role and budget. The president doesn’t get to disestablish an agency of government any more than he gets to establish one like the “Department of Government Efficiency” without Congress voting on it.

We are careening toward a constitutional crisis. No, we’re not quite there yet. That happens when a court tells Trump he can’t do something, and he does it anyway, and then judges start trying to put the administration’s underlings in jail for doing that thing and Trump orders federal prisons not to admit people who have been arrested and ignores them anyway.

Then we’re in a constitutional crisis. Right now, it’s just crime.

Which is where the leaks come in, and why local journalism matters.

That’s my Signal account. Signal is an encrypted communications platform that incorporates self-destructing messages that aren’t stored on a central server. There’s no way to subpoena a deleted Signal message. It’s very hard to intercept. And normally, I hate it.

I hate it, because I am morally certain local government officials use Signal to circumvent my Georgia Open Records Act requests.

Given the circumstances however, I must bend. Expect this signal account to change. I’ll be regularly switching SIM cards and using burner phones. The phone I’m on is going to get shredded soon.

I’ve not going into more detail about what folks have told me today because — unless I’m staring at some very hard evidence — it’s going to take time to corroborate. My preference is to never actually quote an anonymous source, instead relying on people to show me things that I wouldn’t otherwise be able to get and let that evidence speak for itself.

My editors at the Guardian have authorized anonymity for federal government sources afraid of reprisals … which is all of them at this point. I pledge to refuse to disclose the source of information given under a promise of anonymity, even if it means imprisonment. I take that very, very seriously. Men said they were ready to kill me for my cell phone four years ago and I still said no. That’s why.

Verifying the identify of a source is part of the process, though. While I’m not going to tell you who an anonymous source is, in general I need to know who they are unless the information they’re providing stands entirely on its own without further corroboration.

Consider how a hostile government would screw with a journalist who wants to publish inside information. An agency leader might fake a profile and feed me false information, simply to discredit the work. They may salt emails with idiosyncratic spacing and characters, so that if they are reprinted the source of the document can be located and punished. This isn’t a theoretical consideration: Musk is openly discussing it.

The value of local journalists working to expose illegal or unconstitutional acts is that I can meet someone in person if it comes right down to that. Some human being who is standing in public has to identify themselves and put their reputation on the line, so that others can obtain information without risk. That’s the job.

Seriously, I’ll circle back to Atlanta stuff next week. But this has gotta get done.