from the dumb-keeps-getting-dumber dept
If there’s anything guaranteed to increase the number of leaks emanating from an entity, it’s letting people know you’re trying to track down leakers. The public sector knows this. The private sector knows this. And yet, the same thing happens again and again: a deterrent appears and everyone treats it like an instigator.
Even Trump knows this. Or, at least, he should. His first administration was plagued by leaks, resulting in a memo being issued to State Department employees, a few of which apparently leaked it to the press pretty much as soon as they’d finished reading it.
Given this history, we should be expecting many more leaks from the DHS, now that it’s actively engaged in trying to prevent future leaks. How do we know this? It’s right there in Ellen Gilmer’s report for Bloomberg.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem warned employees that polygraph tests will be used to help crack down on leaks that agency officials say have foiled immigration enforcement plans.
Noem last week issued an internal directive that all polygraphs the Department of Homeland Security administers must include a question about unauthorized communications with media and nonprofit organizations, according to a memo described to Bloomberg Government by two people without authorization to speak publicly.
There it is: the new deterrent to leaking has been leaked. And what a stupid deterrent it is. Lie detector tests? What is this, the 1970s? Almost no one believes lie detectors are capable of accurately detecting lies at this point in time. The myth that lie detectors work has been busted so often it’s almost as much of a cliché as the one it replaced: some dude strapped to a polygraph, dripping with sweat, and making the needle move like it’s a seismograph and he’s an anthropomorphic San Andreas fault.
What this move will do is (1) encourage more leaks and (2) give Noem’s DHS an easy way to fire people it doesn’t like, whether or not they’re actually engaged in leaking. It’s not like the employees are polygraph experts. Lies can be in the eye of the beholder, especially when the beholder has the machine, the graphs, and whatever interpretation of whatever has been measured proves most useful at that point in time.
Unfortunately, the DHS is doubling down on this stupidity. When reached for a statement on the deployment of extremely dubious tech to suss out leakers, the agency had this to say:
“DHS is a national security agency,” spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in an email to Bloomberg Government. “As such, it should and will polygraph personnel.”
As such, it should recognize the tech is unreliable and beatable. And it definitely shouldn’t expect this magic box to discover the sources of leaks with any accuracy or regularity. Finally, the DHS should know that treating every employee like a criminal is only going to generate more leaks, with the most damaging internal stuff being thrown to the nearest source of disinfecting sunlight first.
All that’s really on display here is the paranoia of Trump appointees.
Noem and White House border czar Tom Homan have blamed alleged leaks for disrupting planned immigration enforcement operations in Colorado and California over the past month.
Take that with the largest grains of salt you can ingest, even unsafely. Noem previously claimed the DHS had rooted out the leakers that supposedly compromised ICE raids and is referring their cases to the DOJ for prosecution. But mere days before that, both she and Homan were convinced the leaks were coming from “crooked Deep State agents” working for the “corrupt FBI.”
This is what’s known as “compounding idiocy.” Neither of these dipshits actually knows or cares to know what they’re doing. They just want to score as many points as possible with Trump by finding scapegoats for ICE’s failure to eject hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the nation on a weekly basis while simultaneously humoring the president’s enduring “deep state” fantasies about the federal agencies that aligned so effectively against him that he’s now serving his second term as president. None of these people should be taken seriously. The problem is that they’ve been given massive amounts of power. You can’t fix stupid, but stupid certainly can break anything it touches.
Filed Under: dhs, kristi noem, leaks, lie detector tests, trump administration
