Prompted by this:
And this, from McThag:
I wrapped up the “What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” series, and it doesn’t look like we’re going back to those days anytime soon. But hand to God, I swear I am considering reviving it for a special limited engagement, collecting videos on the subjects of OPSEC and COMSEC. Seems like too many people don’t understand basic rules, like “don’t buy stuff under your own name”, “pay CASH”, and “don’t brag about your clever scheme to evade the law in email”.
Cheez Louise, I never served in the military or in the intelligence apparatus, but apparently I have more sense than some of these people. And that scares me.
I remember a quote from a book, from many years ago, but I can’t swear to the author or the book. I think it was from a book called Here is Your War, by Ernie Pyle.
He was discussing the fact that the American military leadership had to keep plans and other intelligence very much on a need to know basis. Because as Pyle noted, ” The French maintain better intelligence security in peacetime than the American’s do in time of war.”
I loved the way he wrote, and one of the other anecdotes I remember was when he had a knee start to hurt, causing him to limp and it turned red. Other members of the news media told him to go see the military doctor, but like any other good country kid, he just squeezed the red bump, and out popped a cactus needle, of some sizable length.
It seems that his first days reporting on the war were spent in Tunisia, in North Africa, and he figured that he must have bumped into it there, not realizing at the time, likely due to events going on around him at the time.
Like you pointed out, if you are going to attempt to evade the law, and both of these examples must have known that what they were doing was prohibited behavior, at least don’t be stupid about it. Both of these cases in my opinion should not be disallowed by any law or rule. But the fact is, we don’t always get to choose what cards we get, so we have to play the hand we are dealt.