Not that anyone ever considered crusty old Michael Hayden a credible source of pop culture, but he’s dropped some shade and a poop emoji on a generation in condemnation of leaks of national secrets.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden told the BBC this week that he blames millennials for the government’s secrets being leaked to the public.
“In order to do this kind of stuff, we have to recruit from a certain demographic,” he said, referring to government surveillance. “And I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy, and transparency than certainly my generation did.”
He specifically cited whistleblowers Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden and speculated that whoever recently gave the CIA spy tool files to WikiLeaks was also likely a millennial.
Whether or not his examples bear out his point is another matter. It may well be that “loyalty, secrecy, and transparency” mean something different to Millennials. It may also mean that the government has grown into a very different monster than it was when his generation, and mine, was young.
The tools have changed. The intrusiveness has grown by magnitudes. The rationalization for all of its has been obscured by his old sense of “loyalty, secrecy, and transparency.” Slippery slopes work both ways, and the government’s “need” to violate privacy and conceal its actions from the people it purports to serve have changed. Loyalty covers a lot of ground, and can justify pretty much anything when it becomes an end in itself.
“Culturally, they have different instincts than people who made the decision to hire them,” he said.
But that doesn’t mean Hayden is entirely wrong, either. Manning and Snowden have become heroes to a generation, and there are good reasons to both applaud what they did for the sake of revealing government overreach and to condemn their violation of trust. But right or wrong, they are icons, though they might prefer in retrospect having lived ordinary lives below the radar rather than having their names known to everyone.
So what’s the problem? There has been a constant drip of leaks from government since Trump took office. Story after story is sourced to “unnamed” people. Sometimes one. Sometimes ten, which is ten times as unnamed as one, making it much more unnamed. This reflects something very different than a Manning or Snowden level leak, where they made exceptionally hard, life-changing decisions. It’s no longer a cultural phenomenon, but an everyday activity between getting one’s Starbucks and picking up one’s paycheck.
At the Intercept, Zaid Jilani counters Hayden’s contention with historic examples of leakers who weren’t Millennials.
In 1772, Benjamin Franklin — born about 276 years too early to be a millennial — obtained letters from Thomas Hutchinson, governor of Massachusetts, in which he mused about repressing the rights of colonists. Franklin leaked the letters, and they were used by the movement for independence to rile up the colonies against their British rulers.
It’s a tradition that has continued in generation after generation.
Consider Daniel Ellsberg, who was 40 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971, exposing widespread government deceit about the Vietnam War. Or Mark Felt, who was almost 60 when he helped formed the basis for the Watergate stories under the pseudonym “Deep Throat.”
These examples certainly prove that Millennials didn’t invent leaks, but then, that wasn’t quite the point. The difference may be found in how rarely it occurred, and that the societal impact was so huge, so notable, that we remember every name and the story they revealed. Leaks were outliers then. Leaks are flooding in-boxes today.
Back then, a leak was a huge decision, a life-changing decision, made only under circumstances that would, the leaker knew, potentially destroy their lives. While it’s impossible to know exactly what went through anyone’s head, the nature of the revelations was enormous in context and, to the leaker, served a far higher purpose for which each was prepared to pay a steep price.
So what goes through a person’s head today when they decide to leak? Given the sheer number of leaks, or at least claimed leaks, it doesn’t appear they will suffer any consequences. Perhaps the administration will figure out who the leakers are and deal with them, at which point we may have a better idea of whether they’re Millennials, whether they actually know what they’re revealing, whether they have an ax to grind with the administration, or any number of other salient factors that would give rise to their motives and our acceptance of their leaks as accurate, beyond confirmation bias.
Or maybe leaks are just kinda cool, kinda pedestrian Millennial things to do? Maybe some kids want to become Snowden famous? Maybe they just don’t think that hard about violating the confidence a nation places in them, that any bit of information that conflicts with their feelings is fair game for revelation?
And there may be no loyalty anymore for Millennials. This may well be due to the government’s having abused the concept of loyalty, having lied and deceived constantly, having shamelessly overreached in hits zeal to achieve what, in a bureaucrat’s head, “must be done” to fulfill his mission. If Millennials feel a lack of loyalty, it may well be the consequence of the government’s having failed to deserve it.
There is serious reason to wonder whether Millennials’ sense of entitlement guides their choices. If the government does something they personally dislike, all bets are off and they’re righteous in disclosing secrets? Or it’s just such a banal thing to do that they suffer no conflict in leaking inside information? If it was a one-in-a-million leak, one might be more inclined to believe that the leaker was prepared to risk his life, his future, because of the importance of revealing terrible secrets.
But when the government is a sieve of leaks, ranging from critical to trivial, accurate to fantastical, the comparison to historic leakers falls flat. It’s unclear whether this is a Millennial trait, since unnamed sources are, well, unnamed. At a time when advocates wear journalists’ clothing, sources are unnamed, and stories appear and disappear in a flash, it’s nearly impossible to know whether it’s a political/cultural reaction or a generational anomaly.
It does, however, present two distinct problems. The first is that leakers have watered down the consequence of their revelations. When there’s a leak every hour, it’s not a Snowden- or Manning-level big deal. The second is that government needs some degree of loyalty, secrecy, to perform the functions we ask of it. How much may well be a proper subject of dispute, but daily leak-level transparency of every burp and fart doesn’t bode well for a nation’s ability to function going forward.
And whether Millennials feel loyalty toward anything other than their own feelings and in-group, and then only as long as their in-group supports their feelings, is a matter of deep concern. When someone perceives themselves as the center of the universe, anything they do is, by definition, totally justifiable. No nation can function with a generation that believes it’s feelings are all that matters, and lets us know that constantly on their Facebook wall.
Update: At WaPo, a card-carrying member of the slackoisie, Millennial Mark Berman, posts about this as well. Berman provides not only the most brutally shallow possible post, but irrefutably proves I’ve been far too kind to the little shits, as he offers the usual insipid Millennial apologist crap.
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There are leakers, and there are public urinators; and never the twain shall meet. Has anyone thought that there’s a whole lot more to leak now than in previous decades? Consequently, more leakers. It’s all very logical [mathematical], my dear Watson. That’s beeecause the govt. has grown so “bloated”. The new prez and his advisors will address this problem in due time, we trust.
I mean, don’t we have “the right to know” the size of the CIA’s budget? Why should that be a big secret? Finally, leakers wear athletic footwear, or what some of us used to call “sneakers”. Let’s just say, “leakers
wear sneakers”–in order to make a fast getaway. Let WWIII begin! The next war undoubtedly fought with hi-tech bombs where no one actually gets killed. Nicely done. We sense a screen writer scramble and Hollywood movie in the making. Chelsea Manning plays himself, leaking in the bathroom of his choice. Who plays Snowden? (Snowden being unavailable, beyond the “long reach” of our wonderful govt., holed up in some embassy somewhere with the chamberpots.)
The “leakers wear sneakers” save this comment. You have your moments, Bill. All of you.
Isn’t “information wants to be free” a Millennial construct?
Is that Millennial or is it tech nerd?
Stewart Brand is a year younger than my mother, so I’m pretty sure he’s no millenial. And although that statement is arguably designed to evoke a sympathetic feeling towards inanimate information, it really just expresses the same sentiment as Ben Franklin’s “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead” and “If you would keep a secret from an enemy, tell it not to a friend,” but from the secret’s perspective.
The rest of what Stewart Brand said is “Information also wants to be expensive. …That tension will not go away.” If he had been a millennial, he would have been impeached.
I’d expect that a CIA big thinker (crusty or not) could do better than “get off my lawn.”
But I think you touched some of the key questions: “the government has grown into a very different monster…having abused the concept of loyalty, having lied and deceived constantly, having shamelessly overreached…(and it) doesn’t bode well for a nation’s ability to function going forward.”
Mix this tinfoil screed with notable power and resource inequities, add a dollop populism, a pinch of Peter Turchin, a cupful of technological dislocation, and then “leakiness” smells like somethin’ in the oven.
But “get off my lawn” is a lot more comfortable.
The “answer,” as usual, is more complicated than just Hayden’s Millennials, but Millennials. Tinfoil screed?*
*I fished your comment out of the spam folder. Apparently, someone marked you as spam for akismet.
If it had been as easy to gather information for leaking 60 years ago as it is now, we would have had more leaks. The ability to copy hundreds of thousands of images onto a small piece of plastic makes it far simpler to leak than having to stand in front of a copier with a large stack of paper while trying not to look suspicious. And no, the fabled Minox cameras of spy movie fame would not have helped much. It’s not Millennials(many of whom are little shits), it’s technology, and a lack of decent security protocols on information storage. It’s just not that hard to prevent file copying.
Most of this is just whispered rumor-type stuff, not hard info.
Most of them grew up without a Soviet Union, and probably don’t believe it was ever really that big of a deal anyway. Just a bunch of old white guys yelling at each other. So there’s probably no concern that a leak may lead to a disaster of epic proportions.
Don’t trust anyone under 30.
Good! Use your aggressive feelings, boy. Let the hate flow through you!
Don’t confuse hate for disgust.
Has WaPo edited the article since you posted? I’ve just read it now, and its really just a typical lazy WaPo post; a collection of info sourced from other reports from the usual suspects with no analysis or editorial content.
I was vaguely disappointed; i’d got out my “get off my lawn” t-shirt, got out a jug of cider and was loading the shotgun with rock salt . . .
Sure, the unsupported glib conflation of personal privacy with government secrecy doesn’t count as analysis, but it definitely underpins an unwarranted editorial opinion.
Part of it is definitely the increased ease of leaking without being caught. Many major news organizations have websites where I can drop them whatever I like, with the reasonable expectation that it will never be traced back to me assuming I’ve taken some basic computer security precautions.
As for the general loyalty of millennials, feelings of patriotism and reverence for, well, anything do seem at a general low. If I had to take a stab in the dark it might be having grown up in an era where the United States no longer had a great foreign enemy, or the increasing ability of young people to socialize each other into society instead of being integrated into the community at large.
The construction of Berman’s article is interesting. It starts off reasonably factually, logically, and orderly for several paragraphs before taking unsupported and unsupportable butt-hurt leaps.
Is that a psychological trick to reel the reader in and lower his defenses? Is he cynically abusing logic or incapable of noticing his own errors? Does his editor only concern himself with helping to make the first half of the article coherent?
It’s kind of fascinating construction, as there’s no quote to be had that clearly shows how he circled the rabbit hold and took a dive. It just meanders from fact into bits and pieces of excuses, then manages to end up in nonsense without any smoking gun assertion that can be used to show where he took the dive.
This is some kind of Millennial magic. It scares me.
It seems though that the two actual known examples of millennials cited are people who leaked for principled reasons (wrong or right) rather than just people with casualness about information. If some other organization was always screwing up and said “whoa, sorry, millennials are terrible” I’d be pretty suspicious of the excuse.
Even with Snowden and Manning, the amount of information that a low level employee or contractor could just scoop up and just walk out with on a thumb drive would seem to be, problematic, as the SJWs like to say. I’m surprised that we don’t have more leaks then we do.
I took the Manning and Snowden examples as the two “leaders,” with the rest following after they were beatified by their generation. Someone has to start the ball rolling so the followers can do what followers do.
Speaking as a millennial (though I never get invited to the cool parties), part of it is almost certain to be the general lack of trust in the government. After all, we (the generational “we”) grew up with the USA PATRIOT Act, passed when I was 13 and just beginning to pay attention to the world around me. I don’t think I need explain what a clusterf*ck that one was for the “trust the government” crowd.
As for the rest, I’m afraid I’m not quite self-conscious enough to comment one way or the other.
There’s a leap from mistrust in govt, something many of us share, to feeling empowered to indulge the personal sense of empowerment to reveal secrets.
Oh, absolutely. Sadly, I cannot speak for what the leap was or how the rest of my generation might have decided it was a good leap to take. Always assuming they did, of course. I don’t exactly get on well with the extremists.