Top-Secret World Loses Blogger
CIA Contractor Is Fired When Internal Post Crosses the Line
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 21, 2006; A15
Christine Axsmith, a software contractor for the CIA, considered her blog a success within the select circle of people who could actually access it.
Only people with top-secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community's classified intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation, the war of ideas in the Middle East and -- in her most popular post -- bad food in the CIA cafeteria.
But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries with titles such as "Morale Equals Food" won't be joining her ever again.
On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions, her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.
As a traveler in the classified blogosphere, Axsmith was not alone. Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas.
CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano declined to comment on Axsmith's case but said the policy on blogs is that "postings should relate directly to the official business of the author and readers of the site, and that managers should be informed of online projects that use government resources. CIA expects contractors to do the work they are paid to do."
A BAE Systems spokesman declined to comment.
Axsmith, 42, said in an interview this week that she thinks of herself as the Erma Bombeck of the intel world, a "generalist" writing about lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next. She said she first posted her classified blog in May and no one said a thing. When she asked, managers even agreed to give her the statistics on how many people were entering the site. Her column on food pulled in 890 readers, and people sent her reviews from other intelligence agency canteens.
The day of the last post, Axsmith said, after reading a newspaper report that the CIA would join the rest of the U.S. government in according Geneva Conventions rights to prisoners, she posted her views on the subject.
It started, she said, something like this: "Waterboarding is Torture and Torture is Wrong."
And it continued, she added, with something like this: "CC had the sad occasion to read interrogation transcripts in an assignment that should not be made public. And, let's just say, European lives were not saved." (That was a jab at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's trip to Europe late last year when she defended U.S. policy on secret detentions and interrogations.) A self-described "opinionated loudmouth with a knack for writing a catchy headline," Axsmith also wrote how it was important to "empower grunts and paper pushers" because, she explained in the interview, "I'm a big believer in educating people at the bottom, and that's how you strengthen an infrastructure."
In her job as a contractor at the CIA's software-development shop, Axsmith said, she conducted "performance and stress testing" on computer programs, and that as a computer engineer she had nothing to do with interrogations. She said she did read some interrogation-related reports while performing her job as a trainer in one counterterrorism office.
Her opinion, Axsmith added, was based on newspaper reports of torture and waterboarding as an interrogation method used to induce prisoners to cooperate.
"I thought it would be okay" to write about the Geneva Conventions, she said, "because it's the policy."
In recounting the events of her last day as an Intelink blogger, Axsmith said that she didn't hold up well when the corporate security officers grilled her, seized her badge and put her in a frigid conference room. "I'm shaking. I'm cold, staring at the wall," she recalled. "And worse, people are using the room as a shortcut, so I have no dignity in this crisis."
She said BAE officials told her that the blog implied a specific knowledge of interrogations and that it worried "the seventh floor" at CIA, where the offices of the director and his management team are.
She said she apologized right away and figured she would get reprimanded and her blog would be eliminated. She never dreamed she would be fired. Now, Axsmith said, "I'm scared, terrified really" of being criminally prosecuted for unauthorized use of a government computer system, something one of the security officers mentioned to her.
Axsmith said she's proud of having taken her views public -- well, sort of. "I know I hit the radar and it was amplified," she said. "I think I've had an impact."
In the meantime, she's been thinking about Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, the Navy lawyer who successfully challenged the constitutionality of military tribunals at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
The National Law Journal named Swift one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the country, but the Navy has so far passed him over for promotion. He told the Los Angeles Times then, "One thing that has been a great revelation for me is that you may love the military, but it doesn't necessarily love you."
"That's how I feel," Axsmith said, recalling what Swift said. "I love the CIA. I love the mission. I love the people. It's such a great place to work."
Catherine at the beach. Photo: www.petiteanglaise.com
A 33-year-old British secretary has launched a test case before a French employment tribunal after bring sacked from her company for writing a blog about her day-to-day life in Paris.
The blog - written under the pseudonym "La Petite Anglaise" - has built up a sizeable international following over the last two years, with up to 3000 people a day reading diary-style accounts about work, relationships and the travails of single-motherhood.
But in April Catherine - she refuses to give her family name - was called in by superiors at the Paris office of British accounting firm Dixon Wilson and told she was being dismissed for gross misconduct.
After working out her notice, Catherine today posted news of her dismissal and impending legal case for the first time on her blog - http://www.petiteanglaise.com - prompting a flood of sympathetic comments from readers.
"In the dismissal letter they told me I had brought the company into disrepute, but I never once referred to it or the people there by name," Catherine told AFP.
Managers had also discovered from reading the blog that on two occasions she had lied about having nanny problems to take the afternoon off, Catherine said. And they objected to her using the computer in office hours to write the blog.
"I can understand why they might have felt a little aggrieved, but I cannot accept that it is a sackable offence. It was a gross over-reaction. Only a few days before I'd been told how good my work was," she said.
The case - one of the first of its kind in France - will be brought before the "prud'hommes" or labour tribunals later this year, and Catherine's lawyer is pressing for an award of two years' salary.
Dixon Wilson, which offers tax and financial advice to private clients in Britain and France, was unable to comment.
In her blog, "La Petite Anglaise" mainly writes of her home life bringing up a three-year-old daughter in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, but there are occasional light-hearted references to her workplace.
In one message she describes her boss as "very old school. He wears braces and sock suspenders (although I dont have any firsthand experience of those), stays in gentlemens clubs when in London, and calls secretaries typists.
"When I speak to him, I cant prevent myself from mirroring his plummy Oxbridge accent."
Elsewhere she writes about accidentally showing her cleavage while setting up a video-conference in London, and of a Christmas party where a staff-member broke "the unwritten rule" by pulling his cracker before the senior partner and his wife pulled theirs.
"They were just humorous anecdotes, and in any case I exaggerated to make them funnier," said Catherine.
"I have no idea if we will win the case, because there's very little legal precedent here in France. But we need to set out where the boundaries are between private and professional activities in the workplace," she said.
Among the messages of support posted on blog today: "How completely ridiculous these corporate machines are! What on earth has happened to your bosses sense of humour and fun. Sigh. Good luck fighting them!"
WASHINGTON - Bloggers are a predominantly young group of Internet users who are novice storytellers, enjoy describing their own experiences and have a growing audience in the online world.
A glimpse of this group was put together by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
The survey found that almost one in 10 Internet users are bloggers and the audience for this group of online diarists is growing. Almost four in 10 of the approximately 147 million adult Internet users in this country say they read blogs.
The people they are reading on the online blogs are a young, ethnically diverse group. They are mostly newcomers to writing — often writing about their own experiences. More than half of bloggers are under age 30. They were most likely to list their life and events as the most popular topic, followed by politics and entertainment.
The poll findings are based on a sample of 4,573 Internet users with a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points and a sample from a separate survey of 233 bloggers with a margin of error of plus or minus 7 percentage points.
