There are plenty of instances from recent years of [tag]blogger[/tag]s getting [tag]fired[/tag] for writing about their place of employment, but this is an interesting twist on the phenomenon.
[tag]Christine Axsmith[/tag], a software contractor for the [tag]CIA[/tag], 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she posted her views on torture and the [tag]Geneva Conventions[/tag], her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, [tag]Axsmith[/tag] was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.
Axsmith had an internal blog that the public couldn’t even access. These were CIA employees sharing thoughts with other CIA employees, exclusively. Her employers not only knew about the blog, they offered some encouragement, such as giving Axsmith traffic data.
Moreover, her blog posts covered diverse interests. As Axsmith told the WaPo, she’d write about “lunch meat one day, the war on terrorism the next.” All the while, no one at the CIA or BAE Systems cared.
Then she wrote that “[tag]torture[/tag] is wrong.” Things quickly got ugly.
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.
Anyone care to guess if the reaction, including the firing, would have been the same if Axsmith had criticized the Geneva Conventions?