Congressional Ethics
Ironic as it may seem, the U.S. House of Representatives actually maintains an Ethics Committee. The stated purpose of this committee is to have the Representatives police themselves to prevent or punish any unseemly behavior on the part of any members of Congress. In practice, the committee mostly has served as a vehicle for members of the majority party to antagonize troublesome members of the minority party.
You don’t hear much about the Ethics Committee because their work is shrouded in super-secrecy. They don’t do press conferences. There is no message board listing their ongoing investigations. We, the people, simply have no visibility into the activities of the House Ethics Committee.
Until now.
The Washington Post recently got a hold of a confidential report from the arcane committee. The report details investigations into the wheelings and dealings between a lobbying firm and seven members of the House. Interestingly enough, five of the seven are members of the majority Democratic Party. While many pundits will spend their ink dissecting the contents of the leaked document (which was several months old when it leaked), I’m more interested in the way the report found its way into the hands of the fine folks at the Washington Post.
The Chairman… chairwoman… chairperson of the Ethics Committee, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, referred to the breach as a case of “cyber-hacking”. I’m not an expert on the subject, but the labeling seems deceptive and downright unethical to me, unless you consider hiring a moron to be a Congressional staffer to be “cyber-hacking”.
It turns out that a staffer, referred to only as “a junior employee”, was trying to impress the bosses and pave the way for his (or her) meteoric rise in politics by working from home. What Junior Zippy didn’t realize was that using peer to peer freeware to download confidential documents from a secure server wasn’t going to be lauded as clever thinking by his (or her) bosses. In fact, once bosses found out that the Post got wind of the document, the powers that be made sure that he (or she) quickly became an EX-House staffer.
