editorial critique thread

I think I might have put this one out here before, but -

"Project Foresight"

The idea for this one is that the US government hired a bunch of science fiction authors, tech authors, military fiction authors, and others to help brainstorm future threats, future solutions, and possible points of vulnerability, the logic being that these are subject matter experts who could potentially see what was on the horizon while also being aware of existing flaws in the systems.

Depending upon how I use it, it could be that either this brain trust succeeded in preventing bad things from happening, or were ignored / ridiculed and things went wrong.

Or the tech/ideas where taken seriously by rogue elements and sold to enemies of th state.

One possible idea I was considering involved a situation where a historian and author of militaria had pointed out how if a person got a particular type of clearance and followed a specified series of steps they could do considerable damage to such-and-such, only to be ignored by the powers-that-be... until a rogue individual who had that type of clearance found out about his warning, used it as a blueprint, adjusted the plan to have the guy killed during a television appearance (thick-knit suit jacket + thick stack of photos in his pocket to give away as autographs = like Teddy R, he survived despite serious injury), and then get *sued* by the government on the "logic" that if he had never told them about the vulnerability the rogue individual wouldn't have known about it.

Cue half the sitting president's own party demanding that the president, the head of the program, and the government lawyer who filed the suit all fall on their metaphorical swords over the matter.

Cue the *new* administration trying to win the guy back to assisting them, with various offers being on the table...

For what I'm toying with, I'm thinking of having it that the legal settlement he got from the government, combined with the surge in book sales due to the blitz of media attention, was enough that he was able to buy a tract of land outside of town, putting some distance between himself and regular human contact. It's not that he's agoraphobic, but that for obvious reasons he's not entirely in the mood to deal with a lot of people on a regular basis, especially in uncontrolled situations.

Cue a questionably competent - and questionably ethical - bureaucrat deciding that the best way to get him back on the job is to dangle a sweet young thing in front of him as either bait to entice him in or a potential honey trap to coerce him in.

Cue the sweet young thing being so used to city life that she has no idea how things work in his part of Flyover Country, making her stand out enough that it doesn't take long for him to figure out that there's an ulterior motive to her sudden reassignment.

Hence some cat and mouse as he tries to figure out who is hoping to bait him and why.

Keep in mind that anyone writing a book about classified work is highly illegal. Even if details are leaked, anything that you do in a classified roll you have to keep secret until it is officially seamed not classified by the appropriate person. IF it is not officially deemed not classified, then you take it to your grave. On top of that, if you do anything to profit off of classified info (i.e. books, interview fees, etc.), not only do you get hit with fines and jail time, any profits or income from the work are forfeited to the government as well.

Maybe part of the investigation into the hero is government people are trying to figure out if he did release classified info. What info did he have, was if classified, and did it come from a classified or not classified source? The BG could use that investigation to their advantage.

Classified info can be a real pain in the *** to work with. Who handles the info matters a lot. There are plenty of times where classified info is based on readily available, not classified stuff. There are plenty of times where if you know the field you can come up with something that is determined to be classified.

So if a person does not hold a clearance, they do their research with publicly available sources and are able to come up with something that happens to be something that is classified, while the government may not like it, it is perfectly legal. Usually the government will need to re-evaluate that information to see if it is classified correctly. However, if a person has (or even had) a clearance, and they expose information that is deemed classified, even if they can show that they obtained it from publicly available sources, That particular information is still considered classified regardless of the source. They will still get in trouble and depending on the severity, could potentially face fines and/or jail. Any money they make off of that info will defiantly be forfeit. It doesn't matter the source. it is considered protected info and they are required to keep it secret.

Yes, there is a double standard when dealing with classified info. A person with a clearance is held to a much higher standard than a non-cleared person. So if someone had a clearance, but later left that world, but publish something that happens to contain classified info, they will be investigated and potentially tried. They would need to be able to show that not only did they get it from publicly available sources, but that they did not have access to the information back when they did have a clearance. Because even if it comes from a public source, if there is reasonable suspicion it may also be from a classified source, then things will get messy.

That whole classified/non-classified can be a real pain to deal with, especially if your job deals with both sides of the line. I am SOOOO glad to be out of that world. Way more headache than it is worth.


For the story at question, here are a couple ideas off the top of my head:
1. Due to changes in operations and personal, the hero would not have been around the info in question and would not have had access while they were there. That group would only have access to the materiel after the hero left.
2. The hero worked with the team, but was not actually cleared him/herself. So when he publish a book with classified info in it, he has all the deniability he needs, but that raises questions about if he had access to stuff he should not have. Did he do something he shouldn't, or did someone else drop the ball?

It doesn't even have to be classified information.

For example, in the late 1970s an author wrote a book explaining at length a catastrophic flaw in the Social Security system.

How it worked was that in the days before everything was connected by computers, the death of a child often wouldn't be reported to Social Security and so their SSN would still be valid.

If a person got lucky, they could pull the information of someone who died as a child, use that information to get a "replacement" Social Security card in the child's name, and then use that Social Security card in order to obtain new documentation (such as a driver's license or even passport) in the name of the deceased.

One YouTube channel that looked at the creepy & spooky estimated that over a thousand people used the work to commit identity theft before the federal government caught on to what was happening in the 1990s and began plugging everything back up.

Imagine a scenario like this, where a writer does a missive in which he says "Yeah, such-and-such is so broken that you could actually do so-and-so and with a little bit of luck nobody would even know."

Or something like the aforementioned Die Hard movie where a set of publicly-available maps showing tunnel systems was used to make a heist film.

Now imagine how the government would react to the author of such a work and why they might feel inclined to let them loose on trying to ferret out other issues provided they keep their *subsequent* findings secret.

in all honesty, it sounds like a setup for gender baiting. you're going to be hard pressed in that scenario to write the story in such a way that character A's bad judgement is not gender based.

consider: gender swap the two characters so it's a man whose tunnel vision causes him to fall down on the job, while he woman has a broader skillset and team skills to succeed. would you not be predisposed to dismiss the scenario as an attack on masculinity?

the simple solution, assuming you can't do enough development to establish character A as a person who is trying to take shortcuts to game the system; is to simply make them the same gender as the hero.