lefler

I do not share your suspicion. The initial 20161106 wapo article had this: "U.S. officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is ongoing."

Pleading "ongoing investigation" suggests the source was in law enforcement, not authorized to discuss the case, discussed the case anyway, and used anonymity to avoid the consequences. A victim or friend can safely go on the record with a reporter, an investigator cannot.

In any case, the friends of Raphel seemed quite upset about the leak when they were spoken to for follow-up articles.

"Doing their jobs" misses a huge part of the story. Someone illegally leaked the details of the ongoing investigation to the New York Times, changing what could have been a temporary unpaid leave for Raphel into a front page story with damaging after effects.

Had this been investigated and resolved secretly, as per the rules, Raphel could have reapplied for her job after the FBI concluded there was no espionage case.

MAX.gov was kind enough to run us a proxy in order to support https, and that proxy had a bad day under load. Described more here https://github.com/18F/web-design-standards/issues/733

Btw, GSA and OMB aren't connected the way you describe. They just happen to be the respective parent agencies of 18F and USDS-HQ. Here's a tree.

  POTUS
  ├── GSA
  │   └── 18F
  └── OMB
      ├── USDS-HQ
      └── MAX

It doesn't have to be either/or. Will Chan is donating 20% of his income to charity. He has done that whether he was in DC with us or at Google. https://plus.google.com/app/basic/stream/z13pddzpwn30d5ozb04...

I support the idea of effective altruism, but at this exact moment, I believe that technical people donating time goes further than technical people donating money.

I'm sorry about this miscommunication and it wasn't intentional--we absolutely consider the Digital Service team at the VA to be part of the USDS; we helped build it. Ellen Ratajak (new eng director at VA) is one of the examples listed on whitehouse.gov/us-digital-service

Hiring bright people isn't enough, we have to empower them by building critical mass on impactful projects with executive support. We were focused on creating a team at the VA when you applied (still are, if you finished stapling yourself), but there are other options now that didn't exist then.