Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Thank you, @edwardlucas. I'm not sure it's brilliant, per se, but do think the problem I'm describing is important. It's not just a grammarian's lament, though it's that. Within my lifetime, "being educated" meant you could write minimally literate, clear, workmanlike prose--

https://twitter.com/edwardlucas/status/1340026248337211393

--not "brilliant" prose, a separate issue altogether. But everyone qualified for a high-level job in government or industry was, until pretty recently, able to write simply and clearly. You'd have the occasional mishap, a dangling participle or something. But nothing like this.

Overall, educated people understood that in business and government, you had to write a certain way: Especially during an emergency, the writing should be clear, and no sentence should have three errors in grammar and six plausible and distinct interpretations.

Especially if by writing that sentence you're hoping to minimize Russia's chances of melting down our nuclear power plants and launching our SLBMs into Topeka.

It's unclear that anyone concerned is *trying* to inform the public at large.

More than one member of the CG team surmised that these documents were so badly written precisely because the authors didn't want anyone to understand them. But in that case, why bother writing them?

Some things have to be secret. But after a disaster of this magnitude,

it's not unreasonable to expect people in positions of trust and responsibility to explain, roughly, what happened to us--us being "We the People," and in particular, "We the People at Risk." It's not wildly entitled to ask for this.

They're in those jobs to secure our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Looks like all three are in grave danger. So it's not un-American to think, "The government should not only give us an update about this, it should be in English."

Or *some* recognized UN language.

I get it that this is sensitive. I get it that they too are confused about what happened themselves. But there's no justification for putting out page upon page of gibberish.

If all of it is too sensitive to discuss, don't say anything. If there's anything the public *can* know about this, say it plainly. We instituted government to secure our lives, liberty, etc. We're entitled to know how that's going.

If they can't describe the problem in simple, declarative sentences, they shouldn't be trying to solve it.

And the gibberish isn't just a joke. It's a security hazard. This memo's clearly pretty important: But what are they asking people to do? us-cert.cisa.gov/sites/default/…

Much of the US public still doesn't understand how Covid19 is transmitted or how a vaccination works. Does CISA imagine the American people will read *this* and promptly take the right steps, in the appropriate order, to protect themselves and others? us-cert.cisa.gov/sites/default/…

If no one at CISA is able plainly to describe what happened, what CISA plans to do next, or what the public should do, how do they imagine solving the problem?

(When did we lose the widespread ability to write a simple English sentence? Pretty much every HS grad once could.)

(Losing this isn't trivial. Language, as they'd say over Corporate HQ, is H. Sapiens' "unique value proposition." No claws, no jaws, no talons, no carapace, no wings, no flippers--just a skull the size of a basketball and 100 billion neurons in it.)

(Only thing H. Sap's got going for us.) Within my lifetime-- mostly during the past ten years?--standards of speech and writing have declined so vertiginously that I'm worried I may be watching a macro-mutation.

In 1980, say, no educated American would have written a document like this: us-cert.cisa.gov/sites/default/… (Nor for that matter an uneducated one. You need bad education, a lot of it, to come up with this.)

"The adversary is making extensive use of obfuscation to hide their C2 communications."

How did that sentence get past an editor?

"making extensive use of obfuscation to hide?" No shit.

"Adversary." single. Pronoun: plural? This goes well beyond a grammatically painful effort to be gender-inclusive and straight to genuinely dangerous incoherence. Have *one* or *more* adversaries attacked us? Are readers supposed to guess? Not an incidental question, is it?

But it can't be discerned from the sentence. If I'm diligently trying to follow the advice offered in the section titled MITIGATIONS, wouldn't it help me to know how many adversaries I've got?

"it bears repeating that this threat actor is among the most capable, and in many cases, a full rebuild of the environment is
the safest action." Do I begin by burning my home to the ground?

The people trying to protect our national nuclear weapons stockpile and the small and large private enterprises trying to comply with these instructions really do need clear instructions.

I hope they're at least getting them on our completely corrupted private networks.

The only benefit in writing this way is that Moscow won't be able to make sense of it either.