Ryan Coleman

I got pointed to an interesting article today, by my friend Mark via Twitter, about a whistleblower who is sounding the alarm about the West’s nuclear secrets being sold on the black market.

While the story is scary, and worth a read there was an interesting tidbit that caught my attention. The whistleblower in question, Sibel Edmonds, is actually the translator who the FBI brought in to translate all of the covertly recorded tapes the agency had amassed as part of their investigation.

What actually surprises me is that it seems like the FBI let her listen to & translate hours upon hours of these tapes. I would have expected an agency like the FBI to chunk out the information to a bunch of translators so no one person could get a clear picture of the whole story.

That said, I can also see how it might make sense to let a few people become SME’s on the “story” so they can better translate as they get to understand the conversational styles and tones of the various participants. I wonder if they ever really stopped to consider how much information a translator might actually be soaking up in the course of doing their work…

It’d be interesting to see if the agency changes any of their procedures because of this (not that we’d ever know if they did).