A controversy has recently broken out in the New Jersey gubernatorial campaign. Mikie Sherrill, who has long touted her experience as a helicopter pilot for the Navy, is now facing the somewhat exaggerated charge that she “cheated her way” through the Naval Academy (to quote hearsay from the Internet).

The backstory is this: Nicholas DeGregorio, a supporter of Sherrill’s opponent in the race, made a records request re Sherrill, including her Naval Academy record, to the National Personnel Center of the National Archives.

The records request ended up doing two significant things. One was to reveal that Sherrill had been barred from walking in (i.e., taking part in) her class’s graduation ceremony because she had suspected widespread cheating–had heard a credible rumor of it–but failed to report it. The other was that the records request ended up being unredacted, and revealed her Social Security number, home address, evaluation records, and more. The National Archives claims that the latter was a mistake. The Democrats are claiming that it was a crime. DeGregorio released the unredacted information in what seems to be either the knowledge or culpable ignorance that it was there (see here as well). Personally, as neither a Democrat nor a Republican, I find this an interesting story for all the things about it that no one, Democrat or Republican, wants to discuss.

The Republicans are triumphant that they’ve uncovered this great scandal about Sherrill. Sherrill has been in office since 2018. What took them so long? Opportunism and desperation. The Republicans’ worthless candidate, Jack Ciattarelli, had until this scandal been down in the polls. He’s a soulless pro-Trump fascist with nothing to say that isn’t a regurgitation of some Trumpian talking point. That wasn’t playing as well as he likes, so the best he could do was to generate a belated scandal.

I have no idea whether the National Archives’s failure to redact Sherrill’s personal information was deliberate or an error. What I do know is that many records requests involve redaction errors. When I myself was arrested back in 2017, I made a records request to the Lodi Police Department for the relevant records. When I did, the Vehicle Identification Number for my car was left unredacted. Like students who don’t read the syllabus, the people who do these redactions take little care to read the documents they’re redacting. That’s just one of many problems here that needs addressing. But here are some bigger ones. 

Why was it necessary for the Naval Academy (or the National Personnel Center or whomever) to have Sherrill’s Social Security number at all? It is certainly not best practice to use a Social Security number as a general purpose identifier. Institutions are widely advised not to do so. Yet they do. Why do so many institutions, like hospitals, all feel the need to throw Social Security numbers out there with such abandon? The answer is convenience. The predictable result is disaster. 

I work with hospital data every day. So I have access to millions of Social Security numbers. “Millions” is a matter of mathematical precision, not exaggeration. I work with databases involving dozens of clients. The clients in question are hospital systems that themselves involve dozens of hospitals. The hospitals have patient records stretching over decades, numbering in the millions. Most of them include Social Security numbers. Hence I have access to millions of Social Security numbers. There is no more reason for me to have access than there is for these hospitals to have or provide it. But I do because they do. They do because it costs them nothing to have access, and they claim (with whatever validity or fatuity) to need access to collect patient responsibility bills. Yes, it makes every patient’s Social Security number vulnerable to hacking. But so what? As the mail must get through, so must the revenue. 

As I’ve said before ad nauseum, hospital records are hacked just about every day. The Change hack involved 100 million records. The Oracle/Cerner hack involved between tens of thousands and 6 million (low estimate, mid estimate, high estimate). It’s remarkable that no one knows how big the Oracle/Cerner hack was; all we know is that some huge amount of data was hacked, that the mainstream media largely refused to cover the hack, and that Oracle is now poised to become the majority owner of TikTok, installed there by Trump to safeguard TikTok’s digital integrity (!). These are the people telling us that the Chinese are after our data. (I’ve previously discussed Oracle/Cerner here and here.)

As for hospitals, start with the micro-picture. When I worked in a hospital OR, it was common for anesthesiologists to leave whole sheets of HIPAA protected information lying around the lounge for hours–every single day. We (meaning the janitorial team) would then take these sheets to the decontamination room, where they would be stashed in an unlocked bin, every single day. Then they’d be taken out to wherever the trash was taken, where they sat exposed to anyone who wanted access to them. Anyone could read or appropriate or sell any of it, and I’m sure some did. My hospital was not unique in this way. This is how things work everywhere.

I was recently in the ER of a hospital in California with a friend who was there because she’d suffered a dog bite.  The ER charge nurse asked the patient for her name, date of birth, address, phone number, third-party payer, policy number, and Social Security number, all within hearing of the entire ER waiting room. Anyone within hearing could have taken it down and used it for any purpose they pleased. Again, not unique. 

But that’s small fry stuff. Here’s a list of the hospitals and health care facilities that have been reported as hacked in New Jersey in the last five years: 

• Cooper Health
• Passaic Hospitalist Services
• Capital Health
• Hackensack Meridian
• RWJ Barnabas
• Atlanticare
• Centra-State
• New Jersey Brain & Spine
• University Hospital Newark
• Mulkay Cardiology, and 
• Hudson Regional (which recently acquired CarePoint Health, including Hoboken, Bayonne, and Christ Hospitals). 

These are not minor or unimportant institutions. Capital, Hackensack, and RWJ are among the biggest hospital systems in the state. University Hospital is one of the most important public hospitals in the state. Passaic, Mulkay, and NJB&S aside, every one of the other institutions on the list is a major player. Many if not most of these involved the leak of Social Security numbers, along with names, addresses, medical records, financial information, etc. 

A Sherrill event in Bloomfield, New Jersey, ca. 2018, when I was a volunteer for the Sherrill campaign. Note the absence of a Navy helicopter on her campaign sign, before she discovered what hay could be made of it (photo: Irfan Khawaja)

Repeat the small fry indiscretions I’ve described above thousands upon thousands of times a day, then multiply those by hundreds of thousands of data bases, and dozens of hospital hacks, and only then will you get a sense of the magnitude of the problem. Remember that “reported as hacked” is not the same as hacked. Not all hacked institutions report every hack.  Remember that “hacked in New Jersey” is not the same as hacked. There are 49 other states in this Union. Finally, remember that “hacked in the last five years” is not the same as hacked. Hacking didn’t begin in 2020. I work in the field, and I can’t keep track of the hacks taking place in my immediate vicinity. Keeping track of them is a full time job. 

Given this, the doxxing of Mikie Sherrill is as insignificant as the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Between fifty and sixty people are murdered every day in the United States (19,800 per year/365 in 2023), yet we’re still fixated on Charlie Kirk. Millions of people are doxxed every day, and yet we’re still fixated on Mikie Sherrill.

The Republican critics of Social Security back in the 1930s were the first to predict that Social Security numbers would be abused in this way.* Do the current Republicans give a shit about it? No. Mikie Sherrill is one person. What about the millions who are being doxxed in the same way every day? What do the Republicans of the 2020s have to say about that? Nothing. That’s the real scandal here.

Now focus on Sherrill herself. As I said above, I don’t know whether the failure of redaction involved was deliberate or accidental. If it was deliberate, it’s a crime; if it was accidental, it’s bad but routine. But what it reveals is irrefutable: Sherrill failed to report credible rumors of a cheating scheme on an exam she herself was taking at the Naval Academy. 

Democrats have triumphantly and idiotically argued that this proves that she’s “not a snitch.” What it actually proves is that she was in violation of Naval Academy policy and complicit in the widespread cheating there.** As a prosecutor, Mikie Sherrill undoubtedly knows all about accomplice liability. What has now been proven is that she bears a form of that very liability herself.  The Democrats defending her for “not snitching” are in fact defending complicity and accomplice liability as a way of life.

I wonder what these people would say about the urban equivalent of “not snitching” when it comes to felonies like murder, rape, and robbery, or not snitching in the case of white collar crime, or not snitching where snitching is a matter of whistleblowing. How do they think cheating flourishes? How about crime generally, or better yet, sexual assault? Have they forgotten #MeToo? Tailhook? The Epstein files? The Pentagon Papers? The Church Committee hearings? Wikileaks? Julian Assange? Chelsea Manning? Edward Snowden? Reality Winner? Wrongdoing flourishes through complicity and silence of exactly the kind Sherrill has practiced here. Clearly, that’s what the Democrats want. 

It’s telling that the pious little Democrats are willing to defend complicity. It makes perfect sense, because of how many crimes in which they are themselves complicit, including war crimes and the crime of crimes, genocide. So it’s understandable why they desperately must defend Sherrill. The Democratic Party as such is guilty of exactly the same offense as she is, complicity, but with respect to a crime that would bring them before the Hague–which is exactly where they all belong. This is the case of the genocidaires defending the refusal to snitch for fear that someone might snitch on them for their complicity in the crime of the century. To which I can only say: if you’re in a position to snitch about something snitch-worthy about these people, please do.

The ruins of Beit Lahia, Gaza, photo credit: Jaber Jehad Badwan, Wikipedia

Sherrill’s situation is, by the way, a perfect exemplification of the relationship between entanglement and complicity. When you’re involuntarily involved in someone else’s wrongdoing, you’re entangled in it. At first, you bear no culpability for that. But there are occasions in which, once entangled, you must do something about it. One example is if you’ve sworn an oath to do so, as Sherrill had. She had a sworn, explicit duty to remove herself from entanglement by reporting observed cases of cheating–a very common Honor Code provision within the military and outside of it. Failing this, she became (and remains) complicit. That is culpability, not innocence. So she is guilty, and remains so.

This is a person, by the way, who’s spent her entire vaunted career prosecuting crimes as a federal prosecutor while herself guilty of a serious, undisclosed offense the whole time. It would be an interesting exercise to determine whether Sherrill had ever prosecuted anyone for accomplice liability in a federal crime, a very common prosecutorial tactic. In any case, the people defending her are guilty of complicity in the cheating she helped conceal. This is a country which will kill people with impunity on the high seas on the basis of unproven accusations of wrongdoing. Yet, faced with irrefutable proof of guilt, its political leaders avidly defend the guilty, demand sympathy for guilt itself, and expect the rest of us to play along. 

I would add: imagine that everything said about Sherrill was defamation. Doxxing would still be poetic justice in her case. Sherrill is an ardent defender of New Jersey’s IHRA legislation, which is nothing but a license for the worst form of defamation possible to anyone in the US. It permits legislators to defame ordinary citizens of anti-Semitism on the basis of zero evidence. Sherrill and her defenders are now complaining of defamation against her. There is no defamation here, just plain, hard truth. But even if there had been defamation, she’d be the last in a position to complain about it. She is, after all, angling to be the Defamer in Chief in this benighted state. What she actually deserves for that is the wholesale destruction of her campaign and career, and though I don’t really believe in the efficacy of prayer, I pray for it anyway. Nothing would gratify me more. Those who live by defamation should have their reputations destroyed by it. 

A last piece of advice: don’t take my attack on Ciattarelli to be a defense of Sherrill, or my attack on Sherrill to be a defense of Ciattarelli. An attack on each is an attack on each, not a defense of either. If you’re a New Jersey voter, find someone else to vote for. My suggestion would be to write in Lily Benvanides, the Green candidate, but if not that, then vote for None of the Above. Do not by default vote for what you regard as “the lesser evil.” A vote for the lesser evil is a vote for evil. We have enough evil already not to ratify and vote for it. It’s time for change. Be a part of that change. Stop functioning as the deadweight for the evils of the past, which weigh us all down like a gigantic millstone and threaten to do so into the indefinite future. Ciattarelli and Sherrill are the two halves of that millstone. It’s time to let that millstone drown the likes of them, so that the rest of us can make it to the surface and breath. 

*See Charlotte Twight, “Watching You: Systematical Federal Surveillance of Ordinary Americans,” The Independent Review 4:2 (1999).

**Sherrill has acknowledged that she didn’t walk with her graduating class because she didn’t report those who cheated on an exam. The New Jersey Globe cites a source that asserts that 400 of 663 midshipmen who took the exam cheated on it.  This is now widely being described as though Sherrill was not “involved” in the cheating, a classic case, in my terms, of failing to distinguish primary wrongdoing from complicity. But as far as I’m concerned, she has admitted complicity, so that it’s utterly beside the point that she served “with honor” after that. She is telling us that when faced with wrongdoing by her peers, she is committed to not divulging it. So any “honor” in her subsequent career could well include honorable concealment.

This is of a piece with her total failure to acknowledge American complicity in Israel’s genocide. In doubling down on her Naval Academy behavior, she just seems to be insisting on her own blindness to the existence of complicity. However dishonorable he himself is, Ciattarelli is right to say that a person who builds a brand around her military service cannot hide from the charge he is making. In both the Naval Academy case and the Israel genocide case, Sherrill has worked hard to pretend not to know what was right there in front of her so as to avoid having to deal with it. That’s not “honor.”

In a typical act of cowardice, the Navy itself has declined to comment even on the factual issue of why Sherrill was not permitted to walk.

I revised this post around 6 pm after the initial posting around noon.