[Alliance] Information Leak Causes Widespread Consternation

Information Leak Causes Widespread Consternation

Late yesterday, an information leak revealed that Kharog Ab'Arohth, a notorious batarian pirate, was secretly pardoned by the Systems Alliance during the Reaper War.

Ab'Arohth had a bounty of nearly half a million credits before he was pardoned, and was wanted for piracy, murder, rape and conspiracy to enslave sentient beings, among other charges. His most famous crimes include the burning of the colony of Caernabog and the assault on a colonial flotilla in 2171 that resulted in almost 300 men, women and children being captured and sold into slavery. His last known offense, the Haven Convoy Robbery, was in 2178 after which he disappeared off most galactic records. He reappeared for the course of the Reaper War, during which he received his alliance pardon for assistance in creating trade routes and moving supplies through the Terminus, but participated in no combat operations and disappeared immediately after its end.

Already thousands across Elysium and Terra Nova are condemning the pardon. Bogdan Senko, a prominent political activist who escaped enslavement by Ab'Arohth called the move "an immense betrayal" and "a travesty that shames the memories of the thousands of lives Ab'Arohth ruined throughout his career". There are calls for investigations into the pardon, with demands that those responsible lose their jobs at the least and that the pardon be repealed from many groups across the Verge, most prominently many pro-independence political organizations. Several groups have posted new, independent bounties for Ab'Arohth, a press release by The Citizens for Free Elysium, who posted a 50 thousand credit bounty for his death said, "Some of us will pursue justice, even if SATAE has given up on the concept".

Our reporter spoke with Jerome J. Johansen, a man who lost his wife and daughters in one of the raids, who claimed that the pardon was a 'travesty' and 'a betrayal of the ideals of the Systems Alliance'. He called for the bounty, at the least, to be reinstated, and for the pardon to be reversed, reminding us of all the people who lost friends and family to death or worse at Kharog's hands. He claims that his desire to see the pardon reversed is not brought on by revenge, but 'because of the...sincere belief that justice must be done in this galaxy, and men....like Arohth cannot be allowed to roam free because they threw a few trinkets towards alliance politicians'.

SATAE has given no comment as of publication.

There's a fact that the Chinese gentleman, willfully glosses over when he says that governments sometimes renege on pardons; being that in most of those cases one (or more,) of the following three scenarios are being played out;

1. The pardonee did not live-up to his part of the agreement, for example; a criminal gets a pardon in order to get him to testify against another criminal. It is then found out that he lied in the witness box. The pardon is retracted since the criminal did not keep to the agreement.
2. The agreement for pardon was not an official one. This is a common with less well informed criminals who think, for example, that a police officer saying he will be pardoned or given amnesty is enough to make it official. Obviously the government as a whole does is beholden to commit to such an agreement if there was no valid agreement in the first place. This is also the case if the pardon was coerced, if someone blackmails the government in giving a pardon he should not be surprised to find that the pardon is considered invalid once the threat ends.
3. If the government does not care about its reputation at all, and know that even with a shabby reputation its still an better alternative for the truly desperate.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on how you look at it,) none of these three scenarios (and adjunct ones,) is applicable in this situation. Ab'Arohth, was offered a pardon in exchange for his assistance during the war, he held-up his part of the bargain and so will the Alliance. The idea that we should renege on an official pardon is laughable, the Alliance is not in a position to be seen as an unreliable partner.

What it comes down to is that its reputation as reliable partner with which you can make a deal is more important to its long-term strategy than a few hundred colonials and a bit of PR-backlash (which Kirok is correct to assume will blow over after a few weeks/months.)

As for the reason why it was held secret I can think of multiple reasons two being;

1. At the time of pardon the whole Alliance was in a state of flux, this combined with the natural reflex to downplay unpopular news might have resulted in the story falling between the cracks.
2. Equally possible is that Ab'Arohth demanded secrecy as part of the pardon to stave off any vigilante attacks. He could even have argued correctly that it should be secret because you would not want people attacking his supply network to get back at him, since this would ultimately be hurting the whole war effort.

Keep also in mind that these pardons are only for past deeds, if he restarts his criminal enterprise he will be a fugitive once again. Additionally I very much doubt it that even if we had rescinded on the pardon that we could have recaptured him, he probably did not settle in Alliance jurisdiction after the war.

Well here's a decent attempt at an explanation.


That first explanation I'd probably place more emphasis on the embarrassment than the losing the information. After all the person who put out the leak found the info. Unless this is a case of outsider hackers getting into a secure database that person probably has to be from inside the current Alliance establishment. If it's an inside job why didn't this person bring it to higher up attention to be released through regular channels? Now maybe it's just somebody trying to discredit their superiors, or it could be their superiors didn't want the pardon released. So there is a possibility that this just fell through the cracks, but I remain skeptical about that for now given how convenient it is that embarrassing information happened to be "misplaced."

To the second point, that makes a lot of sense during the war. But the war's been over a year. Any need to protect this guy because of the war effort is long past. Now maybe you might say "we need to keep all the aspects of the agreement to make sure we can make these deals in future crises." That might be partly true, it's a reason to keep the pardon going, but leaks mean that pirates won't trust long-term secrecy agreements anyways. By waiting for the leak to let the information out the Alliance still fails it's promise to the bad guys AND makes the victims more pissed at them. So now the explanation would have to go back to point one.

And to the krogan saying "the Alliance isn't that bad," compared to most terminus governments you're probably right. Compared to plenty of historical governments you're also right. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't hold them to higher standards than that. People holding their governments to high standards is one thing that helps keep them from becoming those especially bad terminus governments.

A thought.

Why does everyone assume that the information was coerced from the Alliance? It is possible that someone in the supply lines, or perhaps Ab'Arohth himself, or one of the others who would know of the deal, leaked the information, possibly for profit. It may have been a rival of Ab'Arohth, attempting to get him killed by vigilantes or putting scrutiny back on him.

The Alliance is not the only polity that knew about this deal.

Doesn't change my argument, just substitute my term "outside hacker" for "anyone who might have known not inside the alliance." Given that we don't know the leak source as of yet any of these is possible. The chance that the Alliance deliberately hid the information or just lost it is not necessarily changed because the outsider releasing the information was a pirate involved or a hacker making his way into a database with it.

Regardless, until more information is known, the safest assumption is that the Alliance did deliberately hide or "lose" this information on the pardon. We've got three scenarios: 1) a person outside the Alliance found out somehow and leaked the pardon info, 2) a person inside the Alliance did it because their superiors refused to release the information, and 3) a person inside the Alliance did it and didn't bother asking their superiors whether they would release the information. That means we should assume each possibility has a 1/3 chance of being true until we know more. In cases 1) and 3) because we don't know for sure what the Alliance people in charge of releasing information like this knew we might as well give it a 1/2 chance. Thus there is a 1/6 chance case 1) is correct and the Alliance deliberately hid the information and a 1/6 chance case 3) is correct and the Alliance deliberately hid the information. If case 2) is correct however there is 0 chance the Alliance just lost the information and didn't make a deliberate decision to hide it. So given that case 2) has a 1/3 chance of being correct, the chance the Alliance hid the information and case 2) being correct is still 1/3. Adding those chances together gets you a 2/3 chance the Alliance deliberately chose to hide the information and only 1/3 chance they just lost it.

The most likely conclusion to come to is therefore to assume the Alliance was covering this pardon up until we have more information on who did the leaking.