Mashable should try to master journalism before practicing law

Mashable is desperate for content and short on brains.

So when former CIA agent Valerie Plame posted a public response to disgraced journalist Judith Miller, Mashable saw a cat fight and plunged right into it.

Jason Abbruzzese is the misinformed who elected to flaunt ignorance.




Did you catch the mistake?


"Outing a CIA agent is a felony, so the identity leak was investigated by the Department of Justice. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby was convicted for interfering with the investigation."



Is outing a CIA agent a felony?


No charges were brought against journalist Robert Novak, after all.

That's because it's not a crime to out a CIA agent.


Murder is a crime for everyone.


If you murder someone, that's a crime.

But outing a CIA agent?

The Intelligence Identities Act makes it a crime for anyone with access to classified information to expose the identity of a CIA agent or anyone who has a pattern of exposing them.  This law was passed in response to former CIA operative Philip Agee writing Inside The Company: CIA Diary in 1975 in which he outed several CIA agents.



What's really sad is that Mashable thinks they have it right when they don't and that they even offer:

Updated: April 7, 2015, 6:14 P.M. EST This article was corrected to clarify that revealing the identify of a CIA agent is a felony. 



The article needs another correction to clarify the mistake their clarification created.