To listen to Washington politicians, leaks of secret national security programs are among the biggest threats to America. Over the past several months, they've outdone themselves in declaiming media disclosures about President Obama's "kill list" for terrorists; cyber-attacks against Iran; and a possible Saudi infiltration of al-Qaida's Yemeni branch.
"This is getting way out of hand," Rep. Buck McKeon, the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, told reporters last month.
And it's not just legislators: The Justice Department has opened two investigations to hunt the leakers, consistent with Obama's record of prosecuting more officials for leaking than any previous administration. But the politicians don't want to wait for the prosecutors to finish their inquiries. The leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees propose to make administration officials inform Congress before holding background briefings for reporters; and to consolidate the press shops within the spy agencies. Those moves may be contained in the annual intelligence funding bill that Congress will soon consider
Just one problem: they won't do a thing to stop leaks. They'll make it harder for regular reporters to do their jobs. And, not coincidentally, they'll ignore a big source of the leaks -- Congress itself.
Take it from a reporter who occasionally finds himself on the receiving end of a leak. In Washington, leaks both profound and innocuous spout forth from offices both famous (the White House) and obscure (the principal deputy assistant secretary of whatever), regardless of how the officeholder proclaims to be angered and horrified by the leaking. There are, however, ways to sharply limit the leaks. But politicians, appointees, journalists and citizens might not like their implications.
There are many questions to ask about how much damage leaks pose to national security and how that balances with the need for an informed citizenry in a democratic society. For the sake of consistency, I'm going to ask none of them. One person's leak is another's enterprising journalism; one person's damage to national security is another's policy preference. This is merely an exploration of what is probably necessary to force Washington professionals to shut up. Decide for yourself if it's worth it.
Ban Alcohol
Washington is lubricated by happy hours. Young, underpaid journalists go to snag a dinner's worth of finger food and drinks for cheap; experienced ones go to them out of routine. Politicians, staffers and appointees go to better understand their frenemies in the press. They occur in cigar bars and dive bars; in the city and in the suburbs; in events convened by swank institutions and those spread via e-mail chains and social media. And to be clear, drinking is merely the pretext.
The actual point is to obtain and disseminate information. As the D.C. cliché goes, information is currency. And currency depends on asymmetry: Someone has more of it than another, so a barter proceeds. Usually the person who can hold his or her liquor gets the better of the transaction -- regardless of who actually knows the most.
Now: You're rarely going to get a very knowledgable official keyed into a vital military project or clandestine enterprise to divulge the whole thing because he made the mistake of reaching for the third Knob Creek. Most leaks don't work like that. A better metaphor for a national-security disclosure would be a mosaic: Someone might give you one tile, but you have to find the others for yourself. During happy hours, an enterprising reporter is likely to learn about a new tile, or get a clue about where to find one. If you want to keep the mosaic hidden, step one is to keep your staff away from the bottle. And D.C. has many bottles.
Change the Political Incentives
McKeon began his denouncement of leaks on June 21 during a breakfast chat with reporters by suggesting that President Obama knew about or authorized the recent spate of leaks. He backed down under questioning and admitted he didn't have any evidence for the proposition. But he raised a critical point: Leaks happen because, in most cases, they benefit someone politically. (I know you're shocked to read that.)
It's not crazy to think that someone leaked word of the cyber-sabotage "Olympic Games," including Stuxnet, aimed at attacking Iran's nuclear program, because s/he thought it would make Obama look tough ahead of the fall election. After all, the story makes Obama look like he's keeping Iran from getting an a-bomb without embroiling America in a full-scale war. A similar political benefit was at stake when New York Times reporters heard about a (bogus) shipment of aluminum tubes for nuclear centrifuges en route for Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
That's not to say that Presidents Obama or Bush wanted the information leaked. It's just to recognize that someone could easily have thought s/he was doing the boss a favor, whether or not the leak actually helped.
That's often the incentive structure at work here. Most attempts at plugging leaks take aim at the supply side of the problem -- the people holding the secrets. But that fails to recognize there's a demand that might be more powerful -- the political benefits that come from a secret finding its way into the information bloodstream, towards an approving public. Addressing that side of the problem is hard. There's no obvious way you can make it disadvantageous for a politician to have certain information leak out. (It depends on the politician and the information.) Most politicians, and especially their staffers, have a pretty good understanding of what's in their best interest.
Heightened media scrutiny of leakers might be one way to change the incentive structure. But reporters like me also benefit from publishing leaks -- at least until Attorney General Eric Holder tries to prosecute us -- and we're in competition with one another to obtain new information. Difficult problem to solve.
Blame Congress
Congress's leading proposals for stopping leaks involve forcing administration officials to inform Congress about background briefings and consolidating the press operations of intelligence agencies. Notice how they have something in common: They leave Congress alone.
It won't burn any sources of mine to inform you that the sources of national security leaks are very often members of and staffers for the Congressional committees that handle national security. Remember what I wrote above about leaks occurring when there's a political interest to be served? There are more politicians on Capitol Hill than in the White House or in federal agencies. Leaking is a bipartisan endeavor. Any Washington journalist who doesn't exploit this is professionally lax.
Congress' inability to keep secrets has a distorting effect on government oversight. With good reason, intelligence agencies don't trust Congress with the most sensitive classified information about national security. So they seek to limit the number of legislators to whom they must legally inform about those sensitive endeavors. That's why there's a "Gang of Eight" lawmakers who are kept in the loop. Eight -- out of 535 senators and representatives. The result is often minimal oversight; a relatively free hand for government abuses; and routinized secrecy for the rest of us.
Secrecy and leaks are two sides of the same dirty penny. Excessive secrecy inflates the value of sensitive information, driving up both the price of exchanging it (see point 1) and the potential benefits of cashing it out (see point 2). The cashiers of this informational currency are very often found in the Senate and the House of Representatives.
Read Everyone's E-mail, Texts and IMs
First of all, yes, government officials in position to know secret information communicate through text-based channels. Sometimes they even do so through official government accounts that can get sent to the National Archives. Other times they use personal accounts. I have even contacted sources in the intelligence agencies for stories through text messages.
A caveat: It's rare that someone will reveal something that's truly sensitive over such a traceable medium. Remember, this most often about gathering tiles for mosaics, not receiving the whole portrait at once. Sometimes, particularly when there's trust between a reporter and a source, an e-mail, text or instant message will merely read, innocuously, like a message to get together -- often over a drink. Nothing incriminating about that on its own.
People are comfortable communicating through such text-based media because they believe themselves to be secure in those communications. That may or may not be true. It's going to be less true in the post-WikiLeaks era thanks to programs run by Darpa that can hunt through employees' internet habits for anomalous usage. But those are still years away. But even with an algorithmic hunt through someone's online behavior, any marginal government official will be hard to pinpoint in the data glut of everyone's communications.
And then there are the costs, both to store and analyze the data and the damage to the spied-on organizations. Even if you factor out privacy rights, organizations that don't trust one another to communicate freely are unlikely to develop the functional bonds necessary for executing delicate national security programs well. There will be a trade-off between secrecy and effectiveness.
Start Classifying Way More Documents
Forget about Deep Throat. Most reporters don't get leaks from a guy in a trenchcoat they meet in a parking lot. In fact, it's the lazy reporter who waits for the leak. The enterprising one looks for it in plain sight. Many of the tiles of a national-security program's mosaic can be public, hinted at in the endless stream of unclassified government documents.
Here's a quick example. In January, this blog revealed a previously unknown special operations task force at work near Iran. I didn't have to know any super-secret information to learn about the task force. Thanks to an alert tipster, I saw a job application for an I.T. specialist at something called "CJSOTF-GCC," which I suspected meant Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force-Gulf Cooperation Council. (Turned out there was no "Combined" in the title.) Several weeks later, I had the story confirmed, on the record, by the U.S. Special Operations Command.
There are ways for government to stop me from reporting that story. It could classify vastly more documents than it already does -- and it keeps a ton of information classified, at a huge cost to both the public treasury and the principle of open government. But not only does that create an incentive to leak (see point 3), but it might stop the government from getting what it needs -- in this case, a qualified I.T. specialist for the Gulf special-ops task force. Once again, secrecy is rarely absolute, even when it's cumbersome, and it can hurt the government as much as it aids it.
