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US Intelligence Community Has Lost Credibility Due To Leaks (bloomberg.com)
Two anonymous readers and Mi share an article: U.K. police investigating the Manchester terror attack say they have stopped sharing information with the U.S. after a series of leaks that have so angered the British government that Prime Minister Therese May wants to discuss them with President Donald Trump during a North Atlantic Treaty Organization meeting in Brussels. What can Trump tell her, though? The leaks drive him nuts, too. Since the beginning of this century, the U.S. intelligence services and their clients have acted as if they wanted the world to know they couldn't guarantee the confidentiality of any information that falls into their hands. At this point, the culture of leaks is not just a menace to intelligence-sharing allies. It's a threat to the intelligence community's credibility. [...] If this history has taught the U.S. intelligence community anything, it's that leaking classified information isn't particularly dangerous and those who do it largely enjoy impunity. Manning spent seven years in prison (though she'd been sentenced to 35), but Snowden, Assange, Petraeus, the unknown Chinese mole, the people who stole the hacking tools and the army of recent anonymous leakers, many of whom probably still work for U.S. intelligence agencies, have escaped any kind of meaningful punishment. President Donald Trump has just now announced that the administration would "get to the bottom" of leaks. In a statement, he said: "The alleged leaks coming out of government agencies are deeply troubling. These leaks have been going on for a long time and my Administration will get to the bottom of this. The leaks of sensitive information pose a grave threat to our national security. I am asking the Department of Justice and other relevant agencies to launch a complete review of this matter, and if appropriate, the culprit should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. There is no relationship we cherish more than the Special Relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom.
If there's one thing we can all look forward to under the Trump administration it is the strangling and dismantlement of our intelligence community.
You know, apart from exile or being confined to a single building for multiple years on end. I mean apart from that nothing too serious.
Keeping his mouth shut when entertaining the Russians in the Oval Office?
Intelligence agencies have lost credibility by lying all the time. It's no wonder there are leakers like Snowden: no self-aware person would feel confident following the leadership in the NSA or CIA or FBI.
Let's be honest though: there has never been a time in history when the CIA or FBI were particularly competent.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
With Trump blurting out "I'm not saying we got our intelligence from Israel, but: Israel" and "Oh and we got some nuke subs over there, look how tough I am", there are leaks at the top as well.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
mi aka roman_mir once again proves he loves sucking authoritarian cock.
Also lets tell apart whistle blowers and traitors. Shedding light on unlawful practices of government agencies isn't treason. The unlawful practices themselves are the crime.
We spend a lot of time and money making ourselves believe we are morally superior. Then when believers make it into the ranks of organizations that are the strong arm of the US government, they suddenly see the evidence that we aren't morally superior at all. We are bullies, using our superior weapons to bully other nations into favoring western business. Some can't deal with this reality, and try to right the wrongs. Or at least, that's how I think this keeps happening. But it's the plight of leadership. The other dogs are constantly looking for advantage, and nipping at your heals. You have to smack them down or lose your position. That also means taking food from betas to maintain your strength. I'm not saying it's right, but it's the reality.
U.S. citizens should be far more concerned about what was leaked than the fact that there were leaks. The leaks clearly show our government is out of control, spying on us citizens without cause.
No, this spying did not start with either Trump or Obama. It might have started with one of the Bushes, or it might have started even earlier. Whenever it started, it should stop.
However, Trump want this spying to continue. That is the real reason for his focus on ending the leaks.
Leaks are an essential part of how the US government works. The White House uses them, Congress uses them, the military, the CIA, NSA, etc. It's an aspect of bureaucratic infighting. "Leaks" will never stop because no one who says they want them to actually wants them to. They want EVERYBODY ELSE to stop.
So, if I have this right, when they were leaking information about the executive branch on a daily basis to the press, that was cool... but now that they're leaking information to the press about terrorism, that's bad.
Howabout we call it all bad. That's not how bureaucrats should pay back the government they work for.
Also, how is it that the federal government can monitor its citizenry ala The Patriot Act, but it can't even figure out who's leaking classified information to the press?
The leadership of the intelligence community has been using their authorized secrecy to do terrible, evil things, and cover it all up.
The low-level functionaries that must facilitate this evil are mostly ordinary people with something of a moral backbone. They aren't paid nearly enough to sell their souls, and feel an obligation to protect the people whom they purportedly serve from all the evil that their bosses are perpetuating.
So, the culture of evil leadership has created the culture of perfidious employees.
If they want the leaks to stop, the must either:
1) cut all their employees in for a much large slice of the pie (everyone who touches anything secret gets a 0.5 million dollar a year salary, to start). Buy their silence.
2) Clean up their act, so people stop feeling morally obligated to leak information.
When you prioritize people who enjoy shoving their head up your ass over people who know how to do their jobs, then this is the result.
If Trump actually manages to hang on for the full four years, I think the US will be completely unrecognizable by the end. And not in a good way.
So the US intelligence community can't keep a secret, but they want backdoors in all IT gear and encryption algorithms.
Yeah, that will end well...
How about loosing their cyber weapon arsenal to hackers?
How about having hired Snowden as a contractor?
How about missing every single terror attack?
How about missing the Russian infiltration of Crimea or move into Syria?
How about rendition, secret torture camps, public exposure of torture?
How about perpetually killing civilians with drone strikes based on their "intelligence"?
How about missing the fact that Bin Ladin was living around the corner in an allied country for 10 YEARS?
How about not finding WMD?
And they are losing credibility due to leaks? Please.
He's the President. He's the highest level classification authority in the U.S.
That just means his leaks are legal. It doesn't mean they're good, or that Americans shouldn't be upset about them.
One of the deepest principles of intelligence handling is that however valuable the intelligence itself is, the sources and methods are even more important. Except in very, very rare circumstances, any intelligence shared with anyone not an extremely close ally (and even them, generally) should be very carefully edited to ensure that it does not disclose sources and methods. This is especially important when the sources and methods belong to an ally, because if those are burned, the ally may well decide to stop providing any intel.
Sharing information with the Russians about a common enemy is a perfectly good thing for the president to do. However, a president who is not a narcissistic, insecure idiot would do this by directing his staff to provide intelligence appreciations. Said staff contains professional intelligence officers who are very good at identifying and excising details that might expose sources and methods, and would be perfectly capable of delivering the information, including solid estimates of its reliability that Russian intelligence professionals would correctly understand, without endangering intelligence gathering operations or alliances.
So, yeah, Trump was perfectly within his legal rights to leak this information to the Russians. But it's still perfectly correct to call it a leak, because he screwed it up so badly and in the process revealed more information than he intended.
We have to hope that the intelligence agencies have schooled Trump on the issue and that it won't happen again.
Oh, wait...
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