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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.
they were corrupt and lawless under Obama, and they are corrupt and lawless under Trump, i doubt much has changed
"Meet the new boss, same as the old boss"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
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."
Trump is talking about punishing leakers so that the government is less accountable, not dismantling the CIA.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, Obama promised more government transparency. These leaks delivered quite a bit of that, though I doubt it was what he had in mind...
However this is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
We need good intelligence, and some of it needs to be kept secret. However the trend is to classify stuff that shouldn't need to be classified, just because it is easier to classify then have it public.
With the leaks, what bothers me more isn't the stuff that got leaked out, most of it is fairly common knowledge, it just confirms what we already know. The real problem is why is such mundane stuff classified?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
One thing the Trump administration will never be accused of is too much intelligence.
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.
I'm inclined to cut Snowden some slack for two reasons. First, he took pains to release the information in as responsible a way as possible. Second, what he exposed was a pile of crimes against the American people (whether technically legal or not). It has been a long time since I studied the Manning incident, but my recollection is that he was trying to hurt America by casting wartime battlefield events as if they should be held to peaceful homeland standards.
If I were President, I'd offer Snowden a deal where he can return home and serve 13 months under house arrest for stealing secrets in exchange for a pardon of everything else.
If I were Emperor, or had an agreeable Congress, I'd also make it a capital offense to abuse government against the American people as a whole or American citizens individually - including spying, IRS bullshit, etc.
See that "Preview" button?
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.
The Rosenbergs got plans for how to build nukes to the Russians. There's no comparison to the people you mention. The comparison for Snowden, who passed information to the entire public via the press is Daniel Ellsberg who did that same thing. All charges against Ellsberg were dropped. There is no comparison between Assange and any American citizen as he is not an American citizen and owes no duty to our government. However, if you want to look at someone who has passed classified intelligence to the Russians, there's been a story in the news recently...
... and yet leaking is almost never punished, much less prosecuted.
If you want to see why, look at one of the few cases of leaking that *was* prosecuted: Scooter Libby's leaking of the fact Valerie Plame was an active CIA agent. Note that his sentence was commuted by the president he served.
That's because despite leaking being characterized as disloyal, often it's the exact opposite. I'm not just talking about planted information, I'm talking about leaks that arise out of internal differences in strategy and policy. The insiders who do this aren't trying to sabotage the administration, they're trying to steer it using public pressure. And while embarrassment is often part of that pressure, leaks by insiders are usually carefully measured to limit damage. And given the infrequency with which they are punished I have to assume that insider are also careful about choosing their battles.
What's coming out of the Trump Administration feels different, more disloyal, and gratuitously embarrassing. It smacks of people out to personally undermine their colleagues.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
"I get good intelligence photos - great photos. They're the best intelligence photos in the world. I just saw some last night of the bomb remnants from Manchester... here, they're on my phone, I'll send them to you."
#DeleteChrome
Just look at all the domestic spying that has been uncovered, admitted to, and simply resumed without anything being done about it.
You mean the domestic spying which got its real start when Bush forced telecom companies to install equipment which allowed the government to listen in on every phone call without a warrant? That he admitted to signing the executive orders and which were subsequently found to be illegal? Who then went and expanded the program?
You mean those hacks who kept saying over and over it's for our protection, that the right to privacy no longer exists?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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.
He's the President. He's the highest level classification authority in the U.S. It even says in the Executive Order (possibly an old one):
(a) Top Secret. The authority to classify information originally as Top Secret may be exercised only by:
(1) the President;
Then for Secret and Confidential it's folks appointed by the Pres.
In Section 3.4 it even states that the President is exempt from the declassification process. The real argument is would any sane person give away that kind of information to a country that has been an antagonist for decades.
Keeping his mouth shut when entertaining the Russians in the Oval Office?
You do realize that ANYTHING Trump decides to discuss, classified or not, is legal right? It's under HIS authority that stuff is classified in the first place and he can declassify anything he wants anytime he wants.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
There are leaks and there are leaks. Trump will leak when it's convenient for him to leak - or when he just can't control his impulse to brag about what he knows. But the only leaks he really cares about are the ones from inside the White House, apparently from staffers that can't believe the sheer stupidity of this Administration and feel the country has a need to know.
Manning and Snowden are a whole other leaky ball of wax. They obviously believed the country had a need to know the stuff they were leaking, and they weren't members of the Administration or even the agencies they were working for. They may have done us a service - and they may also have done some real damage. But what they've pointed out more than anything else is that it's practically impossible to use modern digital technology and reliably maintain the levels of secrecy that the government seems to want to maintain...
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
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...
However this is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
We need good intelligence, and some of it needs to be kept secret. However the trend is to classify stuff that shouldn't need to be classified, just because it is easier to classify then have it public.
With the leaks, what bothers me more isn't the stuff that got leaked out, most of it is fairly common knowledge, it just confirms what we already know. The real problem is why is such mundane stuff classified?
Have you ever disclosed your real identity on /.?
Now assume I go through your posting history and read every comment, and that I start searching the Internet for other comments made under the same username, or people using the same phrases on other forums.
How confident are you that I couldn't uncover your real identity?
Give an intelligence agency a bunch of mundane stuff and some confirmed rumours and they'll figure out a lot of things they weren't supposed to know.
I stole this Sig
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.
Besides that whole issue reeking of the Trump-Russia collusion conspiracy theory for which there is still no evidence.
The fact that there are so many overt signs of dishonestly and incompetence bubbling up so early in the term is a problem owned by the Administration, not its detractors. A bit of speculation on the part of the detractors does not invalidate specific named criticisms that can be backed by concrete evidence.
Personally, I doubt actual collusion on the part of Trump himself, but I will keep an open mind to real evidence. But a proper investigation is very likely to throw mud on a lot of his friends and people in the Administration, and possibly a couple indictments to boot; it is right and proper and necessary to purse such an investigation, given just what is known in the public record.
Is there something specific you are attributing to Obama? Those programs go back decades. We just found out about them under Obama. I'd prefer to blame Bush Jr, but really he was just signing-off on justifications for programs that already existed back before 9/11/2001. This is what happens when you have a secret government watchdog.
The White House Staff wouldn't know the name of the Libyan suicide bomber: that had to come from one of the TLA agencies. The White House staff leaks have been about each other - Jared about Bannon, Priebus about Jared & so on
Well, there is leaking and there is leaking. For a long time, leaking was done to a responsible media, who would then go on to corroborate it with other sources if possible. Snowden actually, to his credit, did it the right way, giving the documents to the media who could then devote time to verifying the information. This is where the 4th estate shows it's value. However, confidence in the media is seriously eroded today. People don't even bother to criticize fox news anymore, and when they are busted in a lie, they don't even bother to defend themselves anymore. Who you leak to says more about your motives than the actual information, IMO. I think we, as a populous, have a dual responsibility to pay attention to these, but not to assume they are indisputable fact. With that said, there is a difference between a candle and a bonfire. When a lot of leaks from different sources point in a certain direction, you should probably start paying attention.
Well, Obama promised more government transparency. These leaks delivered quite a bit of that, though I doubt it was what he had in mind...
On a more serious note, I think the leakers delivered it precisely because Obama didn't. I'm not pointing the finger solely at Obama, I mean the system as a whole, though he may have increased the likelihood of leaks by raising hopes of transparency and then failing to deliver. The system is too secretive, too closed, and too uncontrolled, and people like Manning and Snowden (not so much Petraeus) do what they do in order to fix that problem. It's not a very good fix, for obvious reasons, but since the system seems incapable of correcting itself, it seems the only option we have.
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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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