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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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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