Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Journalists are urging President Clinton to veto a bill that would make it a felony to disclose any classified information to the media.
Nov 1, 2000 | Ever since leaks about alleged espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory reached the front pages of the New York Times and produced a firestorm on Capitol Hill, government secrets have become a hot political issue.
Yesterday, the debate over security leaks reached a kind of climax in the form of a bill, approved by Congress, that awaits President Clinton's signature -- or veto -- by Nov. 4. The controversial provision, tacked on to a larger intelligence spending bill, tightens government security by making it a felony for anyone with security clearance to knowingly disclose classified information to anyone without authorized access to it.
An alliance of press organizations -- including CNN, the Washington Post and the American Society of Newspaper Editors -- is up in arms over what they say is a broad threat to journalistic freedom.
And even people who support the law admit that there's a lot wrong with it. It's extremely broad, covering the entire gamut of classified information and making it illegal to leak to the press anything -- no matter how innocuous -- that's been classified.
Proponents of the law say it is not intended to prosecute minor leaks. But whatever the intention, critics say that's what it will do.
"It's disastrous for journalists," Kenneth H. Bacon, assistant secretary of defense for public information, told reporters on Monday. "It's disastrous for any official who deals with the press in national security."
As a government spokesman himself, Bacon pointed out that the law would make it a felony for him to answer simple questions posed by the media -- about, say, the movement of Iraqi troops during the Gulf War, if he were relying on classified information in order to do so.
Many in the security field say that while holes in disclosure laws need to be filled, this bill has everything to do with politics and nothing to do with the real problems at hand.
"History shows that classification rules are often used to punish people," says Jessica Stern, senior fellow at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "This law would make it a lot easier to use those rules in an arbitrary way. It could and most likely would be used politically: to squelch disclosure of politically embarrassing information or to punish people whose views officials don't like."
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy has been following the anti-leak bill since its inception on the Senate floor. He spoke with Salon Tuesday to lay out the stakes for the media and the nation.
The proponents of this law are saying that there is a big problem with leakage of information to the press, which is hurting all kinds of surveillance operations and causing them to lose agents. Is this a big problem?
I think it is certainly true that there has been an epidemic of leaks of classified information. To some degree there have always been leaks as long as there has been a classification system. But the rate of unauthorized disclosures has increased markedly since the end of the Cold War. I don't know if anybody really knows why. I suspect that there's a feeling that it just doesn't matter as much anymore. And since we don't face the same kind of superpower threat that we faced in the Cold War, there's not much to lose in leaking classified information.
At any rate, there has been an erosion of discipline within the cleared community such that people are leaking right and left. I would say that at least nine out of 10 leaks are utterly benign, and many are positively beneficial in terms of informing the public. It is probably true however that, from time to time, an authorized disclosure of classified information jeopardizes a source or causes an intelligence-gathering method to be rendered useless.
Now I should hasten to add that the problem here has nothing to do with a lack of legal authority to prosecute.
It's already illegal to disclose classified information if it aids a foreign power, exposes intelligence agents or compromises national defense, correct?
Not exactly. There are prohibitions against leaks of only a handful of discrete categories of information. Those categories include the names of clandestine intelligence agents, nuclear weapons secrets and certain kinds of cryptographic and communications intelligence. But those are the exception, not the rule.
What does exist is a broad range of administrative penalties -- administrative, in contrast to criminal. If you're caught leaking, you can have your security clearance revoked, you can have various kinds of penalties imposed, you can lose your job.
The problem that government agencies have had is that they have been unable to identify the leakers. It's not that they have been unable to prosecute them; they've been unable to locate them. And so this new law will do nothing to address the problem that it supposedly is directed toward.
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