The rest of the testimony of the experts is also worth reading.
Blanton's especially is a must read, as he dispels many of the myths and put them into a wider context of US reactions.
Official reactions like these show how we are suffering from “Wikimania.”
Almost all of the proposed cures for Bradley Manning’s leak of the
diplomatic cables are worse than the disease. The real danger of Wikimania
is that we could revert to Cold War notions of secrecy, to the kind of
stovepipes and compartments that left us blind before 9/11, to mounting
prosecutions under the Espionage Act that just waste taxpayers’ money and
ultimately get dropped, and to censorship pressure on Internet providers that
emulates the Chinese model of state control rather than the First
Amendment. So perhaps a first order of business should be to dissect some
of what I call the “Wikimyths.”
1. A document dump.
So far there has been no dump of the diplomatic cables. As of yesterday,
there were fewer than 2,000 cables posted on the Web in the Wikileaks and
media sites combined, and another 100 or so uploaded each day, not the
251,000 that apparently exist in the overall database as downloaded by
Bradley Manning. And even that set of a quarter-million cables represents
only a fraction of the total flow of cable traffic to and from the State
Department, simply the ones that State staff considered “reporting and other
informational messages deemed appropriate for release to the US
government interagency community” (the Foreign Affairs Manual
explanation of the SIPDIS tag). According to the editors of Le Monde and
The Guardian, Wikileaks is following the lead of the media organizations on
which documents to post, when to do so, and what to redact from the cables
in terms of source identities that might put someone at risk. Such behavior
is the opposite of a dump. At the same time, an “insurance” file presumably
containing the entire database in encrypted form is in the hands of
thousands, and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has threatened to send out
the decrypt key, if and when his back is against the wall. So a dump could
yet happen of the cables, and the prior record is mixed. A dump did begin of
the Iraq and Afghan war logs, but once reporters pointed out the danger to
local cooperators from being named in the logs, Wikileaks halted the dump
and withheld some 15,000 items out of 91,000 Afghan records.
2. An epidemic of leaks.
While the quantity of documents seems huge (hundreds of thousands
including the Iraq and Afghan materials), from everything we know to date,
all four tranches of Wikileaks publicity this year have come from a single
leaker, the Army private Bradley Manning, who is now behind bars. First,
in April, was the helicopter video of the 2007 shooting of the Reuters
cameramen. Then came the Iraq and Afghan war logs (highly granular
situation reports for the most part) in July and October. Now we see the
diplomatic cables from the SIPRNet. Between 500,000 and 600,000 U.S.
military and diplomatic personnel were cleared for SIPRNet access, so a
security official looking for a glass half full would point out that a humandesigned
security system with half a million potential error points ended up
only with one.
A better contrast would be to compare the proposals for dramatic expansion
of the Espionage Act into arresting foreigners, to the simple operational
security change that the Defense Department has already implemented. The
latter would have prevented Manning from doing his solo downloads onto
CD, and we should ask which approach would be more likely to deter future
Mannings. State Department officials were gloating last week that no
embassy personnel could pull a Manning because State’s version of the
SIPRNet wouldn’t allow downloads onto walk-away media like thumb
drives or CDs. Defense’s rejoinder was that its wide range of forward
operating bases, equipment crashes from dust storms and incoming fire, and
often tenuous Internet connections – certainly compared to the usually cushy
conditions inside embassies – meant some download capacity was essential.
Now, just as nuclear missile launch requires two operators’ keys, and the
handling of sensitive communications intelligence manuals requires “two
person integrity,” and the Mormons send their missionaries out in pairs, a
SIPRNet download would take two to tango.
3. A diplomatic meltdown.
Headline writers loved this phrase, aided and abetted by official statements
like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s characterization of the cables’
release as an “attack on America” “sabotaging peaceful relations between
nations.” In contrast, the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates played down
the heat, in a much more realistic assessment that bears repeating. Gates
told reporters two weeks ago, “I’ve heard the impact of these releases on our
foreign policy described as a meltdown, as a game-changer and so on. I
think these descriptions are fairly significantly overwrought…. Is this
embarrassing? Yes. Is it awkward? Yes. Consequences for U.S. foreign
policy? I think fairly modest.” Most international affairs scholars are
calling the cables fascinating and useful, but at least so far nothing in the
diplomatic cables compares to the impact on public policy in 2004 from the
leak of the Abu Ghraib photographs, or other recent leaks of the existence of
the secret prisons, or the torture memos, or the fact of warrantless
wiretapping, or even the Pentagon Papers’ contribution to the end of the
Vietnam war.
4. Alternatively, no news here.
Wikileaks critics who were not bemoaning a global diplomatic meltdown
often went to the opposite extreme, that is to say there was nothing really
new in the Bradley Manning cables. The past two weeks’ worth of frontpage
headlines in the leading newspapers and broadcasts around the world
should lay this myth to rest. Folks with more news judgment than we have
in this room are continuing to assign stories from the cables, and foreign
media in particular are getting an education perhaps more valuable for their
understanding of their own countries than of the U.S. Likewise, the blogs
are full of lists of stories showing all the things we didn’t know before the
cables emerged. The real problem with the modern news media is evident
from the fact that there are many more reporters clustered around the British
jail holding Assange, than there are reporters in newsrooms actually reading
the substance of the documents. Celebrity over substance every time.
5. Wikiterrorists.
I wish all terrorist groups would write the local U.S. ambassador a few days
before they are launching anything – the way Julian Assange wrote
Ambassador Louis Susman in London on November 26 – to ask for
suggestions on how to make sure nobody gets hurt. I can certainly
understand the State Department’s hostile response and refusal to engage
with Assange in the kind of dialogue U.S. government officials routinely
have with mainstream media, and were already having with the New York
Times over these particular cables. Given Wikileaks’s prior stance, who in
State could possibly have taken at face value the phrase in the November 26
letter which says “Wikileaks will respect the confidentiality of the advice
provided by the United States Government” about risk to individuals.
But I wish all terrorist groups would partner up with Le Monde and El Pais
and Der Spiegel and The Guardian, and The New York Times, and take the
guidance of those professional journalists on what bombs go off and when
and with what regulators. Even to make the comparison tells the story –
Wikileaks is not acting as an anarchist group, even remotely as terrorists, but
as a part of the media, as publishers of information, and even more than that
– the evidence so far shows them trying to rise to the standards of
professional journalism.
I was quoted in Sunday’s New York Times as saying “I’m watching
Wikileaks grow up” as they embrace the mainstream media which “they
used to treat as a cuss word.” So far, with only a few mistakes to date, the
treatment of the cables by the media and by Wikileaks has been very
responsible, incorporating governmental feedback on potential damage,
redacting names of sources, and even withholding whole documents at the
government’s request. Of course, Assange and his colleagues could revert to
more adolescent behavior, since there is the threat out there of the encrypted
“insurance” file that would be dropped like a pinata if the organization
reaches dire straits. But even then, even if all the cables went online, most
of us would condemn the recklessness of such an action, but the fundamental
media and publisher function Wikileaks is serving would not change.
6. When the government says it’s classified, our job as citizens is to
salute.
Actually our job as citizens is to ask questions. I have mentioned that
experts believe 50% to 90% of our national security secrets could be public
with little or no damage to real security. A few years back, when Rep.
Christopher Shays (R-CT) asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s
deputy for counterintelligence and security how much government
information was overclassified, her answer was 50%. After the 9/11
Commission reviewed the government’s most sensitive records about Osama
bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, the co-chair of that commission, former Governor
of New Jersey Tom Kean, commented that “three-quarters of what I read
that was classified shouldn’t have been” – a 75% judgment. President
Reagan’s National Security Council secretary Rodney McDaniel estimated
in 1991 that only 10% of classification was for “legitimate protection of
secrets” – so 90% unwarranted. Another data point comes from the
Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel, over the past 15 years,
has overruled agency secrecy claims in whole or in part in some 65% of its
cases.
When two of the CIA’s top officers retired and went into business, the
Washington Post’s Dana Hedgpeth asked them what was most surprising
about being in the private sector. Cofer Black and Robert Richer responded
that “much of the information they once considered top secret is publicly
available. The trick, Richer said, is knowing where to look. ‘In a classified
area, there’s an assumption that if it is open, it can’t be as good as if you
stole it,’ Richer said. ‘I’m seeing that at least 80 percent of what we stole
was open.’” (“Blackwater’s Owner Has Spies for Hire,” by Dana Hedgpeth,
Washington Post, November 3, 2007). And this was before the Bradley
Manning leaks.
In the National Security Archive’s collections, we have dozens of examples
of documents that are classified and unclassified at the same time,
sometimes with different versions from different agencies or different
reviewers, all because the secrecy is so subjective and overdone. My own
favorite example is a piece of White House e-mail from the Reagan years
when top officials were debating how best to help out Saddam Hussein
against the Iranians. The first version that came back from our Freedom of
Information lawsuit had large chunks of the middle section blacked out on
national security grounds, classified at the secret level as doing serious
damage to our national security if released. But the second version, only a
week or so later, had almost no black in the middle, but censored much of
the top and the bottom sections as secret. Slide the two versions together
and you could read practically the entire document. The punch line is: This
was the same reviewer both times, just with almost completely contradictory
notions of what needed to stay secret.
[...]
Bringing the reality of overclassification to the subject of leaks, Harvard law
professor Jack Goldsmith, who served President George W. Bush as head of
the controversial Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, has
written, “A root cause of the perception of illegitimacy inside the
government that led to leaking (and then to occasional irresponsible
reporting) is, ironically, excessive government secrecy.” Goldsmith went
on, in what was otherwise a highly critical review of the New York Times’
coverage of wiretapping during the George W. Bush years (“Secrecy and
Safety,” by Jack Goldsmith, The New Republic, August 13, 2008), to point
out, “The secrecy of the Bush administration was genuinely excessive, and
so it was self-defeating. One lesson of the last seven years is that the way
for the government to keep important secrets is not to draw the normal circle
of secrecy tighter. Instead the government should be as open as possible….”
Goldsmith’s analysis draws on the famous dicta of Justice Potter Stewart in
the Pentagon Papers case: “When everything is classified, then nothing is
classified, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or
the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or selfpromotion.”
In fact, Stewart observed, “the hallmark of a truly effective
internal security system would be the maximum possible disclosure” since
“secrecy can best be preserved only when credibility is truly maintained.”
Between Goldsmith and Stewart, then, Mr. Chairman, we have a pretty good
guide with which to assess any of the proposals that may come before you in
the guise of dealing with Wikileaks in these next months. We have to ask,
will the proposal draw the circle of secrecy tighter, or move us towards
maximum possible disclosure? We have to recognize that right now, we
have low fences around vast prairies of government secrets, when what we
need are high fences around small graveyards of the real secrets. We need to
clear out our backlog of historic secrets that should long since have appeared
on the public shelves, and slow the creation of new secrets. And those
voices who argue for a crackdown on leakers and publishers need to face the
reality that their approach is fundamentally self-defeating because it will
increase government secrecy, reduce our security, and actually encourage
more leaks from the continued legitimacy crisis of the classification system.
Thank you for your consideration of these views, and I look forward to your
questions.
But I would suggest reading the rest of the testimonies as well. Turns out all of the experts are saying that the prosecution will be hard and only one (Schoenfield, while repeating many of the wikimyths) believes it can even be done without destroying the First amendment.
"
- PeZook
