WIKILEAKS FALLOUT: Observations on a Banana Republic
According to Executive Order 13526 signed by the President on December 29, 2009:
"'Secret' shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security."
"'Confidential' shall be applied to information, the unauthorized disclosure of which reasonably could be expected to cause damage to the national security."
The first day I reported to work as Afghanistan desk officer in the State Dept., I found a pink slip on my desk citing me for a security violation. The foul-tempered misanthropic woman who had preceded me in that job had left me a desk stuffed with her junk, including a Canadian cable marked CONFIDENTIAL that she had carelessly left behind. The evening before my first day on the job, Marines had gone on one of their periodic random searches of offices to catch things like this. I ended up taking the rap. No excuses. I was left holding the bag by virtue of desk ownership. That violation stayed on my record for three years. Had I gotten two more such violations, they would have yanked my security clearances and I'd be assigned to the mailroom. Three strikes and you're out. Period.
The government expends tremendous resources on protecting classified materials. What most people don't realize is that the primary mission of the thousand U.S. Marines deployed at 148 diplomatic missions worldwide is to safeguard classified information. The safety of the personnel who generate and consume that information comes third (after protection of the facilities that contain the secrets).
Security is a very, very serious thing in the national security agencies. Classified information is locked in safes inside locked rooms inside locked buildings with guards. In many embassies, classified work, such as drafting cables, must be done in so-called secure conferencing facilities, known to laymen as "bubbles." Working in these overly air conditioned metal cocoons is akin to sitting in a cold crypt equipped with specially security enhanced PC's.
We also spend enormous resources on diplomtic couriers, men and women whose job it is to carry and accompany classified materials to, from and between diplomatic posts.
There are a lot of misperceptions and outright false claims in the media now about government secrets in the wake of the Wikileaks fiasco. Blanket assertions are made that "the government classifies too much." Oh, really? How would these pundits know that? It's a facile and false claim based on bias and ignorance.
When I entered government as a lowly analyst at the Pentagon in the '70's, indeed almost everything was stamped at least CONFIDENTIAL. The result was the need for too much secure storage space for all this paper (digital storage hadn't come to the fore yet). With so many safes containing so many documents, the USG needed more rooms. More rooms meant more buildings. Not only that, but more man hours were required to cull and maintain the files. It was crazy as well as needlessly expensive. The Carter administration reformed the system, requiring us public servants to classify many fewer documents and to rely on an unclassified restrictive label for any unclassified materials that nonetheless did not warrant unlimited distribution. Further reforms were enacted under President Clinton.
Statistics thrown out about the enormous growth in the absolute number of classified documents are misleading. This growth can be tied to the growth in the federal national security bureaucracy post 9/11 rather than classification-mad functionaries on security steroids wildly stamping everything SECRET.
There are standard procedures for declassifying documents. One is the declassification schedule requiring that all classified documents have an expiration date attached to them. A close examination of the Wikileaks documents reveals these, e.g., "DECL: 09/01/20." The other procedure entails the Freedom of Information Act whereby any citizen may request past classified documents on a given subject. These historical documents are reviewed by legions of federal retirees sitting in the far recesses of the bureaucracies. Sources and methods may be redacted, but usually, the documents are eventually released in some coherent form. A great repository of declassified documents is George Washington University's The National Security Archive (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/).
Private Bradley Manning, sitting at a U.S. Army base in Iraq, managed to download a quarter of a million diplomatic messages onto a Lady Gaga CD and walk out the door with it. This single act of an unbalanced narcissist with self-esteem issues has blown a tremendous hole in the national security of the United States. The outcome won't be fatal, but the United States certainly will suffer in terms of trust and efficacy in carrying out its foreign policy. And do not rule out people's lives being on the line, including indirectly -- for example, from the exposure of the SECRET "Critical Infrastructure List," a windfall for al-Qaida.
But the U.S. government deserves as much, if not more, opprobrium for its unbelievably lax digital security. One would expect this kind of flub-up from a banana republic, not the world's sole superpower. Yes, the need for more information-sharing was underscored in the wake of 9/11. And this need not be sacrificed. What's direly needed is a totally revamped system to prevent acts like Pvt. Manning's. Technologically, this is not in the same league as putting a man on the moon. It's doable now.
The alternative is going back to a system of lots of papers stuffed into too many safes, a grossly inefficient means which puts too many new desk officers at risk for taking some other schmuck's rap.