Escalating Secrecy Wars

"Any sources and methods of intelligence will remain guarded in secret. My administration will not talk about how we gather intelligence, if we gather intelligence, and what the intelligence says. That's for the protection of the American people."

-- President George W. Bush, New York Times, Sept. 14, 2001

"The seriousness of the [unauthorized disclosures] issue has outpaced the capacity of extant administrative and law enforcement mechanisms to address the problem effectively."

-- Attorney General John Ashcroft, Letter to the Speaker of the House, Oct. 15, 2002

For an administration obsessed with secrecy, the recent musings of Dr. James B. Bruce might be just what the doctor ordered. In the current edition of Studies in Intelligence, Dr. Bruce recommends "stiff new penalties to crack down on leaks, including prosecutions of journalists that publish classified information," according to the May 22 edition of Secrecy News.

Last summer, Dr. Bruce, a veteran CIA employee, told the Institute of World Politics that "We've got to do whatever it takes -- if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes -- to stop these leaks." According to NewsMax.com, a right wing online publication, Bruce declared that "Somehow there has evolved a presumptive right of the press to leak classified information. I hope we get a test case soon that will pit the government's need to prosecute those who leak its classified documents against the guarantees of free speech. I'm betting the government will win."

In his latest attack on leakers, titled "The Consequences of Permissive Neglect: Laws and Leaks of Classified Intelligence" (Studies in Intelligence: Journal of the American Intelligence Professional -- Volume 47, No. 1, 2003), Dr. Bruce maintains that intelligence gathering efforts and secrecy "is under assault," from the U.S. press which acts as an "open vault of classified information on U.S. intelligence collection sources and methods." The problem is being exacerbated by "the scope and seriousness of leaks coupled with the power of electronic dissemination [of information] and search engines."

U.S. newspapers, magazines, television, books, and the Internet are not only revealing information about "how secret intelligence works," but they are also divulging "how to defeat it," according to Dr. Bruce. To prevent "unauthorized disclosure" there must be "a frontal assault on many levels" including "a range of legal solutions that have not been tried before, some of which are controversial." Establishing these remedies will not be easy because "freedom-of-the-press advocates" and professional journalists "exert disproportionate influence on this debate."

Dr. Bruce also rails against the "myths" that "leaks do not do much harm" and "that the government over-classifies everything -- including intelligence -- and classifies way too much." He claims: "The National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) has experienced roughly a hundred leaks just since 2000 that have damaged U.S. imagery collection effectiveness. Many dozens of leaks on the activities and programs of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) have also helped foreign adversaries develop countermeasures to spaceborne collection operations. DIA and the military services, too, have suffered collection losses as a result of media leaks."

"There are laws that already criminalize the disclosure of certain specific categories of information to an unauthorized person," Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and editor of Secrecy News, told me in a telephone interview. "These categories include revealing the names of intelligence agents that are under cover; classified cryptographic material -- information pertaining to U.S. government codes or communications intelligence; information relating to nuclear weapons design and a few other areas." Disclosure of anything in these areas is prohibited and is punishable by law. The specific media outlet as well as an individual reporter is subject to prosecution.