Leaks: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Them
Leaks of classified information and the government’s responses to them are the subject of a new study by David Pozen of Columbia Law School.
The starting point for his examination is the “dramatic disconnect between the way our laws and our leaders condemn leaking in the abstract and the way they condone it in practice.” How can this disconnect be understood?
Leaks benefit the government, the author argues, in many ways. They are a safety valve, a covert messaging system, a perception management tool, and more. Even when a particular disclosure is unwelcome or damaging, it serves to validate the system as a whole.
This thesis may explain why the number of leak prosecutions is still lower than might be expected, given the prevalence of leaks, and why new legislative proposals to combat leaks have met with a lukewarm response from executive branch officials.
“The leak laws are so rarely enforced not only because it is hard to punish violators, but also because key institutional actors share overlapping interests in maintaining a permissive culture of classified information disclosures.”
The article is full of stimulating observations woven into an original and provocative thesis. See The Leaky Leviathan: Why the Government Condemns and Condones Unlawful Disclosures of Information by David Pozen, to be published in Harvard Law Review.
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.