Senate Intelligence Authorization Report Filed

Do the security clearance procedures that are used for granting access to classified information actually serve their intended purpose?

To help answer that question, the Senate Intelligence Committee mandated a review of security clearance requirements, including “their collective utility in anticipating future insider threats.”

See the Committee’s new report on the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2018, filed September 7, 2017.

The report summarizes the content of the pending intelligence authorization bill (S. 1761), which was filed last month, and adds Committee comments on various aspects of current intelligence policy.

So, for example, “The Committee remains concerned about the level of protection afforded to whistleblowers within the IC and the level of insight congressional committees have into their disclosures.”

The central point of contention in the bill is a provision (sec. 623) declaring a sense of Congress “that WikiLeaks and the senior leadership of WikiLeaks resemble a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors and should be treated as such a service by the United States.”

The provision had originally stated that WikiLeaks and its leadership “constitute” a non-state hostile intelligence service. But this was amended to replace “constitute” with “resemble”. That move might have attenuated the provision’s significance except that it went on to say — whether WikiLeaks constitutes or merely resembles a non-state hostile intelligence service — that the U.S. should treat it as such.

A hostile state-based intelligence service would presumably be subject to intense surveillance by the US. A competent US counterintelligence agency might also seek to infiltrate the hostile service, to subvert its agenda, and even to take it over or disable it.

Whether such a response would also be elicited by “a non-state hostile intelligence service” is hard to say since the concept itself is new and undefined.

“The Committee’s bill offers no definition of ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ to clarify what this term is and is not,” wrote Sen. Kamala Harris, who favored removal of this language, though she said WikiLeaks has “done considerable harm to this country.”

Sen. Ron Wyden, who likewise said that WikiLeaks had been “part of a direct attack on our democracy,” opposed the bill due to the WikiLeaks-related provision.

“My concern is that the use of the novel phrase ‘non-state hostile intelligence service’ may have legal, constitutional, and policy implications, particularly should it be applied to journalists inquiring about secrets,” Sen. Wyden wrote in minority views appended to the report. “The language in the bill suggesting that the U.S. government has some unstated course of action against ‘non-state hostile intelligence services’ is equally troubling.”