The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence announced (pdf) that it will hold a hearing on Friday May 26 on “the Media’s Role and Responsibilities in Leaks of Classified Information.”
There is no legislation on leaks currently before the Committee, and there are no governmental witnesses testifying at the hearing.
In an invited statement for the record (pdf), I attempted to put the issue into a larger context and to illustrate the fact that some leaks serve a constructive purpose.
“I believe it is an error to focus on unauthorized disclosures as if they were an isolated phenomenon, without consideration of the corrupted state of the classification system and the difficulties faced by whistleblowers who seek to comply with official procedures,” I wrote.
“From my own perspective, it seems likely that the benefits of leaks in preserving constitutional values greatly outweigh their risks to national security.”
The suggestion by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales last weekend that the government might prosecute reporters who publish classified information was critiqued by Jacob Sullum of Reason Magazine in “When Speech Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Speak,” May 24.
Committee chairman Rep. Pete Hoekstra has been an outspoken critic of classified leaks.
“Each year, countless unauthorized leaks cause severe damage to our intelligence activities and expose our capabilities,” he said in a speech last year.
“The fact of the matter is, some of the worst damage done to our intelligence community has come not from penetration by spies, but from unauthorized leaks by those with access to classified information.”
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.