Conor Friedersdorf can be infuriating. He constructs an entire argument based on the premise that a) you can never totally eliminate damaging leaks of classified information, and b) that if you are too effective in limiting those kinds of leaks, you will just encourage people to bypass responsible corporate reporters and go to WikiLeaks or Anonymous.
Let me give Mr. Friedersdorf a hypothetical. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that there is a foreign country that has been in an official state of war with the United States for 60 years and that they have nuclear weapons and that they are a totalitarian society based on a Cult of Personality, and that they periodically shoot off missiles and other projectiles at their southern neighbors who are our close ally, and that they are developing more and better nuclear weapons and rockets and are a threat to proliferate that technology to countries like Iran. Let’s say that we were about to slap new United Nations sanctions on this country and we wanted to know how they might react. Let’s say that the CIA managed to get an asset high up in this country’s government who was willing to give us insights on how the country might react. And let’s say that this source told the CIA that the leadership would react in four ways, one of which would be to do another nuclear test.
Okay, are you still with me, Friedersdorf?
So, the CIA gets this very valuable and sensitive information and they distribute it to a small list of people who are cleared to know about such classified affairs. These are analysts and policymakers and military planners who have to be able to anticipate how the world might go all wobbly at a moment’s notice.
Then one of the analysts decides that it is very important that a reporter from Fox News not only get this information but that he learn how the CIA got it. And then the Fox News reporter doesn’t ask the CIA about it. He doesn’t try to find out whether it might be a problem if he reports this information. He just reports it. Like two hours after he gets the information. He tells the world that we have a source high up in the government of this foreign country. You know, maybe we could have overheard this information with our spying equipment. Maybe an intelligence officer from a foreign ally could have stolen the information.
So, now we have a very hard to get source not only pissed off at us but terrified for his life. And every other current or potential source in the world has to figure talking to us is a terrible idea.
The thing is, this isn’t a hypothetical. This is exactly what happened in the case of Fox News reporter James Rosen. So, what is the government supposed to do in a case like this? Should they follow this advice from Friedersdorf?
It doesn’t matter if the “stop the leaks” folks believe their cause is righteous, or even if they’re right that we’d be better off if all leaks could be stopped. They can’t be stopped. The question is how best to minimize their costs and maximize their benefits. The answer is to discourage leaks, but to tolerate it when they filter through journalists, an approach that has served the U.S. well.
I’m not even going to give the obligatory nod to the First Amendment here. It doesn’t serve our country well to tolerate leaks that burn assets who can help us avoid (potentially nuclear) war. There is not even an element of whistle-blowing in this case. The government did precisely what it was supposed to do. Nothing was served by divulging this information. It was incredibly damaging. James Rosen should be fired and never given another job where he is expected to dig up classified scoops.
This isn’t even a remotely close call.
And I think it really does damage to the credibility of the defenders of press freedom to defend this guy or to criticize the government for figuring out who his source was.
The only part of this story that is troubling at all is the news that the government treated Rosen as a possible co-conspirator. Stick to that angle, and you’ll have my sympathy. Tell me that the government has to “tolerate” leaks of this kind and I’m just going to call you an idiot.
A right-wing dissenter from within the State Department and an activist press attacked the new administration’s relative non-aggression and diplomatic efforts in the wake of North Korean provocation. That’s actually the entire point of national security reporting. People professionally treated serious matters blithely. There are 365 days a year, you can’t expect them to only work four of them when it really matters. People like David Iglesias don’t have a job but for leaking everything under the sun from all comers (including the sainted White House) to shape narratives and decision making.
The leaker was alarmist. The reporter was incompetent. The intelligence was wrong (oh by the way). The administration’s rapprochement was a failure. And North Korea is still nuclear armed and hostile and likely to remain that way for some time. No damage was done. The system remains pretty robust in its utter brokenness.
The feigned ignorance galls. People should just admit that the trust and love this particular government and distrust and hate that which is not this government. And that their fantasy in this scenario would be the press rising up as one to burn right-wing sources to the proper authorities and begin publishing stories exposing the seditious elements within the state that are sabotaging the oh so noble peacemaking efforts of our glorious leadership, ever may they reign.
Me, on the other hand, I just accept that when the opposition loses an argument, they go to the press, and this setup has managed to get us this far after all. The country appears to still be standing.
I can’t wait to watch this song and dance when the details of the stuxnet/NYT investigation are inevitably leaked. Because I would think that if any story deserved and needed publishing, it was that the time the government started sabotaging nuclear infrastructure over the internet, but I’m sure that too somehow endangered our national security terribly…
David Ignatius, rather.
What’s with the hipster irony?
There’s no irony.
The press can fulfill one of three, and only three, functions. It can be celebratory about government (for those who trust it) or it can be oppositional towards government (for those who distrust it). When the press does its job very well, it can be enough to convert people one way or the other on any given subject. Or it can just report relevant statistical data without editorializing or contextualizing.
You trust this government. You trust it more than the press, yes? But the Fox News leak in question was sourced by a person who didn’t trust the government, written by a reporter who didn’t trust the government, and targeted at people who don’t trust the government. They don’t think as you think, and they won’t act as you would. Unless you have a professional and legal commitment to be offended, I don’t see why any layman should really care too much.
those are only two functions. what’s the third?
Joe Friday.
The thing is, there was no reason to run the story. DPRK would respond by increased testing. WHOO-HOO THAT’S SOME NEWS! Oh wait. It’s not. It’s the obvious response from DPRK. It’s not a surprise how they would react. There was nothing newsworthy there and he just confirmed to DPRK that they had a leaker. Which is bad and served no purpose. But I’m not going to pretend that somehow the information actually leaked was of any detriment to national security. It was all in the implications.
I think it is a danger to national security if you burn a high level asset who, if s/he survives, will no longer be able to provide intelligence and if it makes it very difficult to recruit other well placed assets.
Sigh.
I know spy craft is a learned skill, but some things are actually quite basic.
Probably the single most important thing the CIA has to do is to protect their sources. This is not for the sources in particular. It’s for the other sources and would-be sources.
To understand this, you have to understand why people decide to betray their own governments and talk to our spies. Generally speaking, it’s because they are already screwed. Either that, or simple greed.
Maybe we’ve caught them in some act of corruption that we can blackmail them about.
Maybe they have a sick daughter who needs surgery in an advanced oncology center.
Maybe they are badly in debt.
Whatever it is, they need to believe that we can solve their problem. That they can talk to us without arousing suspicion. That they can perhaps even to an operation for us without it becoming a headline of the frisking Associated Press.
But it’s not really them we care about, except to the degree that they might stop cooperating. That’s usually not a problem, though, because once they betray their country, there is no way out.
It’s all the other people who learn in the newspapers that we can’t keep our promises. That we can’t protect them.
In this case, it’s basically the worst of all worlds, because the source probably wasn’t replaceable. And they weren’t giving us the wheat yield in the Ukraine; they were giving us the thinking of the North Korean leadership.
Yes, but all of that is on the CIA’s head. It’s their job not include on ‘a small list of people cleared to know about such classified affairs’ a jerkwad like the guy who slipped the info to Rosen. It’s their job not to hire him, and it’s his job not to leak. And if he was a whistleblower, I’d be in his corner, but he’s not, so it’s their job to build a case against him.
Him, not Rosen.
It’s Rosen’s job to dig up classified scoops. The government’s relationship to the press SHOULD BE adversarial. Far as I can tell, absolutely nothing justified Rosen reporting on this, largely because the actual news–they’ll shoot missiles!–was such a zero. As opposed to ‘hey, we’ve got a source in your government!’ which is a big something. But worrying about that isn’t Rosen’s job. Worrying about burning assets or serving our country or avoiding a nuclear holocaust isn’t Rosen’s job.
It sounds to me like what you’re saying is, ‘It is immoral for defense attorneys to represent clients they believe are guilty, because it is morally wrong to get a murderer off.’
Maybe it is morally wrong to get a murderer off, but it’s not the defense attorney’s job to worry about that. It can’t be. The balance doesn’t come from her job, or from Rosen’s job. The balance comes from the whole adversarial system. And at a time when the press functions so horribly, when it’s so in the pocket of power and money, suggesting that it kowtow even more (though you’re right, of course, that the grand total of what Rosen achieved was damage) makes me nervous.
An American reporter has to take an adversarial approach to the government up to a point. They are not prosecuting attorneys, however. They have just as much interest in avoiding a war with North Korea as any other citizen. They have zero incentive to out our spies unless they know that they are breaking laws that they are not authorized to break.
Rosen published the article under his byline. His identity wasn’t a secret. But his source was. And his source was as bad as a mole. He had to be identified and rooted out. End of story.
There are obviously concerns about slippery slopes and how Rosen was treated in the legal sense, but I am talking about the idea that the government should “tolerate” leaks of this kind. That’s ridiculous.
I agree that the government can’t tolerate leaks of this kind (if we set whistleblowers aside): they should go after the leaker.
But not the reporter. Not even ‘building a case.’
(And I didn’t compare reporters to prosecuting attorneys. Prosecuting attorneys work for the government. I said quite the opposite.)
A defense attorney, like everyone else, has a personal interest in seeing a violent criminal behind bars. But she has a PROFESSIONAL interest–and we all have a social interest–in defending that violent criminal as competently as possible.
Unlike the CIA, and unlike the source, Rosen did his job. (Spectacularly poorly, but still: he did his job.) The fact that the government built a case against him is chilling and wildly inappropriate.
It’s like the government building a case against a defense attorney for representing a criminal. Many, many people would say, ‘Well, the released criminal went on to murder again; doesn’t the defense attorney bear some blame?’ Somehow I don’t think you’d buy that, though.
I want to learn more about how the government treated Rosen as a potential co-conspirator and how that allowed them to do certain things that furthered their investigation. As I said in the piece, if you stick to that issue, you have my sympathy.
I’d dispute that Rosen did his job, however, unless you think being a Fox News hack is the same thing as being a reporter.
He did certain things right, like developing a source and getting some information that other reporters didn’t have. But he did pretty much everything else wrong. He should have realized that reporting that we had a source in the North Korean government was probably not a good idea. He should have asked the Intelligence Community for comment. He shouldn’t haven’t written his story the way he wrote it. He should have done a better job protecting his source.
And the prosecutor is a better analogy than the defense attorney because the reporter is usually trying to prove that someone did something, not that they didn’t do something. But the problem the attorney analogy is that they are advocates for a side, not for the truth. Reporters shouldn’t be adversarial in that sense. They shouldn’t be looking to paint the government in the worst possible light. Nor should they be trying to paint them in the best possible light.
Well, I guess I think that hack reporting, like shitty speech, requires the most protection. But I’d missed that about the only troubling thing being that the government treated Rosen as a possible co-conspirator. Obviously that’s the only troubling thing. (Well, other’n losing a source in North Korea …) How deflating. Nothing to argue about.
I think that hack reporting is too kind. Fox news is not a legitimate news agency.
Doesn’t matter. Even a shithole like Fox, as well as places like Wikileaks and Some Blogger, deserve the same legal protection as Our Noble Worthy Newsmedia such as the New York Times (which to my mind, at least, though this is beside the point, has probably done more damage than Fox). The fact Fox is IQ-lowering partisan propaganda simply doesn’t enter into their rights, just like the fact that the American Nazi Party aren’t sweethearts shouldn’t enter into the march-permitting process.
From the warrant, Rosen emailed this to Kim.
Let’s break some new[s], and expose muddle-headed policy when we see it – or force the administration’s hand to go in the right direction, if possible.
So? Do we imagine that the Boston Globe doesn’t expose what they think of as muddle-headed policies in an attempt to force the government to correct what they see as problems?
And Fox is an overtly partisan news organization. Clearly Rosen was doing exactly his job. Breaking news. Exposing what he saw as muddle-headed policy. Trying to change policy. That’s what Dana Priest and Seymour Hersh do, too, except they’re not fucking idiots.
The Boston Globe issuing an opinion about muddle-headed policies is perfectly legitimate as would it be for them to publish classified information responsibly in order to expose corruption or malfeasance (actual whistleblowing). This is not even remotely what took place here.
Hersh and Priest do not burn intelligence assets in order to influence policy.
This actually is not correct. The media as it stands today goes with the conventional wisdom that war is good for the bottom line. It isn’t remotely true as their actual bottom line has shown over the past 10 years, but facts are stupid things for them. They still see themselves as having a vested interest in promoting war.
Worrying about burning assets or serving our country or avoiding a nuclear holocaust isn’t Rosen’s job.
This is no different from arguing that corporations are only there to enrich shareholders, and it’s not their job to treat workers decently or protect the environment.
Are you a fan of that school of thought?
It’s not corporations job to do that. It’s the government’s job to MAKE Corporations do that or fine them into bankruptcy.
In the world as it is, I’ll gladly pressure corporations to do the right thing and say they should be responsible but in the end what really should happen is the government should put it’s foot on the necks of corporations and never let them up.
If that’s the case, then it is similarly the government’s job to enforce secrecy rules against the press.
Yes, that’s what I said.
The content of the story was of minimal importance. It what the content says about what we’re in a position to know and how.
but to tolerate it when they filter through journalists, an approach that has served the U.S. well
Like when the Bush White House leaked Valerie Plame’s name to Bob Novak and Judith Miller.
We should tolerate that, because journalists.
Tolerate? No, cynically exploit after failing to bust them on anything real?
You don’t give a shit about Valerie Plame. No one gives a shit about Valerie Plame. She’s just some random spy whose family took on The Man and lost. On the list of things the Bush administration did wrong and we should care about, Plame is like #17,873.
See, that’s where you are wrong.
I wrote a lot about Valerie Plame. And she and her husband noticed. Joe Wilson made it a point to find someone who knew me to let me know that he wanted to thank me in person for fighting on behalf of his family. That was at a DC conference in 2007 or so.
Why is it so hard to believe that what we do isn’t based in cynicism.
Nihilism must be exhausting.
I began reading Firedoglake during the Valerie Plame case. (I left FDL for good after the primary fight b/twn Clinton and Obama.) It was a fascinating story and one that I hoped would snag the admin above Scooter Libby. Leaking her name was not nothing.
Because the alternative is that you are full of pretentiousness and low on self-awareness, which is far less charitable.
The war still happened, right? Pretty sure it happened. An out-and-out disaster really. So what is Valerie Plame against that?
Yeah, yeah, something, something, chilling effect on voices of honesty and sanity in government. They need our protection. Whatever.
Contrary to joe from Lowell’s willful self-delusion, government is absolutely about raw ideological warfare. One group of people wants to assume power to stamp the behavior out of a different group of people and create and impose new institutional and societal norms.
Obama became president, but many years too late. That’s something that truly mattered as to the war. Plame is just some random pettiness that happened and is forgotten.
You don’t give a shit about Valerie Plame. No one gives a shit about Valerie Plame.
Screw you, Mr. Cynical. Don’t tell me what I believe.
She was a working stiff in a government job, a hard government job, plugging away when some political hacks way above her head decided they wanted to use her to screw her husband for political payback.
Some of us actually give a shit about the government. Some of us don’t view the entire enterprise as an arena for ideological combat. Some of us don’t like seeing people plugging away at their jobs get walked all over.
On the list of things the Bush administration did wrong and we should care about, Plame is like #17,873.
On the list of things they did wrong that are relevant here, it’s pretty much #1.
I’m with JFL on this one.
The way they did Plame not only ruined her career and put her family at risk, it made our country less safe, due to the loss of her particular expertise.
The thing that is always left out of this discussion is what happened to every single person with whom she met in other countries?
We are talking about intelligence on nuclear materials and capabilities all over the world. Her entire network was wiped out.
Outing Valerie Plame also compromised a major nuclear nonproliferation operation in Iran. Which is exactly what the neocons wanted, I believe. Not so random spy after all, hmm?
Why is it that all professions have codes of ethics, but when journalists violate their own professional ethics they immediately start crying about their first-amendment rights? And then you get whole choruses of journalistic sanctimony chiming in.
One major principle of journalistic ethics is “limitation of harm” — the duty to hold back certain information, not essential to the story, if it is likely to cause harm to innocent persons or damage to national interests.
There are even some cases where a story has to be completely squelched because the very fact that someone knows it would be a giveaway. For example, a story based on wiretaps could give away the fact that a certain foreign office was being bugged.
The Wanker of the Month is Rahm Emmanuel:
http://news.yahoo.com/chicago-school-board-votes-close-50-schools-203311824.html
Someday in the future there will be a Jeopardy final answer: “He is the two word proof that Barak Obama was not a progressive President.” Question: “Who was Rahm Emmanuel?”
Rahm’s real sin is that no one can spell his last name.