Intelligence Leaks: what harm is it anyway?
Intelligence Leaks: what harm is it anyway?
Over the last few days there has been a lot of media reporting concerning the latest intelligence leak by 21-year-old, Jack Teixeira. A National guardsman with the Massachusetts Air National Guard, Teixeira, faces up to 15 years in prison for, “unauthorized retention and transmission of national defense information” and “unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material”, after posting sensitive and classified documents on an online chatgroup / forum.
He is not the first, and will not be the last to “leak” sensitive national security related information to the public. He now becomes part of an illustrious group of infamous “leakers”, the likes of which include, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning.
So this leads to my question, “What harm do Intelligence leaks do anyway?” It could be argued that intelligence information is collected for the purpose of maintaining national security. But don’t the citizens of the nation have a right to know what information the government holds, or is collecting, or is sharing with other governments? Isn’t the taxpayer flipping the bill for the work being done and all the necessary (and highly expensive) equipment? To a certain extent this argument holds water, where it starts to leak (pun unintended) is when you look at the damage that such leaks cause the same citizens and taxpayers.
If we take Teixeira for example, the information he provided online included top secret documents with what has been qualified as potentially causing “grave damage” due to the leak of classified methods and sources used to collect the intelligence gathered. This includes documentation US intelligence, US allies intelligence and their adversaries, as well as the movement of troops in Ukraine against Russian forces.
The information leaked in a public forum soon becomes the open intelligence used by adversaries and enemies to disrupt, identify and eliminate sources of intelligence. When I use the term eliminate, I am also referring to the high probability that individuals who could be potentially identified as human source, would be executed. As for technical sources of information, they are now considered compromised and can be used to either provide false information back through intelligence channels or reverse engineered to help identify other means by which western intelligence agencies are collecting information for national security purposes.
Seems like a waste of all that taxpayer money to have implemented such expensive equipment to help preserve national security or keep individuals safe, just to have someone decide to gain popularity on 4chan with his online buddies, doesn’t it?
The sharing of intelligence information between western governments is not an endeavour that is taken lightly by those involved. It is heavily understood throughout the intelligence community that although information is shared, the methods and sources are kept closely guarded secrets within each government and within each intelligence organization or agency. This is done to ensure the both the integrity of the information and the safety of the source, both technical and human.
When a leak of such magnitude as has previously been conducted by Manning, Snowden and now, Teixeira occurs, the concern of the safety and trust related to the sharing of information between nations comes into question. Could you imagine a multibillion-dollar company losing intellectual property simply because one member of the western intelligence community is reticent to share information of an insider threat within that company, based on previous concerns that it could be made public and jeopardizing their source of information? How does the taxpayer or citizen feel about losing their job because their company went bankrupt, when an offshore competitor releases a similar product six months before their launch?
The intelligence community runs off information. Information that is supplied by both technical and human sources. Human sources are reluctant to discuss information with individuals who they know or suspect work for a government (be it their own or another) when they read in the news that another massive leak of hundreds of thousands of documents have been made accessible to anyone.
As a former intelligence officer, I know first-hand that the promise of confidentiality is one of the most important (if not the most important) promises you can make to a human source. But if all the work you have done, and all the trust you have built with a human source, can be destroyed in an instant because someone with access to information beyond their level of “intelligence maturity” decides, for whatever reason, to release it in a public forum, you may lose that source forever or jeopardize their safety. So much for government cost efficiency on that one, not to mention the potential loss of life or risk to national security.
Regarding technical sources, leaks of this nature are a windfall for enemy-states. They can be analysed and dissected to clearly identify how the information was acquired in the first place. At the very least they can identify methods in which information is being observed, overheard, or intercepted, rendering any electronic equipment inoperable and further open to compromise.
There are no simple answers to the questions of how to prevent leaks in the intelligence community. The motivations for those who are responsible for the leaks are as diverse as the individuals who are responsible for them, but the fact remains that intelligence leaks come at a high cost for the intelligence community and the safety of those who rely on that community to maintain their safety from threats of enemy-states, terrorist groups and organizations who are willing and able to exploit these leaks for their own purposes.
