Unauthorized disclosures of classified information have become a cancer which undermines presidential authority to conduct foreign policy, our national security process, and our intelligence capabilities.
— William J. Casey, Director of the CIA, Nov 14, 1986
It’s the perfect dream in a nightmarish context: how do intelligence services get around the problem, in a liberal democracy, of punishing outlets that reveal classified information? The issue, when it reaches the stiff, paranoid official in a home ministry (domestically sounding, if British; more stately, if American) drives the establishment to distraction.
Laws, having being put in place to supposedly protect and encourage the dissemination of information, may well be circumvented. Measures protecting the press need to be blunted. Recipients, in short, need to be rounded upon. The big question for those in intelligence is how.
The intelligence chief, given the nature of the work, has little concept of balancing the role of the media with actual, tangible security. The media is the natural enemy. Closed information systems defy chatter and open discourse. The aim is starvation, concealment and vanishing. Information is to be hidden with officiousness, forever justified by the interests of national security. Whether it affects national security never actually matters.
Intelligence services are, to that end, motivated by different ends to the journalistic scribbler and the information…