He tried to crack down, and George Shultz blocked him. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The government pounced when a low-level State Dept. employee allegedly leaked classified information to
Combined with the uproar over the Justice Deptartment's monitoring of phone traffic out of a number of Associated Press offices, the Obama administration's aggressive pursuit of leakers has pundits warning of a new era of media censorship.
The reality is probably a lot less worrisome. The federal government has always been leaky, and it will likely continue to be a sieve for classified information because the flow helps support whichever administration is in power. Despite the vast power of the Justice Dept. prosecutors, advanced electronic monitoring technology and the certain knowledge that at least one party to unauthorized disclosure -- the journalist -- knows the identity of the leaker and can be hauled into court, the government has prosecuted at most 13 leak cases in the past century.
That's because the government loves leaks. Leaks are especially important for the executive branch as a way to snipe at critics, loft trial balloons, and keep the public guessing about what is real classified information and what is merely spin delivered through the mouthpiece of an anonymous source.
"They don’t want us to pick up the newspaper, see an `unnamed senior government official' quoted and immediately think that’s the White House trying to spin," said David Pozen, a Columbia Law School professor and former State Dept. official who studies the dynamics of leaks. "When I read the paper and see an anonymous source cited, I don't know whether that's approved or not. That’s helpful to the administration."
"Without leaks, we wouldn’t know much about the workings of the national security state," Pozen told me. That builds the trust of the electorate, he said, which can be confident it isn't missing out on vital information despite the massive increase in the classification of internal documents.
Leaking has long been considered the prerogative of top government officials. That might explain why only a relatively low-ranking advisor, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, was caught up in the Fox News scandal. Henry Cabot Lodge, the U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam during the buildup of the Vietnam War, once described leaking as “one of my weapons for doing this job." President Harry S. Truman asserted over 60 years ago that “95 percent of our secret information has been revealed by newspapers and slick magazines.”
When the government has cracked down on leaks, it usually inspires fierce resistance from within. President Ronald Reagan tried to put a stopper in the State Dept. by ordering polygraph tests of suspected leakers, for example. Secretary of State George Shultz held a press conference to announce that none of his employees would submit.
Pozen said high officials and the reporters they leak to operate in a repeated-game context in which both sides know they can cause real trouble if they go public with the wrong information, such as the names of intelligence operatives or details of secret investigations. That allows the executive branch to maintain an overly broad secrecy system, he said, that otherwise might be subject to "painful reforms" such as judicial review of classification.
"Because of all the leaks that come out, key constiuencies feel sufficiently well served by the amount of information they acquire, that they don’t feel compelled to demand additional reforms," Pozen said.
That longstanding equilibrium might be under threat from the spread of electronic files and the ease with which they can be dumped, Bradley Manning style, onto the internet. It's plausible the Obama administration is increasingly afraid of the ability of low-level officials to reach the mainstream media outlets that previously were the province of Cabinet secretaries and the like, he said. Cracking down on leaks like the North Korea disclosure, which came minutes after more than 90 officials obtained computer access to the files, could be a way to send a message to bureaucrats that they will be caught and prosecuted.
But with six cases to its credit -- half of all the journalistic leak prosecutions so far -- the Obama administration is running a very real risk of being seen as too heavy-handed, Pozen said.
"It would not surprise me if this is seen the tipping point beyond which administration tries to pull back," he said. As he wrote in his article for the Harvard Law Review:
There is a dramatic disconnect between the way our laws and our leaders purport to condemn leaking and the way they condone it—a rampant, pervasive culture of it—in practice.
