Since Conor Friedersdorf has responded to me, I will respond to him. James Rosen cited sources in North Korea with the ability to describe the government’s four-point response plan to the imminent implementation of UN sanctions. This tipped off the North Korean government that their deliberations were not secure, and strongly indicated a human source. It is hard to see how it would not be interpreted that way by the North Korean government or by the average reader.
And that’s the damage. There is nothing to be agnostic about. Using your logic, maybe World War Two wasn’t such a bad thing since we wound up with the Bomb first, which might not have happened otherwise. I mean, one never knows, right? Who can foresee all the consequences? Maybe Rosen’s article scrambled all North Korea’s plans and disrupted their government, sending them on a wild goose chase to find a non-existent leaker.
The point remains the same. The leak was damaging. It was harmful to our ability to recruit and retain intelligence agents worldwide. It most likely burned a very valuable source. And the government would have been irresponsible not to make a very aggressive effort to identify the source of insecurity on their Korean team. Saying that the government should tolerate such leaks is moronic.
What’s debatable is not the hunt for the leaker but the methods used to find the leaker. The affidavit is long and the legal issues are complicated, but that’s where this debate should be focused. Did Rosen do something illegal? Can he be fairly described as a coconspirator? How is this case different from other cases where reporters solicit classified information, if at all?
These are real questions. But the legitimacy of finding the leaker is not a real question.
That’s why I called you a wanker.
In reading the affidavit, it strikes me that Fox News is in the unusual position of trying to harm the Executive Branch of the U.S. government by seeking classified information, which creates a very fuzzy line when applied to Section 793 of the criminal code. This is because it is a criminal offense to seek classified information for the purpose of harming national security, which is easy to do if your goal is to hurt the people executing foreign policy. Mr. Rosen, in particular, was trying to both to embarrass the administration and to influence policy (encourage a harder line against North Korea) and was willing to blow an foreign asset in the process. He certainly had a reason to believe that his actions would harm national security, and they did.
This is not the normal situation for an American journalist.
Rosen had an agenda as did Kim.
let us not forget…Murdoch’s reporters in England have been arrested for bribing the police to get confidential information.
That’s my problem, right there.
It’s an exceedingly thin line between ‘it is a criminal offense to seek classified information for the purpose of harming national security, which is easy to do if your goal is to hurt the people executing foreign policy’ and ‘it is a criminal offense to seek classified information about national security that hurts the people executing foreign policy.’
In fact, that line may be so thin as to be nonexistent, given the power dynamics in play. I suspect I’m just being naive to think anything else is possible, but I don’t particularly like it.
I disagree very strongly here.
While I do agree that finding a leaker is a reasonable thing to expect of an employer — any employer — and that such behavior may constitute reasons to fire someone, there is just nothing so important about the negotiations in Korea that would justify making such a leak a criminal offense, much less a criminal offense for a journalist or any other private citizen trying to find out and even try to intervene to pressure, negotiate, or advocate something different than government actors are doing.
This just has to be the case in a democracy. And especially in the case of national security. What if instead of trying to pressure the administration into taking a harder line against Korea, as you have accused Rosen and/or Fox News of doing, the situation was instead a reporter for the Mother Jones and the administration in power was a right-wing administration bent on going to war with North Korea ? Should it be illegal (instead of merely fire-able) to leak such information to a reporter in the hopes of stopping a war, and should it be illegal for a reporter, or any other private citizen to look for such leaks and try to intervene in the policy implementation process? I hope you would not say yes.
Leaking should not be criminal. Reporting and seeking leaks should not be criminal. And using the powers of the national security apparatus to embarrass or intimidate citizens into not contesting national security policy implementation is anti-democratic, plain and simple. There is no middle, gray area here. The government is in the wrong fully on this.
It is a very naive and hierarchical, and therefore undemocratic, understanding of how the policy process works to assume or believe that an administration, or a national security authority, should have free hand to implement policy and negotiations without the intervention of non-state actors, especially citizen activists and the media of all kinds. Cutting off information in the form of aggressive use of criminal laws or police powers to detain or intimidate those who are trying to change or modify policy implementation just has to be against everything any progressive is about. Allowing leakers to leak such information as has been shared with Rosen without criminal retribution is way more important to the survival of our democracy than anything that could possibly go wrong in North Korea.
(Disclaimer: I know James Rosen. I went to college with him, though I haven’t spoken with him in a number of years. Although he is certainly an aggressive careerist and not above modifying his values for work ends, he’s about as far from being a right-wing militarist or tea party fanatic as one could get. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be involved in something like you’re accusing — of trying to use his access to information to affect policy outcomes in contrary to those of the Obama administration, or North Korea. But he’s no snake.)
I’d be willing to debate you on these issues except that I cannot get past your assertion that all laws against divulging classified information should either be struck from the books or simply go unenforced. I consider that so immensely stupid that I can’t really go on and address your other points.
I believe this is the nub of the poster’s question: “What if the reporter worked for the Mother Jones and the administration in power was a right-wing administration bent on going to war with North Korea ? Should it be illegal (instead of merely fire-able) to leak such information to a reporter in the hopes of stopping a war?”
He thinks your answer is no. I think it’s yes.
The answer is no, he’s simply pretending that it’s yes because he’s been taken by a fever of authoritarianism. I can prove this because there wasn’t a single goddamn leak against an opposition government that he or anyone else has ever turned their nose up against, and they weren’t all “criminal whistleblowing.” It’s lawbreaking that I’ve never seen anyone tire of or object to consuming.
It’s good that a government can be brought low in any given moment by that which they fail to conceal. That they can be made to fail. It’s an honest to god social good, it comes with costs operational and strategic and sometimes moral, but it is a net good.
People like Booman simply cannot conceive that someone within the state department would view administration policy as irresponsibly dangerous and softheaded and that the “truth” needed to be put out there to stop them.
I’m irritated that right wing governments hire people like the leaker who are alarmist fantasists who always overrate our enemies and lean towards conflict, but I’m not going to sit here and pretend our national security is imperiled by anything that happened.
Did you know that Kim has ties to Chaney and Rumsfeld? Did you know that Chaney managed to place him at State before leaving office?
Right. The US government is not a homogeneous hive mind. Unless you think government employees should be outfitted with a neural chip that signals disloyalty so they may be removed from service for the good of the nation?
The leaker guy thought the new administration were gonna be total pussies in the face of what he predicted would be a dangerous North Korean nuclear escalation. Except the escalation never showed up. Kim Jong-il died before that country tested another weapon.
Nobody clearly ever knows what they’re talking about when it comes to North Korea. The leak exposed far more than what was intended.
After your little display over Valerie Plame yesterday, maybe you should leave off the mind-reading.
Your hurt feelings are no more compelling today than they were yesterday. You know darn well that I’m right about proportionality.
Hurt feelings?
Dude, I spiked the football after my and BooMan’s responses.
You vanished from the threat entirely.
I “vanished” from the thread because we were done. I said you were lying to yourselves, you said “nuh uh” and got on your soapbox about the nobility of government service.
But I don’t believe you. Or Booman or David Corn or Sean Penn or anybody. Plame was seized on because she was the only weapon available after all other forms of opposition were found to be total failures. And even then, the resolution of the Plame affair was a big nothing. She’s gone, the Bush administration is gone, heck the entire Iraq war is gone now too. The world spun on. What else is to be said?
Congratulations on your football spiking. It clearly meant a lot to you.
The question isn’t quite equivalent.
In order to be a crime on the publishing end, the publisher needs to know that the information, if divulged, will clearly harm national security.
It’s not hard to envision a scenario where divulging that the government has plans to start a war could harm the prospects for that war, and therefore national security.
On the leaker’s part, the disclosure of classified information is a crime no matter when it is done, and can only be mitigated by a whistle-blowing element. So, for example, if starting a war would be clearly illegal, then leaking could be forgiven.
It becomes more complicated, however, if you are leaking battle plans or something.
Clearly, they are grey areas. And the government should have and should exercise discretion about what they will and won’t prosecute.
We shouldn’t be engaging in wars that arouse any significant dissent, but we have done that on a regular basis over the last sixty-three years.
So, my general answer is that ‘yes’ it is a crime to divulge classified information unless it reveals criminal behavior and ‘yes’ it is illegal to knowingly publish classified information that any reasonable person would assume would hurt national security.
Trying to stop an illegal war would not be a crime, although the government presumably would not see it that way.
I never asserted that all laws against divulging classified information should go unenforced or be struck. I did assert that nothing in the Korean or similar cases comes close to a criminal offense, based on what we know now and what you have stated is the likely scenario, and therefore should not have been enforced, especially to the extent that it has been.
But I think the NYT editorial was right — right now just about anything having to do with national security is illegal to divulge, so only illegal leaks is available to the public. Whistleblowing, aka leaking, is not spying. The condition of using the 1917 Espionage act to prevent contesting power within the implementation structure of the Executive Branch presents an existential threat to democracy, not just a threat to the welfare of some or many citizens, which is the other reason liberal theory provides for establishing a government at all.
Currently, I am writing this from Ecuador, South America, a small country that has become somewhat famous recently for pushing the envelope on what a democracy can get away with regarding the curtailment of free speech, all while ironically providing asylum to the founder of Wikileaks for doing what any blogger can now be imprisoned for in Ecuador itself. There are a lot of interesting, new things that Ecuador and similar nations are doing regarding the evolution of democracy in new, leftish ways. But the curtailment of political speech under the excuse of national security or government stability (which is how it is defended here) is just too contradictory for progressives or liberals of any stripe to allow. It presents an existential threat to democratic governance of any kind.
Your rhetorical strategy here has been to question the intelligence of anyone who thinks that governments should be restricted in going after leakers. Mine is to question the progressive, or even merely liberal, credentials of anyone who thinks government should have free reign to do so, as it does now and has been exhibited in the Rosen case.
He, for political gain, outed an in-country asset and compromised an entire operation. That’s Treason. Punishable under law by Hanging By The Neck Until Dead Dead Dead. I don’t care if George W Bush did it and got away with it. It was Treason then and it is Treason now.
Hang the rat bastards.
No fear.