How to Achieve 90% Reduction -- Step 3.5: Intelligence Sources - or - "Guess Who"

The Washington Post Ombudsman had an interesting article in today's WaPost regarding the all too frequent abuse of anonymous sources at that newspaper (an observation that applies to many media outlets today). He writes:

News organizations can pay dearly if they're not vigilant about sourcing. At minimum, credibility can suffer. At worst, a damaging journalistic transgression can occur.

Anonymous sources are critical to newsgathering -- and to informing readers. Without a guarantee of confidentiality, many sources wouldn't share sensitive information on corruption or misconduct.

But anonymity can be overused and abused. Sources can make false or misleading assertions with impunity. Journalists can inflate a source's reliability or even fabricate his or her existence.

The same caveats should apply to our nation's intelligence gathering. Our intelligence services reflexively apply confidentiality to all human sources. Surely, without a guarantee of confidentiality, many sources wouldn't share information with our intelligence agencies. However, our government automatically assigns confidentiality to human sources even without it being requested. Such guaranteed anonymity, no matter what the circumstances but especially without even being requested, can and often does result in false or misleading assertions being made by an intelligence source with relative impunity.

This is but one more example of whereby reflexive government secrecy can actually harm national security - as evidenced by the case of the aptly named intelligence source "Curveball" who has been referenced in many prior posts. In addition, as I noted in an earlier post, we have been precluded from having an informed discussion as a nation as to how to resolve one of the greatest sources of continued anti-American sentiment, the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, because so much of the information surrounding "the worst of the worst" remains classified. Yet, much of this classified information, which was derived from single-source HUMINT (human intelligence) has proven either unsubstantiated or outright false as evidenced by the fact that in 28 out of 33 detainee cases heard so far, federal judges have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison. All the while, our adversaries' exploitation of our flawed detention policies serves as an effective recruitment tool for future extremists, further placing our nation at increased risk.

Reigning in the use of secrecy with respect to human intelligence sources can not only contribute to a 90% reduction in overall classification, but can also enhance national security.

It is time to rethink EVERYTHING we thought we knew about government secrecy.