Clapper's Truth

James Clapper is the outgoing Director of National Intelligence and he has considerable insight into the cyber attacks by Russia on the U.S election.  This past week, he has been on the Hill almost every day briefing one Congressional Committee or another, mostly amid a broiling political struggle between our two major parties.  He has to walk a fine line, which gets narrower and narrower by the day.

At the Armed Services Committee hearing last week, he said something most of the leaders there were already familiar with, but routinely ignore:  People who live in glass houses shouldn't be casting stones.  We all know the meaning of that term, and his context was explained as "we all have these kinds of operations" which is known everywhere but also ignored.  You would think it is easier to tell the truth directly to these esteemed gentlemen and women now that he is leaving but it is never easy because they make it unpleasant for you and your organization, even if you are gone.  Professionals don't like that.

Certainly we do have these kinds of operations, he said without going into much detail which would compromise some of them, the kind that allow us to steal intelligence related material and use if for our analysis, or make it public if there is more value in that.

The more we talk about the Russian hacks of information around this election, the more damage is done to our own efforts to collect information and use it to guide policy making of our government officials.  It is disruptive to our own Intelligence operations.  Every Congressman feels compelled to bring up the most sensitive of information in these hearings about what we know, even if they don't say how we know it.  Every appointed government leader feels compelled to give a complete answer without discussing things that are State secrets, though they do that too.  There is a fine line of context in all of these discussions and it is impossible to separate them.  On this, there is too much of the "public's right to know".  The public doesn't have the right to know very much of this kind of thing and we shouldn't be talking about it in open sessions.

And, we shouldn't be talking about it to the public after closed sessions are over or sending the information to friendly press outlets before it ever is discussed there.  We need a restart - a reset - on the matter of classified information (State secrets) and how to protect it.  We seem to have discovered yesterday that Hillary Clinton was sending very highly classified material to people on a network she knew was being monitored.  We discovered there was an attachment to the classified report that said the Russians have files which may involve Donald Trump.  In my days in government, the Washington Post used to have an office to handle all the classified material they were getting in the mail.  Now, it appears it just goes to the press outlets by e-mail.  Do we have any secrets left to protect?  Our allies in the world may wonder.