Latest in Secrecy: Press Behavior
Would the revised Justice Department News Media Guidelines have stopped past overreach?
On Thursday, a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia returned a superseding indictment charging WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange with 17-counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The full document is below.
Editor's note: In response to criticism from CIA Director Mike Pompeo, the New York Times' national security editor over the weekend defended the newspaper's
The question is provocative, but the answer is hard. The reaction to WikiLeaks’ publication of the fruits of Russia’s DNC hack raises many puzzles about how we should think about publication of truthful secret information that touches on public affairs. These puzzles are important to figure out, since organizational doxing is growing more prevalent and consequential and our intuitions about it are not obviously coherent.
The five-year targeted killing FOIA litigation by the ACLU and New York Times suffered a setback yesterday when the Second Circuit unsealed an opinion affirming an SDNY ruling from October 2014 allowing DOJ to withhold several OLC documents related to lethal targeting.
The Intercept’s “Drone Papers” leaker “believes the public has a right to know how the U.S. government decides to assassinate people.” Maybe so—or maybe public safety and the need for secrecy trump the public’s curiosity. Unfortunately, the leaker has unilaterally decided for all of us. One person with a thumb drive again trumps the democratic process.
I've been thinking about the exchange over the past couple of weeks---much of which took place on Lawfare---between the New York Times and the intelligence community over the naming of CIA undercover officers in a Times story.
The New York Times identified three undercover senior CIA officials in an April 25 story by Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo about oversight of the CIA’s lethal drone operations.
I was honored to be invited to give a keynote speech at an Intelligence Community legal conference last Wednesday, May 6. The speech was entitled Toward Greater Transparency of National Security Legal Work.
Twenty senior former CIA officials—including every CIA Director (including DCIs) dating back to William Webster (1987-91)—wrote a letter to the NYT to take issue with NYT Executive Editor Dean Baquet’s defense (in this interview on Lawfare) of his decision to publish the names of the three covert CIA operatives in http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/us/politics/deep