Leakers Beware

Shane Harris, erstwhile GovExec technology editor, author of the great book The Watchers, and current senior writer at Washingtonian, has a new piece in the magazine about the Obama administration's tenacious effort to prosecute people who leak national security secrets to the media. It's a legally arduous and time-consuming process that requires a commitment bordering on obsession.

Harris writes:

Leak investigations are usually unproductive. Defying the perception of secrecy in the world of spycraft, the number of people who know about even the most highly classified program can be in the hundreds. It's rare that investigators identify a suspect, and rarer still that they bring an indictment and go to trial, because the accused could end up revealing more classified information in his defense--a kind of "graymail" that ensures that most leakers will never spend time in prison. From 2005 to 2009, federal agencies referred nearly 200 leaks to the FBI. Investigators opened 26 cases, identified 14 suspects, and prosecuted none of them.

So why the focus on such cases in the Obama administration? It seems to come right from the top. Harris quotes Newsweek reporter Jonathan Alter from his book, The Promise: President Obama, Year One: "No one on his staff was brave enough to tell [Obama] that obsessing over leaks was a colossal waste of time. But it wouldn't have mattered: leaks offended Obama's sense of discipline and reminded him of everything he disliked about the capital."