There are a zillion questions to ask about the recently discovered leak of classified documents… including whether Donald Trump will be treated or charged similarly for his pilfering/leaking of classified material. I have questions myself about that! But this post is about the system itself.
Is our national security community set up to handle, detect, mitigate, and/or remove extremist threats from our own government employees, contractors, and service members?
There’s a lot of pundit analysis asking off-the-cuff questions about how such a young person (only 21!) could have such access to such highly classified documents, or questions about how someone could possibly access so many documents. Aren’t documents tracked? Et cetera.
Maybe those aren’t the kinds of questions we should be asking. Physical security is only one part of the equation, and it may not be the most relevant here.
Systems engineering is another part of the equation that also may not be as relevant. In the post-9/11 era, the intelligence community (IC) has shifted to more of an open-channels approach. That way, intel analysts and the entire interagency intel community have more information available on the “big picture” so that people can pick up on things in different systems or at other agencies that might need to be connected.
Everyone with a clearance doesn’t have access to everything, but once you’re cleared it’s not hard to get access to a whole heck of a lot of stuff. The old standby “need to know” paradigm isn’t always in play especially if you have access to online systems that move classified info. For example, there is a sort of “high side” (classified) internet where lots of information is available from all kinds of places; depending on your login credentials and hardware and so on.
Reporting indicates that we don’t know yet if our young intelligence leaker gained access to intel through online systems or through physical materials that may have been available on desks, on shelves, or in designated “burn bags” set up to dispose of classified materials. Classified materials may be stored on desks and shelves in certain types of facilities that have many layers of security to access them.
Regardless, all of that doesn’t seem to get at a deeper issue… which is in our clearance processes for vetting individuals — another core piece of national security work.
Are our personnel vetting processes set up to detect and catch individuals who may have developed callous attitudes about national security, who may have become anti-government, or who may have become radicalized or developed extremists perspectives?
There are indications that at least some of this was going on with our new leaker; also including his motivation to feed his ego by showing that he had access to such documents.
Our intel system is set up across the government in a certain way — which is that the government vets and clears individuals about once every five years or so depending on the specific clearance level. The vetting is an extremely invasive process in which individuals give the government a ton of information about their lives, and give the government access to know or find out even more things in their live. The process takes a long time, and gets more complex the higher the clearance.
But it only happens once every five years or so depending on the clearance.
Is that enough, when radicalization and even far-right (or more rarely, far-left) extremism can happen in a matter of days or months in the intervening years, and when our own intelligence community has determined that domestic violent extremism is one of our most urgent, pressing, and serious national security threats?
Has the national security community (i.e., the intelligence community plus all aspects of defense including state and local levels) even bothered to come up with a process to figure out where radicalized or extremist views are held by their own employees and contractors?
If they have, is it a realistic system that people could use to actually find extremists within the national security community overall, to investigate them, and to suspend people’s clearances if they are found to have become high risk?
My guess is that this hasn’t happened. I suspect we’d hear about it if the government had done this with any rigor from the hollering that would come from the far-right crowd — especially in Congress.
I also suspect this hasn’t happened because there are a number of things that the Biden Administration has not done to clean up the federal government after the very corrupt Trump years, after the insurrection, and after government reports have indicated that domestic violent extremism is such a huge national security threat.
Handling extremism and radicalization within the government is awkward, and I suspect that’s the real reason we haven’t seen much progress on it. I was in the US Department of Homeland Security around 2009 when the growing white supremacist threat in the US was reported by DHS and then retracted. Nobody seemed to know what to do about blatant racism/extremism then; especially once Republicans in Congress pushed to have DHS retract the report. It made it all extra awkward… and so nothing happened. That’s part of the insidiousness of white fragility. Discomfort allows it to persist.
A government serious about its own weaknesses would get more serious about realistically dealing with insider threats. I don’t know the solution, but I don’t think it’s in suddenly transforming how all intelligence is stored and handled system-wide. That doesn’t address the human vulnerability to extremism. In this case the vulnerability was indeed a human who turned out to have some extremist ideologies that appear to have contributed to the leaking.
Right now the national security system is partly anchored in a vetting process that is supposed to help the government identify when individuals might not be trustworthy.
But once you make it through the vetting, everything is just golden for five years?
Perhaps we need to do some tweaking on the vetting process for the interim period, or on how we can root out and find extremists inside government.
Maybe we need a few more safeguards in place when our own IC has concluded that extremism is a problem in the US.
Also, personal privacy isn’t really a good argument against doing more in this particular case. If you’ve already agreed to get a Top Secret (TS) or higher clearance, you’ve already given up a whole heck of a lot of your privacy just to get through the process. You’ve also (usually) made certain commitments about how you will live your life so that you can get an updated clearance again someday, or so that you don’t call attention to yourself with questionable behavior and lose your clearance and your job.
But people change.
Especially in a country with growing extremism, cult-like behavior, superspreader conspiracy theories, toxic masculinity, lonely people, a degraded social fabric, and well-established domestic violent extremist groups. Especially when those groups are known to target and recruit military, intel, and law enforcement folks.
This isn’t complicated, but it does need actual attention and evolution. The risk isn’t going to mitigate itself.
One would think that the most powerful military, intelligence, and national security machine in the world could do some serious problem-solving here.
One might also hope to have a more functional Congress for that, and we’re not there, either — especially since some in Congress are in the radicalized crowd. Still, the executive branch should be able to take on at least some of this without Congressional involvement.
Will they?
Shift the Country is not countering violent extremism directly ourselves, but we are working to shore up connection, community, and the social fabric in the coalition of the majority of voters here in the US.
We can all help strengthen that majority and inspire civic engagement that can help us collectively build out a future in a different direction so that we don’t get the future that’s being pushed by extremists. Join our events, donate, or volunteer to get involved. And please share our stuff around… we need to build a crowd!
A lifetime ago, I worked in what was at the time the most forward deployed intel unit in the world, with a provisional clearance. For almost two years, provisional. That means not cleared, but we need you to work. Still had access. The whole system needs an overhaul.
Is it surprising that the focus of the media in this case is on the "systems"? Common sense dictates a focus on the individual involved. What we see about that is, gasp--how could someone so young have a security clearance? There is no reported indication that a whole network of people were involved. If there were, potential breaches in the "system" would clearly need to be top of mind. However, this appears to be just one individual, one young man who wanted to tout his knowledge to other similar young men. Clearly, the "vetting system" for security clearances needs to be investigated, but in my opinion it would be misplaced not to at least acknowledge that perhaps, as you point out Vanessa, this young man changed after he received his security clearance, and maybe we need more regular confirmations to avoid something like this in the future.