By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 06, 2016
‘Secrecy” sounds so sinister. And when we’re talking
about government, that is as it should be. In a self-governing society,
transparency is our default setting. Secrecy is the government’s way of
concealing corruption, incompetence, and profligacy. There must be a
presumption against it.
A presumption, however, is not a prohibition.
Presumptions are rebutted by necessity. Speaking about the necessity of good
intelligence to military operations and homeland defense, General George
Washington observed that “upon secrecy, success depends in most enterprises . .
. and for want of it, they are generally defeated.” The necessity of secrecy
and the catastrophe that can follow when secrecy is breached — these are core
concerns of national security.
They are also what the Hillary Clinton e-mail saga is all
about.
We could go on at length about Clinton’s arrogance in
setting up a homebrew communications network, an outrageous violation of the
transparency standards that were her responsibility as secretary of state to
enforce. It was a familiar exercise in Clintonian self-dealing: Anticipating
running for president in 2016, she realized she was enmeshed in the Clinton
Foundation’s global scheme to sell influence for money, so she devised a way to
avoid a paper trail. Accountability, after all, is for peons: The yoke of
recordkeeping requirements, Freedom of Information Act productions,
congressional inquiries, and the government’s disclosure duties in judicial
proceedings was not for her Highness. Instead, it would be: No Records, No
Problems — a convenient arrangement for a lifetime “public servant” of no
discernible accomplishment whom disaster has a habit of stalking. The homebrew
server was for Hillary’s State Department what an on-site dry cleaner might
have been for Bill’s White House.
If our only concern were Mrs. Clinton’s lack of fitness,
just the setting up of a parallel communication system would be the end of the
matter. No one who goes to such lengths to circumvent our laws is fit to be
trusted with their faithful execution. Here, however, there is a graver issue:
the damage Clinton has done to our national defense, the havoc she has wrought
in our intelligence community — the 17 agencies that spend tens of billions of
our dollars annually to collect and, crucially, to protect the secrets on which our security depends.
In The Snowden
Operation: Inside the West’s Greatest Intelligence Disaster, Edward Lucas,
a longtime Economist senior editor
and student of intelligence operations, explains in vivid detail how “the mere
whiff of a breach acts like nerve poison on intelligence agencies.”
Take just a single document that contains a defense
secret, or conveys the method or source by which secrets are acquired. If the
agency discovers the document has been lost, or comes to “believe an
unauthorised person has had access to it, assumptions must be of worst-case
scenarios.” What could a hostile government or terror network do with that
information? Will they kill an intelligence agent who has been outed? What
about operatives the agent has been running — who must then be pulled out to
avoid arrest, or worse? Even if our spies are safe, their operation must be
considered blown, along with arrangements on which the operation relied —
cooperating businesses, bank accounts, safe houses, drop boxes, etc.
Then there is the matter of when the compromise occurred. Can we be sure of the time? Remember:
It is worst-case analysis. If the agency can’t be sure, it must assume the
earliest point. Does that mean the agency has been victimized by
counterintelligence? Did the hostile government or terror network feed the
agency misleading information and then monitor the results? Is the precious
intelligence the agency thought it was collecting actually corrupted? Have
security policies based on the intelligence actually endangered us? Have they
been expensive wastes of money and effort?
As Lucas notes, “The answers to these questions may be
‘no.’ But an experienced team of counter-intelligence officers must ask them,
find the answers, check and double-check. The taint of even a minor breach must
be analysed, contained, and cleaned.”
Bear in mind, we’re still talking about a single breach.
How about two? The corrective measures quickly become nightmarish. The danger
metastasizes if the breaches come from different components of the intelligence
community. And the challenge cannot be wished away by telling oneself that the
compromised information is not all that significant. A document that seems
harmless enough can be devastating when combined with another — read together
they may reveal a collection technique that is of far greater consequence than
the information on the page.
As Lucas elaborates,
Multiple breaches increase the problem exponentially. Each bit of
compromised information must be assessed not only on its own, but in relation
to every other piece of data. As the numbers mount, the math becomes formidable.
Four bits of information have 24 possible combinations. Seven have 5,040. Ten
have more than three million.
In Hillary Clinton’s case, more than 1,600 e-mails containing classified information have been
discovered. You do the breach math . . . because I can’t count that high.
And we’re not done, not even close. The State Department
continues to slow-walk production of Clinton e-mails despite court orders for
more rapid disclosure. Only some of the delay owes to the functioning of
Clinton’s former department as an arm of her current campaign. The rest is
attributable to the staggering breadth of classified information — some of it,
the most tightly guarded national secrets — strewn through Clinton’s e-mails.
Not just her e-mails but e-mail “trains,” communications involving several
exchanges and multiple participants — as to which it will be difficult, if not
impossible, to calculate how often and how widely recipients forwarded the
information.
Moreover, we’re still talking only about the 30,000 or so
e-mails, constituting 55,000 pages, that Mrs. Clinton deigned to surrender to
the State Department nearly two years after she resigned. There are another
30,000 “personal” e-mails she attempted to destroy. Has the FBI been able to
recover them so the intelligence community has some hope of assessing the
damage? Virtually nothing Clinton has said about her non-secure e-mail system
since its public revelation has been true. In assessing the potential peril
that breaches pose for its agents and operations, could our intelligence agencies
possibly accept at face value Clinton’s claim that these 30,000 e-mails —
correspondence of one of the busiest, highest-ranking officers of the United
States government — involved yoga routines and Chelsea’s bridesmaids’ dresses?
Probably about as much as the FBI can trust that they had
nothing to do with the intersection of State Department business and Clinton
Foundation donors.
In light of the herculean efforts made by China, Russia,
and other cyber-aggressors to hack into the government’s hyper-secure server
systems with occasional success, it is inconceivable that they refrained from
hacking into Clinton’s non-secure system with a high degree of success. Robert
Gates, the former CIA director and secretary of defense, has conceded as much.
Of course, intelligence-community officials cannot afford
to guess or hope. Their national-security duties require them to assume Hillary
Clinton’s incalculable recklessness has corrupted our intelligence base and
endangered our agents.
That makes her a better fit for the big house than the
White House.
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