Who's Afraid of Wikileaks?

Personality occasionally steers policy in surprising directions, and the zeal with which the justice department has lately taken to investigating unauthorized leaks suggests an interesting possibility: could Barack Obama’s long-professed commitment to greater transparency in government be trumped, on the particular issue of leakers, by his legendary personal discipline—his steadfast desire to keep his people in line and maintain a tight and leak-free ship? Or do these investigations reflect a broader anxiety about the future of leaking, and an effort, through a few high profile prosecutions and the the deliberate introduction of a "chilling effect," to forestall a new leaking crisis that has only just begun?

As several commentators have noted in recent weeks, the Obama administration is cracking down on leaks as or more aggressively than the Bush administration ever did—and in several instances, pursuing subpoenas and criminal convictions in cases that stem from leaks actually dating back to the Bush administration. After pleading guilty recently to leaking information regarding "communications intelligence activities" to a blogger, FBI linguist Shamai Leibowitz was sentenced by a federal judge in Maryland to 20 months in prison. The case marks only the third conviction in U.S. history of a government employee for leaking classified information to the press, and the longest prison sentence ever handed down in this sort of case.

Whereas the actual leak in the Leibowitz case occurred on the Obama administration’s watch, in 2009, last month DOJ also indicted Thomas Drake, a former National Security Agency official, for leaking information to Siobhan Gorman at the Baltimore Sun during the Bush administration, in 2006 and 2007. Gorman’s stories focused on an ill-fated technology contract for a project called Trailblazer, which the agency spent over a billion dollars on before finally concluding that it had been a costly and ill-advised failure, and pulling the plug. One peculiarity of the decision to pursue an indictment in this case is that while Drake certainly violated the law, if indeed he leaked classified information to Gorman, the ensuing revelations could hardly be said to undermine national security. On the contrary, Gorman won awards for the pieces and in killing the Trailblazer program the NSA seems ultimately to have shared the articles’ position—that the contract was a colossal waste of precious national security resources.

Nor is the Drake case the only one in which Eric Holder’s justice department is re-exploring the controversies of the Bush years. In April, federal prosecutors reissued a Bush-era grand jury subpoena seeking to compel James Risen of the New York Times to reveal the sources for one chapter in his 2006 book State of War. At issue are passages in which Risen describes a botched effort by the CIA to disrupt Iranian nuclear research. Interestingly, the lead prosecutor in both the Drake investigation and the Risen investigation is William Welch—who ran DOJ’s public integrity unit, but stepped down after the failed prosecution, last year, of Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska.

These cases don’t signify some personal crusade by Welch, however. According to Newsweek, the prosecutor was specially tasked to review "leftover leak investigations" from the Bush years with an eye to bringing possible indictments. This may seem like a strange course of action for an already very busy Department of Justice, and all the more so given President Obama’s repeated insistence that on controversial questions of national security policy, from warrantless wiretapping to rendition to torture, he will not prosecute Bush administration officials, he wants to avoid "retribution" or a "witch hunt," he is interested in looking forward, rather than backward.

Some have speculated that Obama may be pursuing these prosecutions in an effort to curry favor with an intelligence community whose trust he has yet to earn, and it may be that in striving to create transparent government through more official disclosures, he feels obliged to signal his intolerance for unauthorized leaks.

But it may also be the case that Obama’s tough line on leaks is not merely some consolation to law-and-order types, but an expression of his own temperament and philosophy. "Obama had one pet peeve that could make him lose his cool" Jonathan Alter observes in his new book, The Promise, "…Leaks." Obama’s managerial style has never left much room for insubordination, and now that his administration is in power, national security leaks may have shed any mitigating civic virtue that might offset what is, in the end, a fundamentally insubordinate act. One wonders, though, what Obama’s campaign – and campaign platform – might have looked like had he not been able to draw so readily on a litany of Bush-era crimes that we know about today due only to the reporting of individuals like James Risen, and the willingness of their sources to leak.

Whatever your view of the politics and the timing of the current crackdown on leaks, one thing seems clear: even as Eric Holder’s prosecutors seek prison sentences for leakers and threaten journalists with jail time should they refuse to name their sources, the very landscape is changing beneath their feet. Some, like Gabriel Schoenfeld in his new book, Necessary Secrets, argue that we should not allow the New York Times, say, to determine what national security secrets can and cannot be justifiably revealed, and it is certainly the case that parsing the potential public benefit of disclosure and weighing it against the potential security risks is an immensely complex undertaking.

But at least the average newspaper editor devotes some real consideration to that undertaking, and while the editor’s vested interest in landing a big story might cloud his or her judgment in that determination, government officials who might make the same determination are, if anything, more encumbered by their own institutional bias.

What I suspect is worrying the Obama administration, and the intelligence community, and the newspaper editors, for that matter, is the advent of Wikileaks, which in April released a leaked copy of a classified Pentagon video showing the crew of an Apache helicopter opening fire on the streets of Baghdad. The release of the video prompted an angry condemnation by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and generated over seven million hits on YouTube.

This week’s New Yorker has a terrific profile by Raffi Khatchadourian of the founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, which gives Assange just enough rope to hang himself. Wikileaks is designed to effectively cut out the middleman, removing the discretion that might be exercised by both journalist and editor, and enabling any would-be whistleblower to upload classified material directly onto the web. By drawing on the tech wizardry of Assange and his confederates and doing business in countries whose free-speech laws allow the organization some measure of legal impunity, Wikileaks aims to create a system in which government employees can leak with a greater degree of security that they will not be caught or penalized than they might ever have in talking with a journalist.

The most extraordinary, and unsettling, aspect of the article is that for all his conviction and showmanship and technical prowess, Assange does not seem to have thought through, in a systematic way, the implications or even the broad parameters, of what he does. What, if any, types of leaks might be unacceptable, for instance? Is anything beyond the pale? If Assange has come to any determination on these hugely important questions, he doesn’t let on. He seems to indicate that these questions are addressed on a case-by-case basis. But in the course of the long piece there is not a solitary instance in which Wikileaks decided not to disclose.

How the Obama administration will deal with Wikileaks remains to be seen, but it is tempting to read into the recent crackdown on more traditional media leaks a displaced fear of a much greater threat to come.