Classified Information

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said Wednesday that he wanted the FBI to investigate the loss of classified computer disks at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But FBI officials in New Mexico say they will only monitor the case. Abraham issued a public memo that called on Energy Department officials in New Mexico to "request the FBI Los Alamos Field Office open an investigation." FBI officials said they did not have a Los Alamos field office.

A former CIA officer was charged under the Espionage Act on Monday with disclosing classified information to journalists, the latest prosecution in an unprecedented Obama administration crackdown on national security leaks. If convicted, John Kiriakou could face decades in prison. He is accused of providing secrets, including the name and activities of one of his undercover colleagues, to unidentified reporters, according to a federal criminal complaint. One of the journalists is alleged to have turned over the name of the covert CIA officer to lawyers representing a Guantanamo Bay prisoner.

It is known simply as The Plan, and it is one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world today. No more than 15 top U.S. officials are privy to the exact scheme under which U.S. forces will confront the Iraqi military if the current crisis in the Middle East erupts into a war. "I'm not going to tell you the sequence or what the timing of that sequence would be," says Gen. Colin L.

Personal computer drives, compact discs and media cards containing classified information were found during searches of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning's bunk in Iraq and the home of his aunt in Maryland, Army investigators testified on the second day of the soldier's pretrial hearing. Investigators also found chat logs on Manning's personal laptop in Iraq that showed the Army analyst had bragged to a former hacker that he had leaked to the WikiLeaks website hundreds of thousands of State Department cables, ground reports from Iraq and Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay detainees' files, and videos of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright ordered a shake-up in the way her department protects national secrets Monday following the disappearance of a laptop computer loaded with classified information from a supposedly secure conference room. "Like several other recent serious lapses in security, this is inexcusable and intolerable," Albright said of the loss of the computer, which contained classified information about weapons proliferation and other matters.

The CIA has quietly begun a new effort to have U.S. university personnel, including college undergraduates, help out during international crises by performing some of the classified intelligence work now carried out by the agency's Washington headquarters staff. The idea, prompted by the CIA's current budgetary squeeze, is to arrange for students to be trained to help analyze intelligence about particular countries for which the agency is short of staff.

President Clinton vetoed a bill Saturday that would have sharply expanded the government's power to prosecute anyone who revealed official secrets, including whistle-blowers or even ambassadors who briefed news reporters. "Although well-intentioned, [the bill] is overbroad and may unnecessarily chill legitimate activities that are at the heart of a democracy," the president said.

A significantly larger amount of classified information from a nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico was discovered in a residential trailer during a police search on Oct. 17 than was disclosed by law enforcement officials, sources close to the investigation said Wednesday. The search turned up a number of copies of classified documents from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the trailer park where a former employee lived.

Four months after a laptop computer crammed with top secret arms control data vanished from a State Department office, the department has asked U.S. diplomats around the world to determine if any other classified laptops have disappeared. All U.S. embassies and consular posts were ordered in a cable to immediately count their portable computers and report back by close of business Friday if any are "determined to be missing or stolen."

In the secrecy trade, they are sometimes known as the "three-initial" conspiracies--the JFK assassination, Vietnam POWs, and the UFOs in the New Mexico desert. All three have inspired elaborate fantasies, numerous movies and a persistent public suspicion that the truth is hidden somewhere deep inside Washington's mountain of classified documents. Take the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.

Every 6-year-old knows what a secret is. But apparently our nation's national security establishment does not. Consider this strange case from earlier this year. On June 8, the National Security Agency, a top-secret government spy agency, heralded the "declassification" of a 200-year-old publication, translated from the original German, on cryptography. It turns out, however, as reported by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists on his blog Secrecy News, that the 1809 study had long been publicly available and had even been digitized and published online through Google Books several years earlier.

As free speech goes, it was anything but. Protesters disrupted a big-ticket fundraiser for President Obama at a San Francisco hotel Thursday, serenading the president with a song about Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the soldier accused of passing classified information to the website WikiLeaks. Obama was speaking to the crowd of about 200 supporters when Oakland activist Naomi Pitcairn stood up and declared that she and others at her table had written a song for the president.

U.S. officials reportedly are hoping to capitalize on the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in London this week by having him extradited to this country for criminal prosecution. Based on what is known about WikiLeaks' release of hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, that would be a mistake. Assange was jailed in Britain on Tuesday in connection with charges of sexual assault filed against him in Sweden. U.S. officials, meanwhile, are clearly eager to prosecute him for the leaks, if not under the 1917 Espionage Act then for other criminal charges, including receiving stolen property.

About 25 years ago, Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. naval intelligence analyst, betrayed his country by providing highly classified information to Israel. Even though Israel was and still is a U.S. ally and is routinely supplied with U.S. intelligence, Pollard deserved to be severely punished for his actions. However, the punishment should fit the crime. In his case, it does not. After his arrest and indictment by a grand jury, Pollard agreed to plead guilty to one count of giving classified information to a U.S. ally.

WikiLeaks and us Re "A whistle-blower with global resonance," and "WikiLeaks wasn't wrong," Editorial, July 27 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, an Australian hacker, may end up being one of the best things to ever happen to our American democracy. It is not for politicians and bureaucrats to decide what American citizens and voters need to know. In the last 75 years, we have seen a sharp increase in the use of secrecy laws to cover up illegal activities, corruption and incompetence rather than to protect information that safeguards national security, as originally intended.

In a recent hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said that a civilian trial in New York City for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other accused 9/11 plotters was still "not off the table." This is unfortunate, and not only because such a trial would inevitably compromise classified information, impose massive security and logistical costs on New York, and provide the defendants with a superb propaganda platform. Another major problem with a civilian trial has been largely overlooked: the impact on the 12 private citizens unlucky enough to be chosen as jurors.

No more than 200 yards from the main gate of the sprawling U.S. base here, stolen computer drives containing classified military assessments of enemy targets, names of corrupt Afghan officials and descriptions of American defenses are on sale in the local bazaar.

A secret U.S. military program that pays Iraqi newspapers to publish articles favorable to the American mission appears to violate a 2003 Pentagon directive, according to a newly declassified document released Thursday. The information campaign run by U.S. troops in Baghdad and a Washington-based private contractor is the subject of a high-level military investigation. Last month, the top U.S. general in Iraq said a preliminary investigation into the program had found it did not violate U.S.

Iraqi insurgents have intercepted live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, tapping a key component of the Pentagon's vaunted surveillance and weapons system with a $26 program available on the Internet. Militants did not hack into any military communications systems, officials said, but instead were able to view raw satellite feeds of live video shot by cameras on the unmanned 27-foot planes. The drones, flown by pilots based in the U.S., use satellite feeds to transmit video. Officials said they have evidence that video feeds were intercepted in Iraq and do not believe any feeds were intercepted in Afghanistan or Pakistan.