Classified Information

WASHINGTON - The massive leaks about U.S. spying systems caused sharp political and legal aftershocks Tuesday as the Justice Department prepared to file criminal charges against Edward Snowden, a government contractor who has publicly admitted disclosing highly classified telephone and Internet data-gathering operations. The vast scope of the government surveillance sparked the first federal lawsuit challenging its legality, a bipartisan effort in the Senate to declassify secret court orders that authorize the operations, and requests from Google and Facebook for permission to disclose more about National Security Agency requests for users' emails and other online communications.

WHITMORE VILLAGE, Hawaii - Sure, Edward Snowden just used a simple thumb drive to smuggle classified information out of the National Security Agency. But one look at the sprawling NSA compound where he is believed to have worked in the mountains of central Oahu - with its chain-link fences and barbed wire, massive entrance gates and "Keep out" signs - raises the question of how even a trusted employee with a high-level security clearance could sneak out even an innocuous piece of equipment.

WHITMORE VILLAGE, Hawaii - Sure, Edward Snowden just used a simple thumb drive to smuggle classified information out of the National Security Agency. But one look at the sprawling NSA compound where he is believed to have worked in the mountains of central Oahu - with its chain-link fences and barbed wire, massive entrance gates and "Keep out" signs - raises the question of how even a trusted employee with a high-level security clearance could sneak out even an innocuous piece of equipment.

WASHINGTON - Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. and his top Justice Department deputies met with journalists and their lawyers Friday and pledged they would not seek to prosecute reporters under the Espionage Act for reporting and writing stories that may disclose classified information. Holder and his aides also said they were looking closely at the department's guidelines that govern how prosecutors can seek information from journalists and news organizations. The officials focused particularly on provisions in the current rules that in some cases allow the government to obtain records regarding a reporter's telephone calls or emails.

In a move the government called a warning to disgruntled aerospace workers tempted to peddle U.S. defense secrets, a former Lockheed engineer was indicted Thursday on charges of attempted espionage for allegedly trying to sell secret plans concerning the Sea Shadow, a Navy stealth project. John Douglas Charlton, 62, allegedly tried to sell the plans concerning the ship and other projects to an FBI agent posing as an official of an unnamed Western European government, according to prosecutors.

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.

Investigators have recovered the contents of two safes from John Huang's former office at the Commerce Department in an effort to determine whether the former Clinton administration appointee improperly handled classified information, newly available records and interviews show.

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."

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.

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.

WASHINGTON - The FBI obtained a sealed search warrant to read a Fox News reporter's personal emails from two days in 2010 after arguing there was probable cause he had violated espionage laws by soliciting classified information from a government official, court papers show. In an affidavit, an FBI agent told a federal magistrate that the reporter had committed a crime when he asked a State Department security contractor, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, to share secret material about North Korea in June 2009.

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors secretly obtained telephone records from more than 20 lines belonging to the Associated Press and its journalists in an attempt to learn who leaked information on how the CIA thwarted an apparent terrorist plot hatched in Yemen. The Associated Press on Monday called the action a "massive and unprecedented intrusion" into news gathering. The government subpoenaed records covering a two-month period in early 2012 from telephones in the wire service's offices in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., as well as the homes and cellphones of at least five reporters and an editor.

WASHINGTON - President Obama issued an executive order Tuesday that seeks to shore up the nation's cyber-defenses by improving how classified information is shared between the government and the owners and operators of crucial infrastructure, including electric utilities, dams and mass transit. The long-expected order, which Obama announced in his State of the Union speech, is a stopgap measure that follows Congress' failure last year to pass legislation to create comprehensive standards for the private sector to help thwart digital attacks.

FT. MEADE, Md. - Pfc. Bradley Manning swiveled in the witness chair, smiling and occasionally talking over his lawyer. In his Army dress-blue uniform, he appeared even younger than his 24 years. It was difficult to reconcile the bespectacled Manning's relaxed, almost chatty demeanor with the vast charges against him - perpetrating one of the biggest leaks of classified material in U.S. history. Manning is accused of providing the anti-secrecy Internet group WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables and classified war logs from Afghanistan and Iraq while based in Baghdad as a military intelligence analyst in 2009 and 2010.

Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) placed a hold on the 2013 Intelligence Authorization Act, expressing legitimate concerns about provisions designed to plug leaks of classified information. Wyden rightly asked his colleagues to revisit provisions that "threaten to encroach upon the freedom of the press" and "reduce access to information that the public has a right to know. " Wyden objects to three provisions. The most troubling would drastically reduce the number of background briefings provided by intelligence officials to the media by authorizing only a few specific officials to engage in such off-the-record exchanges.

WASHINGTON — Seven Navy SEALs, including one involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, have been reprimanded for divulging classified information to the maker of a video game, Pentagon officials said Thursday. The seven received letters of reprimand and forfeited half of their pay for two months after a Navy investigation found they had served as paid consultants to the designers of "Medal of Honor Warfighter," one official said. All are members of Seal Team 6, the secretive commando unit based in Virginia.

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.

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.

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon formally warned a former Navy SEAL who has written a first-person account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden last year, saying he has violated his signed agreement not to divulge classified information, and it threatened him with stiff legal action. "In the judgment of the Department of Defense, you are in material breach and violation of the non-disclosure agreements you signed," Pentagon General Counsel Jeh Johnson said Thursday in a letter addressed to Mark Owen, the pen name of Matt Bissonnette.

Leaks of confidential government information are nothing new in Washington. But a recent spate of news stories about national security operations has emboldened advocates of new punishments for revealing classified information. Some of these latter-day "plumbers" would target not just the leakers but also journalists. At the risk of seeming to defend our own vested interests, we would caution against such an escalation in the war on leaks. At a recent hearing of a House Judiciary subcommittee, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.)