A generation after the internet appeared on the scene and more than a decade since New York City’s twin towers collapsed due to a terrorist attack, Americans are still coming to grips with what a free and open democratic government looks like in the Information Age. And government at all levels is confronted with more opportunities than ever to monitor citizens’ activity. While the Obama administration claimed it would be the most transparent in history, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Here are a few federal secrets exposed in just the first half of 2013.
1. FBI informants authorized to commit crimes — lots of crimes
Maybe it’s no surprise that civilian informants for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are offered a little legal leeway when providing valuable information for federal criminal investigations. But informants were authorized to commit 5,658 crimes by FBI agents in 2013, according to documents obtained by USA Today. That’s about 15 crimes per day, and that doesn’t even count the activity of informants working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, and Tobacco and the Drug Enforcement Agency. Informants are never allowed to commit violent crimes, and the most serious of trespasses must be approved by top FBI officials. But an Inspector General report in 2005 revealed the FBI often skipped layers of oversight when green-lighting the illegal activities of informants.
2. DEA is using NSA-like surveillance techniques, obscuring evidence trails
The Drug Enforcement Agency has apparently taken a cue from the Nation Security Agency’s playbook and mined massive databases of telephone records, often passing along information to local authorities. According the a recent report from Reuters, a secretive DEA unit has not only used intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and telephone surveillance for criminal investigations around the country, but has also helped law enforcement agents recreate an evidence trail to hide the original sources of information — a tactic some legal scholars believe is illegal. Known as the Special Operations Division, the clandestine DEA unit works with two dozen partnering agencies, including the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security.
3. State Department officials hindered and called off Office of Inspectors General investigations
State secrets aren't always kept to protect national security. Sometimes they are just kept to be kept — or because they’re embarrassing. This seems to be the case at the State Department, where officials at the department’s Office of the Inspector General (IG) attempted to look into alleged solicitation of prostitutes and drug use by State Department officials in Beirut, Lebanon, and Baghdad, Iraq. They made no progress as their efforts were influenced, manipulated, or simply called off by top officials, according to memos and a draft OIG report obtained by CNN. The specifics of the investigations alleged to have been hindered by State Department officials were conspicuously absent from the IG report in its published form. The State Department maintains that any and all criminal behavior by department officials is thoroughly investigated.
4. Snowden reveals reality of Big Brother surveillance
Some have argued that Edward Snowden — the NSA contractor who leaked classified documents about the agency’s surveillance system known as PRISM and then fled the country — didn’t reveal much that wasn’t already public knowledge. Revelatory or not, Snowden’s leaks certainly have been influential in pushing forward dialogue about the role of government surveillance and secrecy. And even if not explicitly new, the information Snowden leaked did offer a clearer picture of the NSA’s largest data-mining and surveillance programs. According to Ars Technica, Snowden revealed, among other things, that the scale of NSA’s snooping programs is much larger than previously understood. He also revealed a closer look at the cooperation between the NSA and telephone and internet providers, illuminating the fact that two major telecom companies — deduced to be Verizon and AT&T — were more than willing to participate and were compensated more than $100 million for access to communication records from 2002 to 2006.
5. Insider Threat Program reveals federal hostility towards whistleblowers
The media, including GIMBY, has paid much attention to the aggressive manner in which the federal government has dealt with whistleblowers in recent years. But some might be surprised to learn that the federal government’s hostility towards information leakers extends beyond national security agencies. According to an in-depth report by McClatchy, a White House initiative called the Insider Threat Program encourages officials at a wide range of federal departments, agencies, and bureaus, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments, to crack down on information leaks of all kinds — not just the release of classified information. The program explicitly encourages federal employees to report any evidence of improper information being leaked to the public; in other words, it calls on government employees to tattle on their colleagues. The program also mandates that top officials punish their subordinates for breaches of information security.
More transparency, fewer secrets
The movement for open government has made strides over the last few decades, often because of pressure from organizations like POGO, OpentheGovernment.org, the Government Accountability Project, Sunlight Foundation, Taxpayers for Common Sense, and others. But the Freedom of Information Act — the primary way reporters and others can obtain details about federal agency activities -- remains burdensome and backlogged, and large swaths of federal business remains shaded in secrecy.
The government often says it needs to keep secrets, for reasons of security. The leaking of top secret information can damage the government efforts to spy on America’s enemies and jeopardize the safety of America’s armed forces as well as confidential sources we have in other countries — including in foreign governments. Certainly, classified information is necessary for strong national security. But some critics wonder whether the government is keeping too many secrets. Some experts argue that overclassification is producing so much secret information that, some argue, it’s undermining the government’s ability to keep track of information that is vitally important to keep secret. But in some cases, the issue isn’t FOIA, or PRISM, or any other acronym except the one that people in large organizations practice all too often: CYA.
Original Publication URL: http://gimby.org/blogs/gimby-news-focus/20130807/five-federal-secrets-have-come-out-2013
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