Balboni and Cilluffo: Secrecy's role in security

Michael Balboni, former New York State deputy secretary for public safety, is a principal at the security consulting group Cardinal Point Strategies. Frank J. Cilluffo directs The George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute and is a former special assistant to the president for homeland security.

A week after the latest WikiLeak of classified documents, it's pretty clear that much of the State Department material released was mundane. But the effect of the release, however, may take years to fully understand.

Though popular reports have tended to lump all the leaked material together, it is important to distinguish between the current and earlier sets of leaks. The documents in the earlier tranches dealing with Afghanistan (the "Afghan War Diaries") named names. In doing so, lives were placed at risk, our military establishment was undermined, and future intelligence sources and methods were jeopardized.

By contrast, the recent diplomatic cables dealt the United States a short-term diplomatic black eye and certainly added color - while admittedly chipping away at the trust upon which successful diplomacy depends.

Though damaging, the nature of the fallout in each case is different. The precise character of the long-term implications from the cables and any possible future leaks remain unclear. What is clear is that undermining diplomacy is bad - but damaging intelligence is potentially fatal.

It's long been said that intelligence is more art than science. Data is gathered by many different means and from many different sources, whether satellite intercept, tapped conversation, e-mail, a secret agent or informant. But it all still relies on one constant: human interaction. Whether it's the development of a relationship with a source, or the interpretation and assessment of data, real people provide their insight and capabilities to create the prism through which our nation sees - and protects itself from - the world.

For months, to take one recent example, Mohamed Osman Mohamud - the would-be Christmas tree-lighting bomber in Portland, Ore. - was monitored by FBI agents who had convinced him that they were jihadists who would supply him with materials to make a bomb. His plot was foiled, and he now faces federal charges.

Since people, and not machines, are the integral part of the intelligence system, trust is essential. Trust between world leaders, so they can speak candidly. Trust between operatives and informants, so that a source can be developed within a foreign country without fear of reprisal from his or her own country. And trust between analysts and their directors that the guesswork, intuitions and hunches that are a necessary part of an intelligence estimate are not splashed on the front pages of the world's newspapers.

Often, even the best analysts are wrong in their assumptions. Intelligence is not clairvoyance - if it were, CIA officials would spend their days at the betting tables in Las Vegas, not on the streets of Islamabad. It's hard to comprehend sometimes that the information our president relies on in his daily briefing may be just one piece of the puzzle, and include a subjective view of world events. But without it, we would be blind.

You simply can't expect perfect insights into the future. But this is the nature of intelligence, and the U.S. intelligence community works very hard, every day, sometimes at great personal jeopardy, to ensure the most accurate and timely information for our leaders. It's an expensive endeavor that takes a great amount of resources and many years of development to get right. And it takes just a sound bite to destroy.

Enter WikiLeaks. It's difficult to overestimate the chilling effect of knowing that whatever you transmit electronically, no matter how confidential, might end up leading the evening news. If anything, in the digital age, the need to keep operational and strategic intelligence discussions classified has never been greater. Such communications are protected by the Espionage Act, and as society changes, so does the need to revisit the application of the laws that protect our country's secrets.

In the days before the 9/11 attacks, there was limited sharing of intelligence between agencies not only at the federal level, but also at the state and local levels. The rule used to be, "If in doubt, leave it out" - that is, don't share.

Federal agencies would keep information about their investigations and sources strictly protected. If there were any chance that compromising a source could jeopardize an operation, information would not be shared. As a result, if you were told there was a threat, you just had to take the word of the agency that told you.

After the attacks, Washington recognized that the more eyes on information, the better chance there might be of preventing something bad from happening - the better chance of connecting the dots. The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force is an example of efforts to include state and local partners with the feds.

But this sharing is only as good as the information that is shared. If e-mail exchanges are sanitized to be politically correct and views muted because they might wind up in the press, the information will lack the detail and insight of the analysts, who may fear that it will turn out to be wrong. In addition, compromising a source - as the Afghanistan war leaks did - destroys the ability to develop future sources. Who would share secrets and risk their lives if they don't trust the people they are working with?

The question now is how to prevent future leaks. For Pfc. Bradley Manning, (the alleged original leaker), and for Julian Assange (Mr. WikiLeak), prosecution and potentially long prison terms await. The question is more complicated for the news organizations that originally published the material. Our focus, however, should be on the Mannings and the Assanges of the world.

We live in a dangerous world, and when our intelligence system doesn't work there are real consequences. Just ask any family member of the 9/11 victims. Since then, the nation has made real progress in recasting our mindset and actions to reflect that there is a need to share classified information among government officials. Having worked so hard to reach this state, we shouldn't revert to a simple need-to-know paradigm. Instead, we must strive to ensure that effective safeguards are in place to support both the security and the sharing of information. Technology is a double-edged sword, and we would be wise to invoke it to secure what information we can.

The reckless revelation of information undermines the very system our security leaders rely on to keep us safe, and it could prevent us from obtaining data that might thwart the next attack. Was this mildly interesting peek under the diplomatic tent worth the risk?