

Are you a soldier? Did you have a chat over beers to a friendly reporter the other night? Tell the journalist embedded in your unit what road you were going to drive down on one mission? Congratulations: you may have run afoul of an Army regulation against leaking classified information. Never mind the fact that the military classifies all kinds fo things that aren’t real secrets. Never mind the fact that the top officials in the military and intelligence fields who warn against the dangers of leaking are news-sieves themselves. (Check out Bob Woodward’s new book, if you don’t believe me.) They can leak, soldier, just not you.

On Monday, the Army issued what it billed as a “major revision” to its regulation about turning in snitches. (Kudos to Secrecy News for catching the change.) Mostly, it informs soldiers how to stay alert against the ever-present “threat of espionage, sabotage, subversion, and international terrorism” that the Army faces. But then Regulation 381-12 instructs Army personnel to rat out “known or suspected unauthorized disclosure of classified information to those not authorized to have knowledge of it, including leaks to the media.”

The service certainly has a lot of information that it justly needs to protect, from troop movements to the specifics of its weapons systems. But like the rest of the military and the government, it also has no problem over-using that “classified” stamp. General Stanley McChrystal’s 2009 Afghanistan strategy paper was initially classified, too. Its disclosure by Bob Woodward resulted in absolutely nothing problematic, unless you want to count the Obama administration’s momentary embarrassment.

Yet the regulation places leaking classified material in the same context as “contact with persons known or suspected to be members of or associated with foreign intelligence, security, or international terrorist organizations.” Even “suspected” disclosures are grounds for snitching. Chances are, it’s not going to be the men with stars on their shoulders and reporters’ numbers stored in their cellphones who get ratted out.

And it’s not just the Army. This morning in Washington, retired Lieutentant General Jim Clapper, the nation’s top intelligence official, paused his first public speech in his new job to rail against WikiLeaks’ recent disclosure of 77,000 frontline military reports from Afghanistan. Clapper said the mega-leak had a “very chilling effect on the need to share” information amongst spooks — and then proclaimed himself “ashamed” that anonymous senior intelligence officials “get their jollies talking to the media.”

Again, the intelligence community has lots of information it justifiably wants to keep secret. Most of what appears in the press, however, aren’t the crown jewels. It’s anonymous officials who describe (and spin) intelligence activities that are pretty much open secrets, as with this recent piece of ours about the CIA’s teams of Pashtuns that spot for the Pakistani drone strikes.

And however much material the Army overclassifies, the spooks far surpass it, hiding from public view even the names of contractors who guard its buildings. It’s more than a little self-interested of Clapper to demand the leaks get plugged: without them, we would know pretty much nothing about what the $75 billion annual intelligence budget actually buys. And — ahem — it’s also not like Clapper himself is averse to talking to reporters off the record.

Check out the Army’s revised information-security regulations for yourself:

Army Threat Awareness And Reporting Program

It’s tempting to consider this a snapshot of the World That WikiLeaks Made. But the Army has waged a battle against its own soldiers for years to keep even mundane information out of public view. In 2007, one of the best milbloggers from Iraq, LT G of Kaboom, found himself taken away from his platoon after he blogged his criticisms of overly-bureaucratic higher headquarters. That same year, the Army instructed soldiers to clear blog posts and even emails through their superiors. Then it wound itself in knots trying to clarify what it meant. Even generals have found the Army’s excessive paranoia about soldier leaks online hard to handle. Major General Michael Oates, himself an occasional blogger, leveled to Danger Room last year that it was “blindingly obvious that these soldiers are using these social network systems,” despite the restrictions.

Still, that was long before WikiLeaks. These days, the Secretary of Defense is worrying aloud about the dangers of letting low-level soldiers see high-level information and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says the radical anti-secrecy organization is awash in blood. Neither are exactly shy about candid, private discussions with reporters on sensitive topics.

The Pentagon even bought and destroyed thousands of copies of an ex-defense intelligence officer’s memoir before reaching a deal with his publisher to black out large chunks of it. Maybe Tony Shaffer should consider himself lucky he wasn’t thrown in the brig. Then again, he was a lieutenant colonel.

UPDATE: Thanks to commenter TexasSecurityAnalyst for jogging my memory on the Pentagon’s treatment of Shaffer’s memoir. I’ve corrected the above paragraph.

Image: Northwestern University’s Library of World War II Posters

See Also: