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Litt lashes leakers, touts transparency

The U.S. intelligence community's top lawyer on Tuesday forcefully denounced Edward Snowden and other recent leakers of government secrets, while declaring that the raft of unauthorized disclosures have set in place a process that will lead to officials being more transparent about surveillance and other intelligence activities.

Speaking at a Sunshine Week conference in Washington, Office of the Director of National Intelligence General Counsel Robert Litt took an uncompromising line against leaks, rejecting a questioner's suggestion that the Obama Administration's record number of prosecutions of leakers is at odds with the administration's claims to favor transparency.

"I disagree with that 100 percent," Litt told the Freedom of Information Day celebration at American University's Washington College of Law. "I think that people who take it upon themselves to violate the law by saying, 'I think this classified information needs to be disclosed,' despite the fact that nobody else does—they ought to be prosecuted and they ought to go to jail."

Litt said intelligence community whistleblowers aren't justified in turning to the media, because such workers have numerous outlets to air their concerns.

"People who have concerns to raise, they can raise [them] through appropriate channels. They can raise it to their superiors. They can raise it to the inspector general. They can raise it to Congress. And if nobody agrees with them, maybe they ought to think about the fact that they may be out of step and not the rest of the world," Litt added.

Snowden's defenders contend he did raise his concerns with colleagues, but that going beyond that would have been pointless since the courts, the Congressional intelligence committees and various other watchdogs had approved the surveillance programs—even though a large swath of the American public view at least some of that snooping as a major invasion of privacy.

Asked about the reception Snowden would have received, Litt said that's far from clear.

Snowden "doesn’t know what would have happened if he’d gone to [NSA Inspector General] George Ellard. He doesn’t know what would have happened if he’d gone to Chuck McCullough, who’s the inspector general for the intelligence community. He doesn’t know what would have happened if he went to the intelligence committee with this information….I believe NSA has publicly stated that they're not aware that Mr. Snowden did in fact raise his concerns with people, so we don’t know what would have happened if he'd gone through channels because he chose not to exhaust his remedies in that regard," the ODNI lawyer said.

However, Ellard has said publicly that he would have told Snowden that the NSA's phone-call metadata program was legal. "Perhaps it’s the case that we could have shown, we could have explained to Mr. Snowden his misperceptions, his lack of understanding of what we do,” Ellard said at a Georgetown conference last month.

While Litt asserted that the recent leaks "have really not been about whistleblowing at all" and he spoke in grave tones about the national security damage done by recent leaks, he said the administration is moving assertively to make public more information about intelligence programs.

"The best way to prevent the damage that leakers can cause is by increased transparency on our part," Litt said. "We must continue to ensure that our secrets are protected, but we need equally to ensure that only secrets are protected....Public confidence in the way that we conduct our admitted secret actitiyes is essentialy if we are to continue to be able to anticipate and respond to the many threats facing our nation."

Litt said officials are now playing close attention to the risks that secret programs will be disclosed and considering whether maybe they shouldn't be secret in the first place. And he said he's aware the real test of the administration's promises to be more proactive on transparency will come when officials declassify a program that isn't yet widely known.

"It's absoslutely a fair point to say that we should not—and we are not—limiting ourselves only to materials that are directly responsive to what’s been leaked," the ODNI lawyer said.

In any event, Litt said, the wave of recent leaks has convinced the intelligence community that a business-as-usual approach to secrecy and disclosure just isn't viable any more.

"I do know we're not going to go back to the old paradigm with repsect to how we protect information and what we choose to release," he said.