DNI Clapper Issues Directive: All Intelligence Community Employees Forbidden To Speak To Press

Kevin Gosztola at FDL:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has issued a directive that prohibits all employees of the intelligence community from speaking to the press.

Signed on March 20, it establishes a policy on “contact with the media,” which leadership in intelligence agencies believe will “ensure a consistent approach for addressing media engagement across the intelligence community and mitigate risks of unauthorized disclosures of intelligence-related matters that may result from such contacts.”

It does not differentiate between classified and unclassified information. Any detail pertaining to an “intelligence-related” matter, if disclosed to a member of the media, is “covered” by the policy. However, the policy apparently does not “apply to contact with the media in connection with civil, criminal or administrative proceedings.”

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Emphasis mine.

Note that all employees... not just agents handling classified material... are forbidden to speak to the press. Note also that the press is broadly defined, and most certainly includes internet publications such as blogs. And finally, note that all communication about any intelligence-related matter, even if it is unclassified, is censored by the policy. It appears to me as if this lessens or perhaps eliminates outright the whole concept of something from an intelligence agency that is unclassified, unless it is administrative or related to legal actions.

In these parlous times of consistent over-classification, often obviously for purposes of CYA rather than security, such a policy is obscene. The American public deserves better. This policy provides critics (and I am emphatically a critic) with a good argument for shutting down the three-letter agencies altogether... not that we would be so fortunate as to live to see that happen.

CIA Caught Allegedly Hacking Senate Staffers

Hey, the gummint is all just one big happy family, right? DSWright at FDL:

...according to a report by McClatchy.

The CIA Inspector General has reportedly made a referral to the Justice Department related to CIA misconduct for monitoring staff at the US Senate who were working on a report on the CIA’s torture program. The spies were spying on Congress.

Remember, the national security state just wants to keep you safe and is not on a power trip.

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The McClatchy piece by Jonathan S. Landay, Ali Watkins and Marisa Taylor is cautiously guarded about whether wrongdoing did or did not occur. Presumption of innocence, ya know. (He... hehehe... HAHAHAHAHA!) Even so, there is this assertion:

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The development marks an unprecedented breakdown in relations between the CIA and its congressional overseers amid an extraordinary closed-door battle over the 6,300-page report on the agency’s use of waterboarding and harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists held in secret overseas prisons. The report is said to be a searing indictment of the program. The CIA has disputed some of the reports findings.

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Damn, I'll bet they have!

Your tax dollars at work...

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AFTERTHOUGHT: I suppose I should be clear about precisely what I'm objecting to here, though I suspect you know. The CIA has no business spying on Americans in America, and especially no business spying on Congress; such acts are wildly outside the mission. I understand that every nation today has to have a spy agency, but I hope that ours can spy ON BEHALF OF America, not ON America.