Haft of the Spear

He knew his group was violating national security laws. But he said bureaucratic walls erected by the military and civilian agencies were hampering intelligence sharing and coordination, making the nation more vulnerable to terrorists …

Details of Maziarz’s case emerged after he pleaded guilty to mishandling more than 100 classified documents from 2004 to last year. The overall breach could be far larger: Investigators believe that as far back as the early 1990s, the intelligence-filching ring began taking hundreds of secret files from Camp Pendleton and the U.S. Northern Command, which tracks terrorist activity in the United States.

It deserves a full read and kudos to the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The transition of Reserve intelligence officer to state or local homeland security or law enforcement officer is not uncommon, and some modest bleeding of knowledge from one domain to another is not unheard of, but the mishandling of classified material like this is shocking. No matter how righteous these guys felt they were, functionally speaking this is espionage.

The fact that these men and their civilian organizations might have had a bona fide need to know is beside the point: There are ways to argue your case within the system and get the information you need. If you are still thwarted, well, there are ways around that too: ways that don’t involve flirting with a prison sentence and that bring more pressure to bear than any internal punch might deliver.

The CI implications are also huge. How do you know your Reserve buddy isn’t an agent of a foreign power? The common refrain from co-workers of people arrested for espionage: “I had no idea.”

I have no doubt that state and local officials are not getting all the information they need to protect their own. On the flip side of that coin is the fact that perhaps a decision has been made at a higher level to handle terrorism suspects in the US in a particular manner. Either way, the lack of meaningful information exchange – even if it is just to inform the locals that the feds are aware but cannot talk right now – is embarrassing; the fact that feds think that they can do it all without local help is equally foolish. We are not fighting as a team.

The implications of this case are going to reverberate fairly loudly. Watch all future official contacts between echelons become a lot less productive and watch all contacts with those at different echelons to get CI scrutiny not too far removed from that given to contacts with foreign peers. The message will be clear: talking out of school, even to school mates, is not worth the risk.

This is no way to win an information war.