Facts and Fears: Hard Truths from a Life in Intelligence, James R. Clapper, Viking, 22 May 2018
I recently finished reading the memoirs of James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence serving under President Obama. Two parts of his memoirs came to mind while reading the New York Times’s account of how they proved Russia’s complicity in war crimes in Syria.
In his memoirs, Mr. Clapper recalls the leaks of classified materials, through WikiLeaks, during his tenure. He called (and I paraphrase here, as I don’t have the source material in front of me) WikiLeaks a “hostile non-state intelligence service” because of its seeming ability to gather otherwise-secret information and make use of it for political purposes. To battle attempts to delegitimize the United States’s Intelligence Community as opaque and ineffectual, he also directed the establishment of IC on the Record, a Tumblr site which serves as a landing page for declassified information which the Intelligence Community can release to the public, as well as an internal drive to proactively declassify that which can be declassified and publish it.
To read the New York Times’s account of how they proved that Russia bombed Syrian hospitals is to read, in a very real sense, the work of a private intelligence service.
- That the paper collected photos and videos from Facebook groups which are publicly available is an example of open-source intelligence (OSINT).
- That the paper collected from human beings “in the field” the flight records of warplanes bombing civilian targets is an example of [human intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_intelligence_(intelligence_gathering) (HUMINT).
- That the paper used satellite imagery to contextualize other intelligence is an example of geospatial intelligence (GEOINT).
- And while the New York Times doesn’t publish the source of the recordings, that the paper collected and “deciphered” these recordings is an example of signals intelligence (SIGINT).
- The New York Times then takes the “raw” intelligence from this variety of sources, and with the help of analysts, proves a coherent, higher-level story which explains the evidence the paper gathered. Indeed, the paper names and credits one of its analysts – Quoctrung Bui.
This represents an expansion, yes, but also a departure from traditional investigative journalism, which largely depended upon OSINT and HUMINT for the “investigative” part of investigative journalism, and left the analysis up to journalists, fact-checkers, and their editors.
This worries me. While I trust the organizational culture of a New York Times governed by Western liberal ethics, and far be it from me to criticize the decision to write and publish an important piece of news that has a serious chance of being nominated (in the least) for a Pulitzer prize, the foundations of Western political thought are democratic, not autocratic, in nature.
In the United States, the legitimacy of the American government comes from the consent of the governed. The system of government attempts to protect minority rights by splitting the powers of government into three branches and empowers each branch to check and balance the power of its brethren branches. Every Western political democracy is similarly governed.
Did the Russian people consent to have their military recorded? Did the Russian people ever elect to empower The New York Times with the ability to criticize the Russian military? Do the Russian people have the power to elect new leadership to the helm of The New York Times, should they disagree with its coverage? And do the Russian people have an objective arbiter to whom they can appeal to right an injustice which The New York Times may have imposed upon them?
Maybe these questions seem facetious to you. After all, The New York Times is not a Russian newspaper, so why should anybody care whether it abides by Russian law? If the Russian military is violating international law, doesn’t the public have a right to know, no matter how the evidence was gathered of such violations?
Personally, I actually would agree that these questions are facetious, and tritefully academic at that – but only in this specific case of this specific publication do I agree that the right course of action was taken. I write not to criticize but to worry about the implications.
I worry that too much power is being concentrated at the helms of privately governed organizations. Where the concentration of power is necessary, inevitable, even helpful – it is important that such power be audited and controlled. But there is no transparency behind the governance decisions of America’s largest companies, no way of verifying – not just trusting – that the public interest is served, no due process to ensure that redress is fairly handled. I worry about the ever-growing ocean of private data controlled by unaccountable cabals and the strength of controls, which may or may not even exist, to protect the privacy of that data and keep it from falling into the hands of people who would seek to exploit it in directly harmful ways.
The facetious questions allow me to ask more pertinent ones: did the US Intelligence Community have proof that Russia committed war crimes in Syria?
If it had such proof, why didn’t it come to light earlier? Why would such proof stay classified? Was an executive decision reached to prevent the disclosure? Was it deemed unhelpful to American interests to give the public the truth about Russian war crimes?
If it didn’t have such proof, what does it say about the Intelligence Community that it, with the roughly $60 billion National Intelligence Program budget, couldn’t find this proof while The New York Times Company, on roughly $1.74 billion of annual revenue, could? Are the IC’s resources budgeted towards needs that are considered more critical, more helpful to American interests, than the conduct of global powers upon the world stage and the preservation of the postwar relative global peace? Or is the IC not as competent as they would like the public to believe?
Is the IC insufficiently powerful at protecting the public interest that private journalists need to supplement their foreign efforts in order to protect the public? When we privatize the responsibility to protect the public interest, we risk the corruption of public safety in the name of expediency. I think that’s unacceptable. Of course, private/independent journalism shouldn’t be abolished – it’s an important control upon democratic governments. But eventually, the size of such organizations behooves us to ensure that their governance is conducted transparently and abides by generally accepted ethical guidelines.
Process is too important to be ignored, which is why the Intelligence Community is subjected to Congressional oversight, the same as any other part of the Executive branch. It may not be a perfect system – no system is – but it’s a system which at least nominally attempts to protect the public interest. James Clapper, in his memoirs, reminds us that the public has to trust that Congressional oversight works, and not idolize leakers who publish without a genuine understanding of the big picture. Maybe yes, maybe no, and the reduced transparency of classified Congressional oversight is a flaw of that system, perhaps a necessary one. But it does at least attempt to ask us believe that the above questions of the IC are being asked, that a response by IC leadership is being given, and that the interests of public accountability are being served. And it is certainly better than a company’s private process without any claims to transparency whatsoever.
Yes, the SEC filings of The New York Times Company (NYT) are publicly available. But nowhere in those filings will you discover any record of editorial decisions – not just what was published, but what wasn’t, why and why not, and the interorganizational context in which decisions were made. So the real question which needs to be asked is – quis custodiet ipsos custodes?