Will they be concerned enough to find out who actually leaked it?
US ‘deeply concerned’ by intelligence leak over Israel plan to attack Iran
US government officials investigating the leak of two classified intelligence papers assessing Israel’s plans to attack Iran have said they did believe any more documents had been compromised.
However, the Biden administration remained “deeply disturbed” by the unauthorized release, John Kirby, the national security communications adviser, told reporters at a White House briefing on Monday.
Kirby also said that US officials have spoken with Israeli counterparts about the leak, but he did not divulge details of the conversation.
“We’re deeply concerned, and the president remains deeply concerned, about any leakage of classified information into the public domain. That’s not supposed to happen, and it’s unacceptable when it does,” he said.
“He will be actively monitoring the progress of the investigative effort to figure out how this happened, and obviously he’ll be very interested in hearing any mitigation measures and recommendations that come as a result of the investigative efforts.”
Earlier on Monday, a defense department official confirmed to the Guardian that an in-depth inquiry was under way into how the two documents, attributed to the US Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency, came to be published on the Telegram messaging app four days ago.
It can’t be too hard to find who did it. Seriously, how many employees had access to the documents? It can’t be large amount for documents that sensitive, can it? Really, they should have been found already.
Kirby said it was not yet known if the papers, both marked top secret, were deliberately released, or if their publication was the result of a hack. But, he said: “We don’t have any indication at this point that there’s an expectation that there will be additional documents like this finding their way into the public domain.”
How many months will it take to find out?
The hopefully incoming Trump Administration will certainly investigate, and prosecute, the leaker.
Of course, the Usual Suspects will laud the leak, and the leaker, but I hope that the Israelis were smart enough to have sent the US false plans, to lead Iran to prepare to defend against an attack that wasn’t coming, and be more vulnerable to what actually does come their way. The people who came up with the pager and walkie-talkie schemes are certainly brilliant enough to have done that! Perhaps President Biden could be trusted by the Israelis, but it’s obvious that our intelligence agencies, top-heavy as they are with anti-Semitic Ivy Leaguers, can’t be.
That’s why Israelis are smart to not share their plans with us anymore.
I read elsewhere that the documents were posted on a “Top Secret” government server that can only be accessed by thousands of people. Once there they were available to anyone with a passing interest and a security clearance. What could possibly go wrong?
That’s not how it works. You have to have the clearance, limited and controlled access and a need to know. People on those systems don’t just get to “poke around”. Sure, trusted people can betray their trust. It happens all the time. That’s why there are safeguards. They only way for secrets to be released is that someone who was in on it released it.
Traitors should be hung, not jailed.