Tag Archives: Secrecy

Willfulness and the Harm of Unlawful Retention of National Security Information

Discussions of the Espionage Act usually focus on the public’s conception of “spying.” Spies steal information that their government seeks to keep secret and disclose that information to other governments. A common acronym, “MICE,” describes the common motivations for spying: money, ideology, compromise, and ego.

The Espionage Act, however, covers a broader set of conduct that can compromise U.S. national security. The original Act, enacted as the United States entered the First World War, included the precursors to prohibitions against undisclosed foreign-government activities in the United States.

The Espionage Act also prohibits taking or possessing national security-related information from the government and keeping it in an unauthorized location. This article explains how some criminal law protections for national security information interact with Executive Branch decisions to protect information based on national security concerns, and how those protections apply in cases where a defendant stole and kept national security information, even if the defendant did not disclose that information to an unauthorized recipient.

To the uninitiated, taking national security information from its authorized location and keeping it in an unauthorized location may seem like a ministerial or administrative violation without much substantive consequence. But to the national security professional—and to the national security professional’s counterparts in adversarial services—such theft constitutes a profound compromise of security.

Authorized locations for the storage of national security information are approved because they are secure and because they facilitate the government’s control over, and tracking of, individuals who access that information—for example, as then-Assistant Attorney General John Demers stated, when Nghia Hoang Pho stole highly classified information and retained it at an unauthorized location, he “placed at risk our intelligence community’s capabilities and methods, rendering some of them unusable.”

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A Review of “The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age” by Laura K. Donohue

Joel Brenner presents his critique of Professor Laura Donohue’s The Future of Foreign Intelligence, and its “full-throated denunciation of the entire legal framework regulating the government’s collection of data about American citizens and permanent residents.” He discusses her findings in detail, and in the end, finds that they both agree on a number of specific proposals, and “disagree profoundly on FISA’s rationale and constitutional limitations.”

A Review of “The Future of Foreign Intelligence: Privacy and Surveillance in a Digital Age” by Laura K. Donohue

Beyond Privacy & Security: The Role of the Telecommunications Industry in Electronic Surveillance

From the perspective of private industry, Mieke Eoyang examines the interplay between US national security electronic surveillance and the US telecommunications companies that are necessary intermediaries for this surveillance, tracing the history of major surveillance programs and identifying key areas of tension. Eoyang recommends reforms including a court process for government access to overseas data on foreign customers, leaving bulk, unfiltered data in the hands of private industry, and working with close allies to build consensus around electronic surveillance norms.