Category Archives: Intelligence

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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Information Lawfare: Messaging and the Moral High Ground

The U.S. legal system is known as the envy of the world. Yet law as an instrument of national power has been woefully understudied. Traditional academic frameworks for studying the instruments of national power do not consider the full potential of law to be used as a weapon of war between states, a concept known as “lawfare.” Meanwhile, U.S. adversaries understand that law can be a potent weapon, both to achieve concrete military objectives and to win battles in the information domain, and have wielded it against the U.S. As war escalates in the information domain, information lawfare will be a critical piece of any party’s strategy.

Through a case study of the U.S.’s strike that killed Iranian Major General Soleimani in January 2020, Jill I. Goldenziel demonstrates how information lawfare can be used, and why the U.S. must develop its offensive and defensive lawfare capabilities. This paper won a prize in the 2020 Air Force Judge Advocate General School’s National Security Law Writing Competition.

Lessons for the Next Twenty Years: What We’ve Learned in the Two Decades Since 9/11

LESSONS FOR THE NEXT TWENTY YEARS: WHAT WE’VE LEARNED IN THE TWO DECADES SINCE 9/11

A Note from Editor-in-Chief William C. Banks

By any measure the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 brought an immediate laser focus to the phenomenon of international terrorism.

Though hardly new to the United States and the world in 2001, the 9/11 attacks instantaneously elevated countering international terrorism to the dominant national security imperative at home and abroad.

Questions were legion: Should we have known the attacks were coming? What could we have done to prevent them? What lessons learned will help forestall the next attack? What are the best options for countering international terrorism?

Twenty years later many lessons have been learned, even as we continue to struggle with the ever changing dynamics of global terrorism. JNSLP is honored to publish this Special Edition, “Lessons Learned for the Next Twenty Years: What We’ve Learned in the Two Decades Since 9/11.”