Friday, July 30, 2010
Who needs to know
Before the WikiLeaks, the policy in the military was to get information needed by the troops to the troops and if that meant everybody had security clearances, so be it.
"One of the lessons learned from the first Gulf War in 1991 was how little useful intelligence information was being received by battalion and company commanders in the field," Gates recalled, "and so there has been an effort over the last 15 or so years . . . to push as much information as far forward as possible, which means putting it in a secret channel that almost everybody has access to."When everybody knows is it still a secret?
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan accelerated that effort, Gates said, granting secret security clearances to hundreds of people who previously wouldn't have had them.
Now, as a result of the WikiLeaks publication, that policy will need to be reassessed. "Should we change the way we approach that, or do we continue to take the risk?" Gates said.
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