This morning I received this memo from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.In it, the ODNI advises its “industry partners,” that is those corporations and individuals who do work to assist the security of the country, that the Washington Post is planning on outing them.
Early next week, the Washington Post is expected to publish articles and an interactive website that will likely contain a compendium of government agencies and contractors allegedly conducting Top Secret work. The website is expected to enable users to see the relationships between the federal government and its contractors, describe the type of work the contractors perform, and may identify many government and contractor facility locations.
Um . . . what?The memo says the Post will begin running the stories on July 19, 2010, which must be the start of ratings week or something. I’m also told that the Obama Administration, outside of the intelligence corridor, is “basically cool with it.”Cool with this? Seriously? There’s this paragraph:
Foreign intelligence services, terrorist organizations, and criminal elements will have potential interest in this kind of information. It is important that companies review their overall counterintelligence posture to ensure that it is appropriate. Specifically, we recommend that companies affected by this publication and website assess and take steps to mitigate risk to their workforce, facility and mission, to the extent consistent with your contractual relationship with ODNI. These steps should include re-enforcement of security and counterintelligence protections and steps to enhance workforce awareness. CI and security events related to the publication of these articles and website should be reported through normal company channels to the MSC/Security office. For the time being, thresholds should be lowered to aggressively report anomalous behavior.
Remember the left cheering when the New York Times did this stuff to the Bush Administration? Somehow I suspect they’ll still actually cheer for this, which won’t exactly do anything to reassure the American people that those in charge are good on national security issues.
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