A new policy guidance issued this month by one of the nation’s top spies takes aim at intelligence community workers suspected of talking to the press.
The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, released the guidance on Feb. 4 detailing how polygraph testing is used in “personnel security vetting,” specifically to determine if an employee has committed high crimes like espionage or terrorism, and also if they’ve handed over classified documents to a journalist.
“Examinations shall cover the topics of espionage, sabotage, terrorism, unauthorized disclosure, or removal of classified information (including to the media), unauthorized or unreported foreign contacts, and deliberate damage to or malicious misuse of US Government information systems or defense systems,” the guidance reads.
The document later defines “unauthorized disclosure” as any “communication or physical transfer of classified information to an unauthorized recipient…including any member of the media.”
Clapper lays out that polygraph tests can be used “in the interest of national security,” and may be administered “as part of initial personnel security vetting” or at “periodic or aperiodic intervals in support of reinvestigations or continuous evaluation.”
The guidance was made public by journalist Steven Aftergood with the Federation of American Scientists, who expressed concerns about the inherent unreliability of polygraph tests.
“The problem with polygraph testing has nothing to do with intimidation but with accuracy and reliability. There is at least a small subset of people who seem unable to ‘pass’ a polygraph exam for reasons that neither they nor their examiners can discern,” Aftergood noted.
“And there are others, such as the CIA officer and Soviet spy Aldrich Ames, who have been able to pass the polygraph test while in the espionage service of a foreign government,” he added.
Since the 2013 Edward Snowden leaks, the intelligence community has turned additional focus to internal affairs, hoping to identify potential “insider threats.”
Policy shifts that equate espionage and terrorism with speaking to reporters, however, will only further enrage a journalistic community that believes the current Obama administration is hostile to the press.
On Wednesday, former New York Times journalists James Risen took to Twitter, declaring, “The Obama Administration is the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation.”
He added that Attorney General Eric Holder–who has been criticized for aggressively prosecuting and hounding national security journalists, like himself, and their sources–has “managed to destroy any semblance of a reporters privilege in the United States.”
Risen’s airing of grievances was sparked by an earlier story from The District Sentinel, detailing how the Attorney General claimed Tuesday that the administration has been lenient when it comes to prosecuting whistleblowers and leakers.
