The Spy We Forgot
Over the past six years, the United States intelligence community has taken two powerful punches from insiders — the first from Pfc. Bradley Manning of the Army (now Chelsea Manning) and the second from the National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, both of whom leaked thousands of classified documents. The news this month that another N.S.A. contract employee, Harold Martin III, removed a large volume of classified information from the agency shows that the government is still struggling to keep its secrets safe.
These security breaches may have caught the government by surprise, but intelligence officials have no excuse for being shocked. They were forewarned about the vulnerability of digital secrets a full 16 years ago by the actions of a little-known traitor named Brian Regan. A signals analyst at the National Reconnaissance Office — an agency responsible for managing the country’s spy satellites — Mr. Regan pulled off a heist of more than 20,000 documents containing top-secret satellite images and reports, which he tried to sell to Iraq and Libya.
These security breaches may have caught the government by surprise, but intelligence officials have no excuse for being shocked. They were forewarned about the vulnerability of digital secrets a full 16 years ago by the actions of a little-known traitor named Brian Regan. A signals analyst at the National Reconnaissance Office — an agency responsible for managing the country’s spy satellites — Mr. Regan pulled off a heist of more than 20,000 documents containing top-secret satellite images and reports, which he tried to sell to Iraq and Libya.
No comments:
Post a Comment