Don’t Read This If You Have a Security Clearance

In 1969, the KGB pulled off one of the cleverest deceptions of the Cold War, slipping forged documents into a leak of otherwise authentic U.S. war plans in an effort to pit America against its NATO allies. More than 50 years later, I was invited to run a training session on disinformation for a U.S. intelligence agency. In my back-and-forth with the official in charge, I proposed a game of spot-the-fake using the 1969 leak. The exercise would test whether the intelligence officers could recognize one of the best forgeries in the history of spycraft. But the official shot down my idea. The leaked material technically may still be classified, he explained, so we weren’t allowed to use it. In fact, although the documents had been sitting in public view since before most of us were born, the officers in the class weren’t even allowed to look at them.

For this I had the Department of Defense to thank. On June 7, an immediate security guidance: Employees or contractors “who inadvertently discover potentially classified information in the public domain shall report its existence immediately to their Security Manager,” read the new rule. This reporting requirement was onerous enough on its own to scare federal employees. To make things worse, those who didn’t just stumble across classified documents but looked for them deliberately would be punished: Contractors or employees “who seek out classified information in the public domain, acknowledge its accuracy or existence, or proliferate the information in any way will be subject to sanctions,” stated the notice. (The directive was grounded in a similar issued by the Office of Management and Budget.) Given that the Snowden revelations were being published by media organizations and blasted around the internet, the policy effectively turned mundane activities like watching the news, browsing social media, searching Google, and even reading books into a risky proposition for any federal employee or contractor.