Everyone's angry at what this 21 year old in the Air National Guard did. And that's certainly reasonable.
But as ever, the real problem is that he was able to do it.
@pieist There's only so much they can do to prevent people with access from misusing sensitive information. I suppose they could tighten up access, and impose further controls. But if someone is determined to misuse the information they have access to, I don't know what can be done.
@slcw All of which skirts the core question: is our naive supposition even remotely true that restricted, highly sensitive information is actually restricted to the smallest possible set of carefully vetted personnel who actually have a need for it?
@barks @slcw As a supposition it's pretty famously untrue. i was at a talk by a former intelligence chief who talked about the dilemma faced by our intelligence partners:
If they don't share intelligence with us, they're cut out of a vital loop, but if they do, their intelligence will be dissipated into a vast and unguarded US public sector and discussed openly by first-year congressional aides brown-bagging their lunches in DC parks.
