The Big Leak

Probably the biggest surprise in the story about the US intelligence community leaking classified data on Israel's attack plans is how non-surprising it is. Look at the classification markings on the document:

Those of you with the right kind of experience will know what that means; those of you with very good memories will remember "TK" from Hillary Clinton's classified email scandal. In fact I'll reproduce that post's bit on classification markings because almost all of them appear here as well.

TOP SECRET is information whose release could cause "exceptionally grave damage to the national security." No one may access this information who has not been through the very thorough background investigation, and even then you must demonstrate need to know.

SI means "Special Intelligence," and is a subset of SCI, or "Sensitive Compartmentalized Information." This information is tightly controlled, so that not only do you need to have need to know, you must have been properly read into the specific program from which the information comes.

TK is "Talent Keyhole," which governs our best aerial and satellite reconnaissance. It is always SCI information, and is extremely sensitive because it gives enemies a sense of exactly how good our reconnaissance technology has become.

NOFORN means "not releasable to foreign nationals." This caveat is discouraged because "NOFORN" means not the British, not the Canadians, not the Australians, not New Zealand. You can mark the data to be shared with the other Anglosphere powers, our very closest allies, with the caveat "FIVE EYES," or "FVEY". We have a treaty with them that governs the controls of sensitive signals intelligence. If the Inspector General has determined this item was properly marked NOFORN, it means that the information was so sensitive that we shouldn't share it with the British or the Australians in spite of that treaty.

RSEN means information that is restricted due to special sensitivity, requiring specialized handling methods (which, needless to say, do not include dumping it into social media). FG ISR means 'foreign government intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance,' which is mostly a warning that some of the data is coming from allies sharing things with us rather than something we produced ourselves.

Note that the overall report is classified NOFORN even though most of the quotes are releasable FVEY, but if you look through the document you can see that some of it is only releasable to Great Britain (GBR), and a couple of paragraphs are not releasable even to them (NF). There is likely some collection method for that paragraph that we aren't comfortable even letting Great Britain know that we have; also, one kind of missile being discussed isn't even in the open sources as a thing that exists ("Golden Horizon"). The media reports about this are only guessing what is being discussed -- that's how secret these documents are meant to be. 

Yet who can be surprised that there are people within the US government, including the intelligence community, who would leak such information if they thought it might hamper Israel? Clearly the ruling party includes many who are outright opposed to Israel, not just to Israel's war; some of their electoral difficulties arise from an internal dispute over what should be done about all this. 

By the way, note well Mr. Schindler's explanation of who is responsible for investigating this leak:

Whether the Biden-Harris administration possesses the political will to let the counterspies do their job is another matter. In normal times, such a high-profile investigation, touching multiple agencies, would be coordinated by the National Security Council, specifically by the NSC’s director for intelligence programs. That big job is currently held by Maher Bitar, who in his position has access to every IC secret. He is no hardliner towards Tehran. When he was a student at Georgetown University, Bitar held a leadership position with Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical group that’s an apologist for HAMAS (itself an Iranian proxy) which has coordinated anti-Israeli protests at campuses nationwide during the Gaza War.

Emphasis added. 

One can be opposed to Israel without being in any way disloyal to the United States, of course; one might even be a former leader of a Hamas-aligned student group without being a traitor to the United States (although there are limits on how far one can go with such alignment without breaking criminal laws, since Hamas is a designated foreign terrorist organization). 

Leaking American secrets, however, is inherently disloyal unless the secrets themselves show the government betraying its duty to the American people -- in that case only, good citizenship could include leaking secrets so that the public can know and take action to repair the matter, as the citizens and not the government are the proper sovereigns of the United States. Here, where the leak endangers American collection methods that were merely being used to inform ourselves internally about what Israel is up to, there's no such excuse. 

Yet one has to wonder, as Mr. Schindler puts it, whether there will be 'the will' to prosecute this matter as it deserves.