A national tale of dereliction

When we gaze into the collective mirror to see who we are as a people and to admire the reflection representative of our tribe, whatever it may be, we abhor the sight of imperfection. We so often prefer to see only what we want to see and when we do notice the presence of blemishes and flaws on the face staring back at us, too much of the time we choose to simply ignore them. If we do happen to focus and dwell on them, we love to buy into the notion that our dings and dents are not that bad and that those belonging to someone else are far worse. When we do have a boo-boo, however minor, the ease of dismissal can sometimes allow it to grow into a serious issue that threatens to expose potentially debilitating and even fatal weaknesses. Investing in one’s own soothing narrative can lead to concealing a lot of things, some of which can balloon into big problems which can be discovered at inopportune times. Some issues can even cross the line of what is considered to be criminal. One thing is for certain though, nobody aspiring to greatness in service of the American public is without a failure of character or an episode of demonstrably bad judgement somewhere in their past. The confidence of the voting public can be placed at ease when our elected leaders can show that they have evolved beyond those episodes of failure and have made amends when and where indicated. The cold and hard fact of the matter in all of this is that no member of our species is perfect. All we have to do is start from that place and deal with it with the understanding that all political candidates and elected office holders must be recruited from the frail and flawed human race.

Safeguarding the nation’s secrets and properly securing information and materials marked as having a classified nature is something impressed upon every military recruit from early in basic training. First and foremost, recruits are taught that access to classified material is granted on a strictly NEED-TO-KNOW basis. Also, the compromise of sensitive material, even if unverified, can result in severe censure for the service member responsible for the breach, be it actual or merely potential. For example, if a nuclear power student were to be found off site with a piece of scrap paper on their person on which was written in pencil a physics equation from a course held in a secured classroom, that would be grounds for loss of the student’s security clearance and expulsion from the nuclear power program ON THE SPOT! This is how it was explained to Yours Truly during my active Naval service by someone who witnessed that very phenomenon in the first person. Suffice to say our nation’s military has a long and storied history of taking the task of safeguarding the nation’s secrets with the utmost of seriousness. Even civilians who get elected to Congress gain an appreciation the level of gravitas surrounding and concerning classified material. They can only handle such documents and items in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF). When they do, they do so WITHOUT their cell phone or any recording material or even notebook and writing instrument on their person. It is unknown at what paygrade this security measure is allowed to be laxed, if it is allowed to be laxed. My kneejerk guess would be that there isn’t one.

With the advent of the Internet and instant personal communication, cyberspace has become the latest medium tainted by crime and fraught with an entirely new milieu requiring enhanced counterintelligence. Staying one step and preferably several ahead of the spies and hackers who can cleverly penetrate cybersecurity has become and the ever present and ongoing chore within the scope of the national intelligence community. The presence of classified material on unsecured non-government email servers became not only a thing but a national outrage in 2015. When a Presidential candidate targeted his opponent for using a private server for official business on which were received potentially sensitive email documents, it became a national scandal even though at the time they were sent, some retrospectively identified emails were not marked as classified. Regardless of where the failure in the custody chain may have been or the need and intent for the material in question, it became campaign fodder for the infamous “Lock her up” chant. The downside for the leader of that chant is that is, given the level of scrutiny the private server and its contents received, there should be no tolerance for security lapses subsequent to that investigation be they virtual or actual.

Most of us among the governed truly want to believe that we are being led by the best among us. However, being subject to the reality previously noted, those chosen from the rank and file of such an imperfect and error-prone species should give us pause particularly in light of the discoveries of the past couple weeks. When the incumbent President is found to be in possession of unsecured classified and top-secret material without apparent cause, it shakes the faith many had in him and badly undermines trust in his leadership, but that is more a matter of personal disappointment. It should be a matter of national consternation that there appears to be a pervasive problem of failing to secure classified documents whether they be found in a locked garage next to a classic Corvette without public access or in a cleaning closet located in a venue which is seemingly open to the public. It doesn’t matter if the vulnerability concerns one, half a dozen or ten thousand documents, now is the time to double down on efforts to eradicate security breaches wherever they may exist. That is the best thing we can all hope come of these findings. As military recruits are taught, national security is the responsibility of EVERYBODY. It is unacceptable that this sort of lackadaisical attitude and outright failure exists at our highest levels of government. How each high-profile current and former official deals with this problem will be a true display of integrity, the watertight variety of which is the preferred option. That will be the most telling of the quality of leadership, past and present. Even still, as has been shown in security failures from the beginning of the Republic to date, the guarantee of safe secrets is only good until the next breach.