Heard on radio on either NPR or Air America or both, Novak was not called to testify by the grand jury. There is not a hint that he is being required to provide information or is testifying to the grand jury under oath. That to me looks like hypocrisy--demanding that someone who didn't even publish anything be tossed in jail, while the person who did first publication apparently gets a complete and utter bye. Also, the background that I seem to recall is that very little of the excrement through the fan over the release of classified information which looked like a piece of vicious vituperation going after someone's wife and putting people she had worked with in jeopary for the husband saying the yellow cake report was bogus, got directed at Novak.
Identities of covert agents are kept secret because it can cause "serious damage" or "exceptionally grave damage" [I don't remember the exact terms anymore that apply to particular classifications] to the US national interest if the identities get revealed. In the old Cold War days, identification of covert agents often resulted in the deaths or disappearance without a trace of their contacts, once the covert agent's identity was revealed, along with the other side realizing what information they thought was secure, actually wasn't secure. (That is, there's stuff that's secret, that the people who classified it, thinks isn't known to people who don't have the "need to know." Then they find out that someone who had access to that information, was a spy or giving information to spies. They then work to change things to minimize the damage--change the codes in use if code information got out, change procedures if procedures got out, and trying to figure out ways to mitigate the other side having gotten detailed knowledge of equipment performance. E.g., if I get the technical details about the actual flight envelope and maximum performance and range and vulnerabiltie of combat aircraft, I can design a better system and procedures to neutralize it. It's got an unrefueled range of 600 kilometers, say? I can use that information in my ground-based air defense systems and briefing fighter pilots practicing to shoot the things down. The computer system at Facility X has to recycle at the turn of day? That's when I run operations that Facility X is watching. There's a hole in the satellite coverage due to sensor characteristics? I'll run operations where and when the hole in the satellite coverage is (that one actually happened.... if you don't know there's a deficiency, you can't exploit it. If you do know, you exploit it. Classifying the measured performance means that the other side has to make a lot more guesses and spend a lot more time and effort trying to figure out how to neutralize something).
One of the things about certain sorts of safes is that they're designed so that break-ins show. That is, finding out that something has been "compromised" is some cases is more important than the actual contents were. Assuming that something is still secret, when it's been leaked, is a much more situation that the information that had been secret, is known to no longer be secret--known leaked information is damaging, but not as damaging as assuming that the information is still a secret and then finding out often in highly unpleasant situations and conditions that the information isn't a secret after all, and the other side was exploiting that as an advantage to destroy your economy, tap your communications lines, divert your cargo vehicles, feed false information to your spies, etc.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-07-08 03:25 pm (UTC)Identities of covert agents are kept secret because it can cause "serious damage" or "exceptionally grave damage" [I don't remember the exact terms anymore that apply to particular classifications] to the US national interest if the identities get revealed. In the old Cold War days, identification of covert agents often resulted in the deaths or disappearance without a trace of their contacts, once the covert agent's identity was revealed, along with the other side realizing what information they thought was secure, actually wasn't secure. (That is, there's stuff that's secret, that the people who classified it, thinks isn't known to people who don't have the "need to know." Then they find out that someone who had access to that information, was a spy or giving information to spies. They then work to change things to minimize the damage--change the codes in use if code information got out, change procedures if procedures got out, and trying to figure out ways to mitigate the other side having gotten detailed knowledge of equipment performance. E.g., if I get the technical details about the actual flight envelope and maximum performance and range and vulnerabiltie of combat aircraft, I can design a better system and procedures to neutralize it. It's got an unrefueled range of 600 kilometers, say? I can use that information in my ground-based air defense systems and briefing fighter pilots practicing to shoot the things down. The computer system at Facility X has to recycle at the turn of day? That's when I run operations that Facility X is watching. There's a hole in the satellite coverage due to sensor characteristics? I'll run operations where and when the hole in the satellite coverage is (that one actually happened.... if you don't know there's a deficiency, you can't exploit it. If you do know, you exploit it. Classifying the measured performance means that the other side has to make a lot more guesses and spend a lot more time and effort trying to figure out how to neutralize something).
One of the things about certain sorts of safes is that they're designed so that break-ins show. That is, finding out that something has been "compromised" is some cases is more important than the actual contents were. Assuming that something is still secret, when it's been leaked, is a much more situation that the information that had been secret, is known to no longer be secret--known leaked information is damaging, but not as damaging as assuming that the information is still a secret and then finding out often in highly unpleasant situations and conditions that the information isn't a secret after all, and the other side was exploiting that as an advantage to destroy your economy, tap your communications lines, divert your cargo vehicles, feed false information to your spies, etc.