BERLINER MORGENPOST
Berlin (ots)
After the chaotic years in office of former US President Donald Trump, which were characterized by regular revelations from within the American government apparatus, successor Joe Biden had promised more professionalism and reliability. In every sense.
The recent data leak scandal puts the president in the most lopsided light possible. Even if the motive, extent and authorship of the publication of dozens of state secrets from military and secret service circles have not yet been clarified beyond doubt, a devastating interim judgment can already be made. After Wikileaks, Edward Snowden (NSA) and Chelsea Manning (Iraq), the world power, which has been investing hundreds of billions in internal and external security every year since the terror event of September 11, 2001, still cannot guarantee that secret information is secret remain.
Not only that. When it is confirmed that a single self-important youngster in the pay of the military had access to the most sensitive foreign policy and military dossiers about Russia, Ukraine, Israel, Egypt and South Korea and was able to circulate them undetected on a video game platform for months, you have to be serious doubt the sanity of those responsible in the Pentagon and in the White House.
Anyone who, like the USA, spends more than 800 billion dollars a year for the integrity of the nation must, after painful experiences in the past, ensure that internal matters remain internal. Everything else is negligent. The tour of apologies that Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Secretary of State Tony Blinken and, soon, Biden are expected to embark on to appease allies and contain the yet-to-be-explained damage stems from a mixture of arrogance and indifference.
What experts, who often come from the apparatus itself, have been complaining about for a long time has once again come true. The unprecedentedly sophisticated security architecture, in which a good three million civil servants have access to information worthy of protection, has outgrown the United States. One means can only be to drastically reduce the number of people who keep secrets and to make access to documents, which if published improperly in the digital age can trigger global crises in no time at all, massively more difficult.
To do this, the system of security clearance (security clearance) urgently needs to be reformed. The sluice for access to state secrets must be tightened. And in such a way that technical processes make it apparent in real time if someone – as in the current case apparently happened undetected for weeks – abuses strictly confidential information that can only be viewed on computers isolated from the Internet in specially secured rooms.
The blind spot that has opened up as a result of the activities of the secret traitor who worked under the acronym “OG”/”Original Gangster” is likely to limit the US’s room for maneuver in the current major conflicts from Russia/Ukraine to China/Taiwan. Credibility has suffered greatly. Domestically, after the botched troop withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, the Biden government gave the hostile Republicans another tool with the mega-leak to criticize the USA as vulnerable and amateurish. Everything as unnecessary as a goiter.
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