Obama to Issue So-Called 'WikiLeaks' Executive Order

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By executive order, President Obama will instruct federal agencies today to better safeguard their classified secrets, to set up internal audit systems, and to make sure that reluctance to share critical intelligence in the aftermath of the WikiLeaks exposure does not hamper collaboration across agencies.

The so-called "WikiLeaks" executive order has been long awaited by the national security establishment and by the privacy and civil liberties communities. It was provided by the White House to National Journal. The order creates a government-wide steering committee to create and assess information sharing policies across the government, as well as a mechanism to determine whether internal auditing procedures work properly.

From National Journal:
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Private First Class Bradley Manning, who the government believes provided WikiLeaks with most of the classified cables and reports it released, was able to access State Department cables that were not germane to his work as a forward-deployed intelligence analyst in Iraq without being detected.

A new Insider Threat Task Force led by the Attorney General will develop a government-wide strategy to see whether agencies that handle classified information can weed out the malcontents and people whose behavior suggests they cannot handle sensitive information appropriately.

The result will be a beefing up of federal counter-intelligence programs.

The intelligence community has worried about an over-reaction, reasoning that analysts who want more access to classified information to solve a problem will second-guess their own efforts because they don't want to trigger an investigation. The order does not specify how agencies ought to strike this balance, but suggests that each agency should establish policies that incorporate their own internal cultures, bearing in mind that the larger goal is to prevent the unauthorized disclosure of classified information.

Obama's executive order makes agencies primarily responsible for the information they obtain and share.

It also creates a Classified Information Sharing and Safeguarding Office to develop institutional knowledge about best practices across the government. This office will provide staff for the inter-agency steering committee, according to a White House fact sheet.

The executive order is the result of several months worth of a deliberation by a high-level task force formed after of the WikiLeaks disclosure. The government has taken several steps to prevent WikiLeaks-like incidents from happening again, including limiting the number of people with access to removable flash drives in classified environments and commencing a government-wide survey of existing internal auditing procedures.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

Marc Ambinder is an Atlantic contributing editor. He is also a senior contributor at Defense One, a contributing editor at GQ, and a regular contributor at The Week.

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New polling finds that their support for the president remains strikingly high. But are they mortgaging the future of the faith?

With two alleged extramarital affairs looming over the presidency, white evangelicals are doubling down on their support for Donald Trump. But the near-term political gains their support is yielding may come at a high cost for the future of the faith.

A new survey released this week by PRRI, where I serve as the CEO, finds white evangelical support for Trump remains strikingly high, with 75 percent holding a favorable view of the president and only 22 percent holding an unfavorable view. This level of support far exceeds his favorability among all Americans, which is at 42 percent. Among all non-white evangelical Americans, Trump’s favorability is only 36 percent.

This is hardly the first time white evangelicals have chosen to weather a Trump scandal. Despite revelations of taped boasts of sexual assault during the 2016 campaign, moral equivocation about white supremacy during his first year as president, and a host of other controversies, white evangelical support for Trump has steadily increased over time. While his favorability never reached 50 percent during the 2016 primary season, by the early fall of 2016, it jumped to 61 percent. Until this week, the highest level of support from white evangelicals PRRI had measured was 74 percent, shortly after his inauguration. Since the start of his presidency, there have been minor fluctuations, but overall his favorability with this group has never dipped below 65 percent.