Opinion

A leak witch hunt

The Obama administration’s response to high-profile leaks may cause more problems than it solves.

In the wake of Army Pfc. Bradley Manning’s theft of military intelligence documents, splashed all over WikiLeaks, President Obama quietly implemented the Insider Threat Program in October 2011. This commands government employees to be on the lookout for “suspicious behavior” among their colleagues — and then rat them out, under pain of possible criminal charges.

Sound reasonable? Maybe — especially in the light of rogue contract employee Edward Snowden’s purloined revelations about the National Security Agency’s breathtakingly extensive foreign and domestic spying operation.

That’s caused max headaches and embarrassment for Washington — including looking impotent as Snowden flits around the globe seeking a safe haven.

But is a crackdown on leakers by almost any means necessary the right way to go? Is this the kind of America we want — one in which neighbor watches neighbor, desk jockey keeps an eye on desk jockey (shades of the old East Germany) and the NSA merrily snoops through everybody’s metadata, in search of a handful out of more than 300 million Americans who are up to no good?

Perfect security was never possible; in a wired, fluid world, even less so. And efforts to reach it come at the expense of personal freedom. So how do we balance the two?

It’s ironic that the crackdown comes under Obama, a man of the left that has long celebrated whistleblowers as heroes — viz. the films “The Insider,” with Russell Crowe as a tobacco exec who’s finally had enough. What’s the line between whistleblower and leaker?

Journalists rely on leaks to alert them to government malfeasance or needless secrecy. But as the administration’s strong-arming of The Associated Press and Fox News has shown, investigative reporting is the last thing it wants to hear about. Obsessed with secrecy, it seeks a zero-tolerance policy toward leakers.

Mind you, the Bush administration briefly flirted with cracking down on leakers after The New York Times revealed details about the NSA’s “warrantless wiretapping” program, but wisely decided against it. The cost to the First Amendment would have been too dear.

Which is why the Obama crew might want to back off its witch hunt — and instead get its house in order. The fact that lowly functionaries like an Army private (Manning) and a 30-year-old Booz Allen employee (Snowden) can get their hands on so much important data speaks to security failures at the Army and the NSA — not to the inherent criminality of the American public.

Already, a backlash has set in. A new Quinnipiac poll shows that by a 55-34 percent majority, American voters think Snowden is a whistleblower, not a traitor. Further, a plurality (45-40) now say the feds have gone too far in restricting civil liberties in the name of national security.

In any case, chasing down actual traitors (Aldrich Ames, Robert Hanssen) is the FBI’s job, not a civilian’s.

When failures do occur — as in the Boston Marathon bombing — the fault is often simple political correctness; our security agencies simply didn’t want to hear the Russians’ warning about radicalized Chechen Muslims in the Hub. That would have been “profiling.” It would also have been the right thing to do.

There’s no need to turn the United States into an American remake of “The Lives of Others,” the 2006 Oscar-winning German film about East Germany under the Stasi. What we need instead is the will to act on actionable intelligence, no matter where it leads. Just ask the NYPD, which couldn’t care less about political correctness — and has had a flawless record since 9/11.

As the recent scandals involving the Internal Revenue Service have shown, Americans need to know what powerful government agencies are up to. Because what we don’t know can hurt us.