To Josh and wraith808:
So what you say is that, for example, W. Mark Felt was wrong to leak information about the illegalities committed by the Nixon administration?
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Indeed, I do not work with classified data, so I do not know all the details regarding this subject. I only read some stories about some whistleblowers, people that have put their careers and even lifes in jeopardy in order to stop bad things and bad people (or at least to inform us about their existence). And I am glad that they did it.
-bgd77
Let's go a bit into why oversight isn't as good as it perhaps should be, and why those being scrutinized might have a problem with it.
The classified information in a lot of cases isn't just discrete bits of data. In the end, there are assets on the ground- people- that put their lives in the way for different reasons. No matter what these reasons are,
“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” People in oversight in some cases use information for political purposes of all sorts. Because of people getting burned, the assets are skittish about people knowing about them, and the people that utilize the information are skittish because these leaks make it harder for them to get the assets in the first place. This makes our defense weaker- we might not get information to effectively handle something because someone is concerned for their safety.
This lack of trust for the oversight, and for the operations that might be put into place makes the oversight process a lot less than it should be, which then weakens the ability for true problems to be brought to light.
Was W. Mark Felt wrong? Yes. Do the ends justify the means? No. Something good came of it, but that still doesn't make it right, or him any less wrong. The problem with classified information and oversight needs to be solved, but having people reveal classified information doesn't make that problem go away, nor does it make going against the vow that you make right. These kinds of revelations have the potential to make real people that are just doing their job and happen to be incidental to the information in question be put at unnecessary risk... and that's not right no matter what IMO. The problem needs to be fixed from the top down, and not the bottom up, and the only way to do that is to (1) make enforcing the CIA Secrecy Agreement a priority no matter what, so that those protected by the classified information are just that... protected, and (2) make oversight a priority and those that violate oversight for any reason liable for that, and (3) make sure that the oversight committee is staffed by those that understand that they either *have* to be available when a Presidential Finding is issued in order to be notified, or give some sort of leeway in the reporting to take into account their unavailability.
Exceptions to prima facie ethical principles must be shown to fulfill more important principles, not simply be assumed to be acceptable due to their being professionally "expedient." An affirmation of the legitimacy of the CIA as an institution does not entail moral approval of every end it might pursue nor every method it might employ. And oversight helps to keep the CIA in line with the rule of law, while keeping their methods and information out of public scrutiny.
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