Potter and Leonard, Junior G-Men

The Potter/Leonard flap over their desire to get themselves Top Secret clearance - and their apparent willingness to back away from the Joint Terrorism Task Force if they don't - is filled with half-truths and misunderstandings. (For a good overview see here and here.)

First, what does it mean for something to be Top Secret vs. Secret? Boiling down the explanation I got from my source, who has Top Secret clearance as part of his job, the difference is generally Sources and Methods.

It is rarely a risk to National Security to let the public know that we know that (say) North Korea has nukes. It is almost always a very grave risk to disclose the Sources and Methods by which we may know it. Have we bugged someone's bedroom where he spills everything to his mistress? Revealing that could reveal who the source is and lead to the discovery of the bug. Is all the information coming from a given source about agriculture? That could point a finger at our mole in the Ministry of Agriculture.

So, one way to take a Top Secret document and render it merely Secret (or even releasable to the public) can be to edit out all the Sources and Methods. Smart intelligence officials may even wait until they have two or three sources before revealing a fact, so the enemy cannot figure out, based on the content, who the source must have been.

(The British famously had broken the Nazi "Enigma" code and were desparate to ensure the Nazis didn't know it, lest they stop using it. During the North Africa campaign the Brits regularly sank German supply ships based on intercepted schedule information - but they always flew a recon aircraft over the ship to be targeted, waited a while, then sank it. The Germans were baffled at how good those British recon flights were. They never suspected Enigma was broken.)

Which brings us to Potter and Leonard. If you want to oversee your people, you don't always need to know all of the details of their day. You do need to know enough to be sure they're doing the right things, and you may want to have their work audited by a third party from time to time.

So, a regular summary of their work could be edited down from Top Secret to Secret, and a trusted person (say anybody working for state government with an existing Top Secret clearance, such as a judge, Department of Justice lawyer, etc.) could periodically examine the Top Secret materials for compliance with departmental policies and ORS 181, the state law that forbids law enforcement from taking part in certain kinds of domestic spying.

Not enough teeth for you? Then consider having the Oregon Dept of Justice issue an opinion on whether FBI agents could be prosecuted in state court for breaking state law or - if they instructed local cops to violate ORS 181 - conspiring to break the law. Wouldn't that be enough of a safeguard?

The Portland City Council seems unable to distinguish between what they want to accomplish (in this case oversight), and a particular way to accomplish it (Top Secret clearances and Sekrit Decoder Rings for Potter and Leonard). This mental rigidity is visible in other ways as well, I believe.