Intelligence agencies are tightening their security after Bradley Manning exposed so much wrong doing. One proposed method involves integrating open source monitoring tools that would allow intelligence workers to remotely monitor each other. A supervisor for example could decide to examine what a particular agent had been doing on his computer, “If the officer acts like a potential leaker, sending an encrypted email or using an unregistered thumb drive, the analyst might push a button and watch a screen video of the officer’s last hour of work.”

They claim such techniques will enhance security so much that the software developer writing this code exclaims, “’Had SureView been on Bradley Manning’s machine,’ SureView’s director Ryan Szedelo told The Daily Beast, ‘No one would know who Bradley Manning is today.’”

That makes sense if you are marketing your software to intelligence agencies. But if an analyst can monitor everything an agent is doing, or has done in the past, and the analyst has as much courage and conscience as Bradley Manning, then what is to stop analysts from blowing the whistle too? Read more here.

An MSNBC article “Catching the Next Wikileaker,” also discusses the SureView software, and it too ignores the issue of a citizens obligation and duty to expose war crimes and other wrongdoing. Trevor Timm of the Electronic Frontier Foundation is interviewed in the article, and he argues that in order to stop leaks, the government needs to stop over-classifying material,

“The government classified a staggering 77 million documents last year, a 40 percent increase on the year before. And a recent report to Congress showed 4.2 million people have classified security clearances. That’s more than the city of Los Angeles.”

With so many people having access to so much classified material, isn’t it more important to stop corruption than to stop whistle-blowers? Let’s hope more people have the courage Bradley had.

One U.S. Diplomat who is daring to speak out about his criticisms of U.S. policy in Iraq as well as the U.S. classification system is Peter Van Buren. Interviewed for an article released by Wired yesterday, he discusses how he lost his Top Security Clearance for linking to a WikiLeaks cable in his personal blog. After WikiLeaks began releasing U.S. government documents, all State Department staff were warned that they were not allowed to look at the documents, even though they were publicly viewable.