LONDON - News organizations publishing leaked National Security Agency documents have inadvertently disclosed the names of at least six intelligence workers and other government secrets they never intended to give away, an Associated Press review has found.
The accidental disclosures illustrate the risks of even well-intentioned, public-interest reporting on highly secret U.S. programs.
In some cases, prominent newspapers including The New York Times quickly pulled down government records they published online and re-censored them to hide information they accidentally exposed. On one occasion, the Guardian newspaper published a National Security Agency document that appeared to identify an American intelligence target living abroad. Before the newspaper could fix its mistake, a curious software engineer, Ron Garret of Emerald Hills, Calif., tried to contact the man at his office.
“I figured someone ought to give him the heads up,” Garret said.
The inadvertent disclosures, which include technical details and other information, are another complication in the ethically and technically challenging coverage of the agency’s surveillance programs. Journalists who have seen the unfilteredsecrets leaked by former intelligence worker Edward Snowden agree some things are off-limits for publication. But media organizations sometimes have struggled to keep them that way.
Glenn Greenwald, the reporter and columnist who has played a key role in publishing so many of Snowden’s revelations, has said he wouldn’t publish the names of U.S. intelligence workers unless they were top-ranking public officials. Greenwald said the mistaken disclosures of at least six names and other material were minor errors made by technical staff and quickly corrected.
“We reported on these documents with the largest and most well-respected media organizations in the world, but like all human institutions, none is perfect,” Greenwald said.
It was not immediately clear what damage, if any, has come from the disclosures of the names of the six National Security Agency employees and other secrets. The agency would not discuss its employees. None appeared to be working undercover.
The Associated Press was able to locate several of their home addresses and other personal details about them. Theagency said in a statement that it asks news outlets “to redact and withhold the names of employees, given the sensitive nature of the information and concerns for the safety of employees and their families.”
The Associated Press is not republishing the names of the agency employees. It generally uses full names of government employees unless there is a specific threat or security concern. In this instance, The Associated Press concluded the names were not vital to readers’ understanding of the issues and provided no additional credibility or transparency into the issues.
The accidental disclosures - The Associated Press counted at least eight of them - involve carelessness by some television broadcasters, sloppy digital redactions applied to copies of documents and, in the Guardian’s case, an incomplete understanding of what information might be revealing.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly news program, The National, revealed the names of three National Security Agency employees when its cameras panned across agency documents during voice-overs.
“They were scrolling through it and I thought, ‘Hold on, that’s an unredacted, classified document,’” said Christopher Parsons, who noticed the mistake.
Parsons, a privacy expert at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, was able to read the employees’ names by pausing, rewinding and replaying the video.
CBC’s director of news content, David Walmsley, said the network regretted the error, pulled the video off its website and purged the material from its servers.
Walmsley said the CBC took responsibility for the mistake. He said Greenwald had asked that agency employee names not be broadcast.
The Times published a National Security Agency presentation last month with the name of an agency employee marked out. But a quirk of electronic documents is that information can linger even when it’s invisible to the naked eye. Within minutes of The Times’ report, the employee’s name was circulating and someone created a parody Twitter account.
The document also revealed that a Muslim terrorist group once had a preference for a specific smartphone, potentially dropping an important hint as to how its communications had been monitored.
A spokesman for the newspaper blamed a production error and said the document was removed, re-censored and republished.
The Washington Post tried but failed to censor some details of the National Security Agency’s internal set up. The Post did not respond to an email about the incident.
Information for this article was contributed by Frank Jordans and Monika Marthur of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 9 on 02/09/2014