Mark Warner says US should ‘classify less’ following classified documents leak
Ryan King
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Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) proposed a few reform proposals in the wake of classified military documents leaking online.
Warner suggested that the intelligence community should classify less material and tighten access to its most sensitive secrets. Warner also said that there should be a single entity overseeing the nation’s deepest secrets.
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“We way over-classify documents,” Warner told ABC’s This Week. “Once we get to that highest level of classification, we maybe have too many folks taking a look at them. Over 4 million people with clearances. So, let’s classify less.”
Earlier this month, Massachusetts Air National Guardsman 1st airman Jack Douglas Teixeira, 21, was arrested for allegedly leaking classified material, including information about the war in Ukraine. That information was disseminated in online chatrooms before officials discovered it, according to the Pentagon.
Many, such as Warner’s counterpart House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner (R-OH), have raised questions about how Teixeira, a cyber transport systems journeyman, even had access to that material in the first place.
“This individual which literally was just an IT tech, there’s no reason that that person should be able to see the full document,” he said.
“If this had been at another entity another agency like the NSA, where unfortunately we’ve had leaks in the past, there would have been internal controls that would say, you just can’t copy that many documents. We need to make sure we’ve got similar internal controls across the whole system,” Warner added.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack, Congress enacted reforms to cut through intelligence silos and ensure that information sharing flourished across agencies.
Warner appeared to allude to concerns about bottlenecking intelligence access in his calls for reform.
“I’ve been a big advocate of security clearance reform. We can’t go to the other end of the spectrum where somebody has to wait a year or two before they get a security clearance if they want to go work for something like the CIA,” he said. “We then have to put in place something called continuous vetting.”
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Warner added that the recent leak “is a problem that we shouldn’t be totally surprised at.”
Senators were recently briefed on the leak and voiced shock over the rules guarding the nation’s most sensitive secrets.