Adding to the leak hysteria in Washington, the Senate Intelligence Committee advanced legislation purportedly to limit "leaks." WaPo reports:
The legislation, which has yet to be considered by the full Senate or House, would require the White House to notify Congress whenever it plans to share classified information with the public and would curb an increasingly common arrangement in which top national security officials take jobs as commentators on cable-television shows.
What Congress completely neglects to address in their apparent frustration that the White House leaks to the press before leaking to Congress, is that whistleblowers who are sources for Congress end up getting burned and monitored by the Executive branch.
If the Senate Intelligence Committee really wanted to stop media leaks and preserve its oversight abilities, it would enact meaningful whistleblower protections so that employees who bring concerns to Congress are adequately protected from retaliation. Such a measure would certainly give Congress more information than a head's up from the White House that the White House is planning to make public information that will no doubt benefit the administration.
UPDATE: For a full summary of the anti-leak measures in the Intelligence Authorization legislation see Steven Aftergood's analysis. Key quote:
And yet there is something incongruous, if not outrageous, about the whole effort by Congress to induce stricter secrecy in the executive branch, which already has every institutional incentive to restrict public disclosure of intelligence information.
National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake testified before two congressional committees and brought his concerns massive waste, fraud, abuse, and illegality at NSA to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act. However, that didn't stop the Obama administration from charging him under the Espionage Act and threatening him with spending the rest of his life behind bars. (The case against Drake collapsed under the weight of the truth last summer).
More recently,the Food and Drug Administration spied on employees, reporters, and congressional staffers in an attempt to target several scientist-whistleblowers who raised concerns about excessive radiation emitted from mammogram and colonoscopy machines. Several of the FDA whistleblowers who contacted Congress and were subjected to monitoring have been fired.
If Congress wanted to perform real oversight, it would protect its whistleblower sources who disclose fraud, waste, abuse, and illegality rather than adding to the leak hysteria by working on legislation that would put Congress more in the know about pro-administration leaks. However, instead of protecting the whistleblowers who approach Congress to help with oversight, the Senate Intelligence Committee is focusing on the White House leaks that Congress does not know about.
Meanwhile, the Senate Intelligence Committee also completely ignores the fact that sometimes it is Members of Congress who are responsible for leaks:
“The culture of leaks has to change,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the intelligence panel, said in a statement.
Feinstein forgets that she herself is well-known as one of the biggest leakers in Congress:
But what makes the case of Dianne Feinstein extra egregious is that, as is well-known in Washington, the California Senator is one of the most prolific leakers in town.
Congress doesn't need new anti-leak legislation. Congress needs to pass the anti-leak legislation already pending: the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (HR 3289, S 743).