Cheney kept CIA program from Congress, source says

[Sqrl]

TheRealMafoo said:

Sqrl said:

I'm not saying that nobody in congress should be allowed to know and that is not how it is currently handled either.  It is that not everyone in congress needs to have specific detailed knowledge of every aspect of our nations TS/S affairs. I can easily think of examples but thats not the point because your question assumes I'm contending something that I'm not. 

Or to put it another way we agree that congress needs to be briefed, but we disagree on how many of them need to be briefed and to what level of detail.  Advocating full briefings to every member is just as insane as advocating no briefings...actually its probably more so.  Information can later be divulged but you can never un-tell or un-leak a piece of information.  Once it's out it's out for good.

I would agree with you if we voted that way.

if congress was setup so only 10 people voted on things related to the CIA, then only 10 people would need to know. But all 535 vote on these things.

In a country with 300 million people, reducing the number who need to know to to 535 seems pretty damn secure to me.

And I am not saying they need to know everything. I mean they don't need to know the names of all the people who are agents. But they might need to know what those people did, so they can decide to vote on if they should be allowed to continued to do it.

The policy-shaping vote actually does occur on that small-scale level in the comittees. 

Come on now, the size of the country is irrelevant, we both know it only takes one.  The thing is that those 535 congressmen are only the start as we add in the aides who are the ones who actually do the work (and in many cases even sit in briefings already).  We are talking about over 1000 new people. Briefing even 100 people is a sizeable exposure for a single sensitive piece of information, several hundred or even a thousand gaining access to the breadth of our intelligence information is the exact opposite of secure..it is a massive security weakness and would require a massive increase in security around all of the people being briefed.  It's an all-around terrible idea to fully brief everyone, both for the integirty of the information divulged and the safety of the individuals briefed.  Even if we were going to enact this plan the program itself would have to be classified TS.

Now you need to realize that the vast majority of sensitive information reviewed currently is given the 'OK' and moved passed very quickly.  When a specific policy issue is raised in a briefing more people can be, and typically are, brought in as necessary.  Even then the detail is restricted by relevance to the specific policy issues they are addressing on a strict as-needed basis. This is "need to know" in action.  Only a handful of people need to know in order to raise the issue and from there things progress slowly to keep information exposure to a minimum while allowing those who truly need to know ..to know.