The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: U.S. Intel Leaks – Macron Blowback

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

Friday Focus provides listeners with a focused, half-hour masterclass on the big issues, events and trends driving the news and current events. The show features Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs and bestselling author, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths, Chair and moderator of the Munk Debates.  The following is a sample of the Munk Debates’ weekly current affairs podcast, Friday Focus. On this week’s edition of the Friday Focus podcast, Janice and Rudyard start the show with a discussion of the origins and implications of the major and seemingly ongoing leak of highly classified U.S. intelligence documents on the dark web. Why did this happen? What are the consequences for America’s allies? Friday Focus wraps up with a discussion of the blowback over French President Emmanuel Macron’s recent visit to China. What exactly are NATO members, the U.S. and fellow European countries so angry about? Is China making more headway than we realize in paring away Europe’s major economies from the U.S.-led effort to back Ukraine’s war against Russian aggression? To access full-length editions of the Friday Focus podcast, consider becoming a donor to the Munk Debates for as little as $25 annually, or $.50 per episode. Canadian donors receive a charitable tax receipt. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue. More information at www.munkdebates.com.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The following is a complimentary excerpt of this week's edition of the Friday Focus podcast by The Monk Debates to access full-length editions of each and every episode, along with all kinds of great additional benefits and perks, become a donor to the Monk Debates. You can do that for as little as $25 a year, and you'll receive each and every year 50 Friday Focus episodes at full length. It's all available right now on our website in just a few simple clicks. Triple W. The Monk Debates.com. Look for the Friday Focus option in our navigation bar, the top right of the website. Make your donation, and we will send you each and every Friday a link to listen to the full-length edition of this program. Thanks in advance for your generous

contribution. Hello, Monk listeners. Rudyard Griffiths here, the executive director of the Monk Debates. Welcome to Friday Focus. We're joined as we are each and every Friday on on this program by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs, internationally renowned scholar and author. Janice, great to be in conversation with you today, the 14th of April. And summer came this week. It's not, summer came. We skipped spring, right, Richard?

Wow, Janice, you know that, those are dangerous words. You know those like horrible demoralizing snowstorm, a Colorado clipper or whatever they call it that kind of barrels across at the end of April, even early May I've seen snow here in southern Ontario where I'm recording from. True, it's true, but celebrate the good ones. Celebrate the good ones. I love it. On this podcast, you're always cup half full.

I'm cup half empty whether it comes to the weather or geopolitics. But let's start with our first story this week. We want to unpack for our listeners just this amazing. I don't know what you call it, fiasco, um, Quandango, I don't know, you'd have to come up with some,

some nillogism to describe this intelligence leak and where it's ultimately ended up at the end of this week, which looks like, uh, the arrest of a 21 year old air guardsman. So this is, uh, basically someone who's a kind of part-time member of the military,

who was, uh, had access, it seems to intelligence files, maybe some question Janice as to how he could have as quite a junior officer had access to what was leaked, which was really the top drawer kind of synthesizing of key U.S. intelligence assets from the CIA to signals intelligence, you name it all for Mark Millie, the chairman of the joint chiefs. It doesn't get much higher than that. So Janice, as this week wraps up, what do you think we've learned here? And, you know, what's the damage that's been done with these leaks?

Let's start with what have we learned here, Rudyard, and shambolic, incompetent. We could use all those words because this was a serious league. It appears that this low-level officer, as you say, very low-level, was to be. tech support. And that's how you get into a system if your tech support, right, which is, I think, a big red light for everybody in the private sector as well as government that you need to unfortunately verify the credibility of people who are providing tech support to your core systems, because that's apparently how this happened. Now, he must have had, so that's point number one, that's a scary one and an expensive one to take forward. Second one,

Rudyard, too many documents are classified. That is, and it's true in Canada too. Everything's top secret. And what's not top secret is top top secret, right? And so you get millions of documents, billions of documents that are top secret. And then the number of people who have to see what are not top secret documents, although in this case they work, by the way. the number of people with access to this is way too large and you can't thousands upon thousands in fact they think these documents possibly were eligible or accessed by upwards of 20,000 you know cleared security military diplomatic and other officials in the United States now in what world does that make sense for you let's just

talk about one document right um in which they're estimating um the the withering power of the Ukrainian Air Force and how, in fact, Ukraine could be subject if Russia clues in, and Ukraine has gone to great lengths to hide us, but if Russia clues in, Russia could really achieve air superiority, and that would be a devastating outcome for Ukraine, a devastating outcome. Why do 20,000 people have access to this? Why? Who's in the inner circle? of decision makers who are working on strategy, 20, 50, 100, maybe because you need military expertise, that's the problem with the system right there. Way too much is classified. And what is truly secret doesn't get differentiated out of the pack where you really have to have very

high level of security to see something. You know, I think this looks really bad, really bad in terms of what you and I would call capacity to execute. Just imagine if this leak had been in Canada. Just imagine. I could just see people that, you know, I know quite well in Washington sitting there and saying those Canadians, we can't trust them, are those Germans, they're penetrated by everybody. This happened on a core issue for the United States that really no more than 100 people needed to see. I was just astonished and dismayed. Now, let's be fair. Just, Janice, just to jump in there because I agree with you, you know,

that I was thinking about exactly that point, like, whoa, is this one of the other, quote, five eyes, the key intelligence sharing countries of which Canada is a member? You know, you're right, though. It lands smack dab in the middle of the plate of the U.S. Security and Intelligence establishment. In their defense, though, Janice, have we seen in this case? case, a reoccurring of a pattern, which is young men who are in this kind of gray world of these online chat forms that have a whole different hierarchy of kind of status and how

young men achieve status through ragadocio and all kinds of off-color jokes and frankly, garbage, but also in this case, a young man who seems to have been radicalized by his, you know, private chat community into taking an action that could be incredibly deleterious for him. I mean, he could be facing possibly decades of prison in a maximum security, you know, facility in the United States, which is, I mean, beyond inhuman, but that's another conversation for another day. It just, it seems, Janice, that there's something going on in the culture that that makes me in some ways sympathetic to these intelligence organizations and,

and others about losing kind of control and loyalty and discipline over the very people that they rely on for their functions to happen. In other words, at the end of the day, what fascinates me about this is that it was a human failure. It wasn't a hack by another country through cyber. It wasn't even a, you know, a state-aligned or a bunch of, you know, black hat, you know, hackers that did this. It was a completely human-driven screw-up by a young man who clearly got kind of radicalized and amped up on one of these private chats.

So you're absolutely right, regular. and frankly, an enormous problem. What do you do? This is the website Discord for people who don't go into the dark web every day, right? It is a spin-out

from 4chan, which is this underground web. And you form little chat rooms. So 20 people. And you're the moderator, registered of this chat room with 20 people. And he was, in a sense, trying to establish

status. And he would say, I have access to information. You people don't have. I really know what's going on. And then he was challenged. And that's how he bought the first document. And this went on and on for a month. So two very worrying things there, right? If you're the government or you're the private sector, can you monitor the behavior of your employees offline on the web? All of us would be up in arms if we heard that, frankly. But you're right. This is where the radicalization is happening. Secondly, there are thousands of documents that the Washington Post in the New Times

and the economists have not yet reported that he posted thousands of documents. And what makes this so damaging right here? Let's look at the Edward Snowden leak. That was, oh, my God, the United States spite on you in the past. This is current, I mean, two months old information, battle-related

information that have been released so far largely on your grade. Who knows what's out there? Because he posted the stuff. And we all know, you tweet something and you want it back 30 seconds later. It's too late. It's gone. There is no way now of retrieving or

pulling back. What has yet to be leaked? And I would assume you have to think if the Washington Post and these other media, let's have it, the Russian government and intelligence services, you know, have this because it wasn't posted, you know, it wasn't posted like some encrypted, you know, chat room or something. It bled from discord to another platform and eventually onto Twitter and then the world became aware of it. Just a side question, because it's an interesting one, Janice, what do you think the responsibility of these media organizations is? Because the U.S. government has tried to make an argument that they should not be reporting on these leaked documents,

that they have an obligation to acknowledge that these documents were classified and are not subject available for public consumption, public documentation. But boy, Janice, you know, I mean, they're newsworthy. They reveal key aspects of American policy. You name it. I mean, hardly anything could be juicier. I'm really confused about where to come down on this. I'd be curious what your view is. You know, it's a really hard issue, Roger.

In 40, 50 years ago, of course, it wouldn't have happened on Discord and the dark web. But if this had happened, the president would have phoned, the publishers of these newspapers and said this is a national security issue. We are asking for your collaboration. and do not release this stuff. And Walter Leibman would have complied because they would have seen the overarching national security implications,

which there are here. There's no doubt about that. But these documents have already, here's the irony. They've already been released. They are circulating on these websites. So there's a real moral dilemma and there's a moral hazard. Do you not let readers of your paper

know what people who are hanging out in these small moderated chat rooms already know. That is a very, very tough one. And I think editors and publishers of these papers are going to have a very hard time holding back. And you know what? See, here's another question about how do they get all that stuff? Did they scrape in these dark corners of the web? did somebody in one of these rooms hand over because they've got

a trove now of stuff that has not been released. So I don't think this investigation is done yet because we don't know. And the third thing... But, Jenice, could there be an argument about what you call the dangers of asymmetry? So if there, as you say,

if there's information out there and certain people have it and certain people don't, You know, what distortions or advantages or influence campaigns could, you know, bad actors, not the, I don't know, the editor of the Washington Post, who I'm sure, you know, has journalistic standards and scruples. But I don't know, Jess. I think when this happens, you kind of have to get it all out because if you don't, we live in a society. now of rampant misinformation. Who's to say, you know, somebody doesn't on Twitter or somewhere else start reporting on this intelligence and alleging X, Y, or Z? You just have to get it out. You don't know. Yeah, I think you have to get it out here. Roger, no matter how damaging is,

let's walk down the road that you start to go down. If this is in the dark web, which it still is, other intelligence agencies, like Russia's, like China's class, have no trouble getting access to everything that's there. And then, frankly, it will be far worse for the U.S. government than it already is, and it's really bad. It would be far worse if Russia were able to manipulate and tell that story back, and there was no public record. So I actually think everything will come out.

And that's why there's semi-panic in Washington right now. you know, they're trying to walk it back, Richard. Well, this is four months ago, and it's no longer current. But it's almost like, Janice, they're trying to walk it back because they just don't want to be embarrassed, right? I mean, it seems almost as prosaic as that, that they're now in kind of PR mode. And in some ways, to me, that's to add an embarrassment

to an already embarrassing situation. It is. Look, they have, every, and this is in a way how I think about it, and that's why everybody should be paying attention to this. Any large organization has a system's problem here. If they don't take that on board, it can happen to any large organization that has confidential material that they want protected.

My university, 100,000 people. If we didn't have tech support, we'd be dead. I wouldn't be able to do this with you. But we don't have security provisions of the kind that are necessary to protect. from a determined actor, which is what this guy was. The part that really stuns me is I would get, as you said, if we use modern digital tools,

this guy printed the documents. How does that happen? Printers leave records. Took them out. Folded them and took photographs. This is pre-industrial technology literally, in a hyper-digital age. get a leak like this, it makes you just want to tear your hair, frankly.

Yeah. Yeah, my final comment would just be to reflect on this weird world of status and kudos that exists completely outside of our awareness as kind of mainstream, you know, somewhat older, you know, people in this society. And I just think we're all institutions and leaders and others should just be just be aware that there are other things going on out there that you have no idea about that people put a lot of time and attention and focus on to it because it's where arguably they find the greatest amount of meaning and validation in their lives. You may think that it's your workplace that they're

in, that they're finding that meaning. You may think it's their family or community. It's not. It's in these online spaces and the fact that they are completely opaque. It's a weird cultural moment and I don't know. It's almost impossible to wrap our heads around it. But let's take a break. When we come back on the other side, Janice, I want to talk to you about the backlash to President Emmanuel Macron's amazing, excellent adventure in China. It has been vicious. And what does it say about the relationship between the United States, China, Europe, China, United States, Europe.

We're going to dig into it all right after this short break. Thanks for listening to this excerpt of the Friday Focus podcast to get full-length editions of each and every episode of this program. Simply go to our website, www.The monkdebates.com. Click on the Friday Focus tab in our navigation on the top right of the site. Make a donation as little as $25 a year of 50 cents an episode at Wilson. you not only the full-length editions of each and every Friday Focus podcast, all kinds of special offers, perks, access to events, and additional content. Again, you can do that right now by becoming a donor to the Monk Debates, a triple W Monk Debates and UnK DebateswithanS.com.