The web is buzzing with news this morning that the latest video of Osama bin Laden was possibly leaked by someone inside the U.S. intelligence community to the media. That leak reportedly led al Qaeda to shut down a hole in its Internet infrastructure, called “Obelisk,” thereby closing a fruitful window into the terror organization’s web activities. The New York Sun‘s Eli Lake and the Washington Post are both reporting on this unfortunate development this morning. Much of the attention thus far has focused on the damage done to our national security–and rightfully so. But there is potentially another twist to this. According to Lake’s account, the SITE Institute first provided the video and a transcript of it to the National Counterterrorism Center. Here is how Lake’s report explains it:
This means that a small, private firm got its hands on the latest missive from Osama bin Laden before the federal government did. Think about that. The U.S. Government spends billions of dollars each year tracking the al Qaeda threat. And yet, a comparatively small, independent, and private firm got their hands bin Laden’s latest message first. What does that say about the need for reform with the U.S. intelligence community? In the Washington Post‘s account, intelligence officials recognized that this aspect of the story may make them look bad:
So, although he emphasized that the U.S. intelligence community is diligently doing the same type of work as SITE, the DNI’s spokesman did not refute that SITE had first brought this tape to their attention. And other anonymous spooks confirmed that SITE is “tremendously helpful” in exposing al Qaeda’s secrets. Therefore, it does appear that the tape was first uncovered by SITE. In Lake’s account, U.S. intelligence officials claim that no one in the intelligence community leaked the tape. So, thus far, the only material issue at dispute appears to be who leaked the tape and the SITE folks are convinced it was someone in the government. The bottom line so far then is: SITE beat the federal government to the punch in uncovering this latest bin Laden tape and while SITE managed to protect the source of the tape, the intelligence community allegedly did not. And as Rita Katz, SITE’s founder, told the Washington Post: “Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless.”
