The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) release on Friday, August 27, 2010, wasted no words in announcing that a Washington, D.C., federal grand jury had indicted Stephen Jin-Woo Kim for “unlawfully disclosing national defense information to a reporter for a national news organization and making false statements to the FBI.” According to the DOJ press release, Kim (age 43) “was an employee of a federal contractor who was on detail to the State Department” at the time of the alleged crimes.

The DOJ provided the following details of the alleged crimes—

Kim knowingly and willfully disclosed information contained in an intelligence report classified Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS/SCI) to a reporter for a national news organization who was not entitled to receive it. The classified information related to the national defense, specifically, intelligence sources and methods and intelligence concerning the military capabilities and preparedness of a particular foreign nation.

… in September 2009, Kim made false statements to the FBI when he denied having had any contact with the reporter for a national news organization since meeting the reporter in March 2009, when in fact, Kim had had repeated contact with the reporter in the months following that meeting.

The Washington Post had a few more details, in this article. The Post article noted that Kim was “a senior adviser for intelligence on detail to the State Department’s arms control compliance bureau.” The Post reported that the “national news organization” to which Kim allegedly disclosed the classified information was Fox News, and noted that in June, 2009, Fox News reporter James Rosen reported that “U.S. intelligence officials had warned that North Korea planned to respond to a new round of U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. Rosen reported that the CIA warning was developed through sources inside North Korea.”

The foregoing is not good. The DOJ press release stated what most everybody already knew—i.e., “The willful disclosure of classified information to those not entitled to it is a serious crime.” It noted that, “If convicted, [Kim] faces up to 10 years in prison for the unlawful disclosure of national defense information and up to five years in prison for the making of false statements.”

Kim’s attorneys are already spinning his defense. The Post article reported that the attorneys “faulted the government with criminalizing exchanges ‘that happen hundreds of times a day in Washington.’" According to Kim’s attorneys—

“In its obsession to clamp down on perfectly appropriate conversations between government employees and the press, the Obama Administration has forgotten that wise foreign policy must be founded on a two-way conversation between government and the public."

Um, how about “no”?

We’re not talking about policy; we’re talking about Top Secret SCI stuff here. Before anybody gets briefed into the compartment, they are told, in crystal clear language, just what unauthorized disclosure of such information would mean to the country—and to them personally.

The Post article also noted that Mr. Kim is not the first person to be charged with unauthorized disclosure of sensitive or classified information in recent months. The Post article stated—

Since December, prosecutors have indicted Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency official, with improperly handling classified information with a Baltimore Sun reporter; secured a guilty plea from Shamai Kedem Leibowitz, a former FBI contract linguist, for leaking documents to a blogger; and arrested Army Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, 22, suspected of giving a classified video of a U.S. military helicopter firing at civilians in Baghdad to the WikiLeaks.org site. Manning is also suspected of leaking 76,000 classified documents about the Afghanistan war that WikiLeaks posted this month.

The Post article didn’t mention the case of Dongfan “Greg” Chung, who was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison in February, 2010, for “six counts of economic espionage and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), for whom the engineer stole Boeing trade secrets related to several aerospace programs, including the Space Shuttle.” We reported that story here. Chung, a naturalized U.S. citizen, held a Secret clearance and, according to reports, spent the years between 1979 and 2003 working for both U.S. defense contractors (as an employee) and the People’s Republic of China (as a spy).

Nice.

We have no sympathy for such people, whether they have cute code names such as “The Falcon and The Snowman” or more mundane names, such as “Greg”.

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