Journalists keep burning leakers

With the arrest this week of U.S. Army veteran Courtney Williams, it has to be said: An underappreciated feature of classified leaks in the modern era is the frequency with which journalists unintentionally lead investigators straight to their sources.

In the last decade or so there have been at least a half-dozen such cases. Once or twice might be bad luck — more than that, however, and it begins to look like a trend.

On April 7, the FBI arrested the 40-year-old Williams and charged her with transmitting classified information to Rolling Stone contributing editor Seth Harp. What makes the matter striking is not so much the leaks themselves but the simplicity with which they were traced. Harp had previously named Williams in his reporting, quoted her at length, and, in some instances, used her likeness, such that federal investigators needed only to skim his reporting to find their culprit.

Harp, for his part, maintains that his source “has committed no crime,” which is interesting considering Williams told him specifically that she was “concerned about the amount of classified information being disclosed.”

Even wilder than this story — wilder than Harp having led the FBI directly to Williams — is that hers is not an isolated instance.

In 2018, the FBI arrested and charged former special agent Terry Albury for having passed classified intelligence to the Intercept. The bureau caught Albury with relative ease, largely because the news outlet itself had filed unusually precise Freedom of Information Act requests for the very papers the special agent had already given them. The........

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