(Photo of Capitol by Cameron Smith on Unsplash, Photo of circuit by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash, Graphic by Lee Ferran / Code and Dagger)
Among the flood of alarming images that emerged from the riot at the U.S. Capitol building earlier this month, one image in particular would’ve set off the loudest klaxon in the heads of security professionals: Random people at a desk in the office of the speaker of the house, apparently scrolling through open emails.
Staff had evacuated the offices so quickly that some left their computers on. At least a couple of electronic devices were reported stolen. And now the FBI is reportedly investigating whether a woman in the crowd took a laptop from Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office with plans to sell it to Russian intelligence. Other rioters were seen on video going through lawmakers’ papers.
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The most closely held secrets in the Capitol building are housed in rooms called SCIFs – Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities – and as of yet there’s no reporting any of the rioters breached those rooms or systems.
But the compromise of information in congressional offices, even if it’s not classified, still represents a “huge problem,” according to former CIA analyst Sarah Carlson, especially if any of that information does somehow make it to a foreign intelligence service. Carlson was involved in the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli in 2014 and wrote in her book in detail about painstaking efforts to destroy any valuable information before those facilities were abandoned.
Carlson said information in congressional offices could reveal valuable “atmospherics” about the nation’s lawmakers and their inner circles. “You would get a feel for relationships between congressional members, their priorities, and probably more than we’d want adversaries to know about how they feel about the incoming administration or the outgoing one,” she said.
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(For an imperfect comparison, U.S. observers essentially made a cottage industry out of attempting to divine what was going on between various personalities at the top of the Soviet power structure during the Cold War.)
Worse, Carlson said, is the potential for that information to reveal personal vulnerabilities for anyone close to the lawmakers.
Speaking of attempting to recruit sources abroad, Carlson said, “We were looking for anybody in the orbit, in the circle, anybody who has access to them and what vulnerabilities you’d like to exploit.”
More than two weeks after the breach it’s unclear exactly how much information might have been compromised and where it ended up.
The eventual damage assessment could be bad, but it’s unlikely it’s anywhere near one America’s worst intelligence compromises from an overrun facility.
That was when Iranian students took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979. Classified information was destroyed then, but the Iranians painstakingly reconstructed shredded documents and continued to publish purported CIA secrets for years afterwards. In her book, Carlson indicated that in 2014 in Libya, their team managed to destroy all the material they needed to before a risky overland journey to Tunisia.
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