Dan Gillmor says that if our news sources persist in using unattributed sources, we should out them.

Actually, he calls it “lying” on their part.

But it makes me think he hasn’t kept up with the double bind, cat and mouse game that every journalist who touches an area that involves national security has to deal with today.

Over classification has been a pretty well known phenomenon since the Clinton administration. Anything that can be classified secret to top secret, will be. A significant percent of the US workforce is now holding top secret classifications, making the idea itself nearly meaningless. And the former procedure for talking to a journalist regarding classified information — just clearing it through your chain of command — has become impossible.

Everything is classified. You don’t even know why, or who made each document so. It might be that buried in this one report, there’s a mention of a black line program, by acronym. Or a confidential source on page 504. But if so, the entire body of the report is top secret, and you won’t be cleared to discuss the most mundane item in it, because no one in your chain of command is going to find out why each document needs vetting.

As a result, to the complete destruction of intent of the classification system itself, sources have taken to using their individual discretion to speak to the press using common sense.

This means, yes, that this is the age of leaks. Deep Throat would no longer be a phenomenon, only another coffee date for the Washington Post.

And to a certain extent, this is on the beltway’s karma. After the decline of the manufacturing economy, the military industrial complex turned to services, which lead to scandals in Halliburton and Blackwater/Xe/Academi (yes, we saw what you did there) that were far too transparent for these companies’ tastes.

So Bush’s DNI had this brilliant idea that cybersecurity was the new black. If we could only turn national security and cybersecurity into the focus of the beltway, all the money would be in the black line budget — unaudited, with minimal oversight from an overworked, mostly hawkish pair of Congressional committees. He set up a major industry/government coalition while Bush was in office, and then didn’t let the revolving door hit his butt on the way out as he took up BAH’s cybersecurity initiative.

Where, eventually, he was Snowden’s superior at the time that all broke.

We think of this as a set of issues around personal privacy and the NSA.

Or perhaps we think of these as issues of civil liberties.

And here, we find ourselves looking at issues of journalistic integrity.

But with any ill in society, I’d urge you to stick to the classics: follow the money. Billions and billions, likely trillions, of black lined money, split between the Intelligence Community and military and a cluster of very happy, highly insulated contractors formerly known as the military industrial complex.

This isn’t news. WaPo documented it five years ago and reporters Dana Priest and William M Arkin published Top Secret America based on their investigative series. Just this year, Foreign Policy reporter Shane Harris followed up his excellent The Watchers with @War. All of these three books are recommended reading.

But to get back to the double bind the current generation of journalists are in — the intelligence system, knowing it is leaking like a sieve, is fielding it’s own protective measures. When confidential sources are the standard, field con men, social engineers.

And in this, it’s correct — we need a more savvy, clever sort of journalist to deal with politics and national security today. We need social engineers and analysts worthy of the CIA, but working in the public interest. (And I probably just broke some people’s brains on that last sentence, lol!) It takes a hacker to catch a hacker, let’s say.

Editorial control won’t do it — it’s necessary but insufficient. We need journalists who can think like field agents and analysts and meet them on even ground, and if you read the books I cite, you’ll understand just what I mean.

And we need the public to understand how much of our national budget is invisible, unauditable, and in the hands of private contractors without meaningful oversight.

Let’s make that a central campaign issue.