US: Senate intelligence panel chair calls for limited access to classified material

The chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee has called for limiting access to the most secret classified records. This comes as Washington tackles the major leak of classified intelligence records by a low-ranking Air National Guardsman.

On ABC News on Sunday, the panel’s Democratic chair Mark Warner said too many people are authorized to access the country’s classified documents. Warner also called for a centralized body to oversee the classification process, noting how the United States has many intelligence-gathering entities.

“Once we get to that highest level of classification, we maybe have too many folks taking a look at them, over four million people with clearances,” said Warner.

“We need somebody fully in charge of the whole classification process and I think for those classified documents there ought to be a smaller universe,” the Virginia lawmaker added, citing how the National Security Agency has previously suffered leaks resulting in internal controls that limit the copying of documents.

Warner also said that not everyone handling the classified documents needs to see the entire document and that only seeing the header of the material could be enough.

Warner’s comments follow the recent arrest and charging of Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira early this month for leaking top-secret classified documents to a group chat online. The latest leak was considered the most serious security breach since the 2010 WikiLeaks scandal that published over 700,000 classified documents, videos, and diplomatic cables on the site. The Pentagon has referred to the leak as a “deliberate, criminal act.”

Previously, US officials said on Saturday that all US government personnel were successfully evacuated from the US embassy in Khartoum, including a number of diplomatic personnel from other countries, as the conflict in Sudan has escalated. The officials told reporters that less than 100 people were successfully evacuated from Khartoum.

US Under Secretary of State for Management John Bass said a number of local staff supporting the embassy still remain as Washington suspended its operations, citing security risks. This follows the violent power struggle by the forces of former allied members of Sudan’s ruling council that erupted over the weekend.