Ex-CIA director: Millennials Are Pro-Leak Because They Are “Culturally Different”

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by Micah J. Fleck

According to a new report by The Washington Post:

The latest massive leak of government secrets — a trove of apparent CIA documents posted online this week by WikiLeaks, an anti-secrecy organization — is still so new that federal officials say they are only in the early stages of investigating the breach.

Still, the former head of the CIA has a theory about a possible root cause of the leak: Millennials.

Michael V. Hayden, who was the CIA director until 2009, said that in order for the agency to engage in the digital espionage described by the documents, the agency must “recruit from a certain demographic” — in this case, younger hackers brought on to help with these efforts.

“I don’t mean to judge them at all, but this group of millennials and related groups simply have different understandings of the words loyalty, secrecy and transparency than certainly my generation did,” Hayden told the BBC in an interview this week. “And so we bring these folks into the agency, good Americans all, I can only assume, but again, culturally they have different instincts than the people who made the decision to hire them.”

Hayden called the latest CIA leak “incredibly damaging” and said it appears to have “made my country and my country’s friends less safe.” He also tied what he described as the “culturally” different viewpoint of millennials to some of the most high-profile breaches that have rattled the country’s national security apparatus in recent years.

“We may be running into this different cultural approach that we saw with Chelsea Manning, with Edward Snowden, and now, perhaps, with a third actor,” Hayden said.

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