The Obama Administration has prosecuted a record number of government employees for leaking classified information. Yet despite this prosecutorial surge — nine cases in less than seven years — a steady stream of high-profile leaks continues and shows no sign of abating. This essay considers why the threat of criminal punishment sometimes fails to deter leakers. It argues that the expected penalty for leaking is quite low; very few leakers ever face criminal charges and those who are convicted receive relatively modest sentences. The essay therefore proposes that authorities seeking to prevent catastrophic leaks should make greater use of technological controls. Examples include access controls that restrict which users may view what information for which purposes (including biometric identity verification), immutable audit logs that record users’ system activity, and automated processes to verify that users are entitled to access the information they seek and to monitor for suspicious patterns of behavior.The BBC reports that Enric Marco, purportedly a survivor of Mauthausen, has been exposed as an unrepentant imposter (albeit less colourful and unpersuasive than Defonseca).
94 year old Marco claim to have been an anarchist forced to flee from Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War, being interned in the Flossenbuerg and Mauthausen concentration camps. He has served as president of the Amical de Mauthausen, Spain's main association of Nazi victims and given emotive speeches featuring his supposed experience in those camps. In reality he appears to have signed up as a voluntary worker in Nazi Germany under the 1941 labour agreement between Franco and Hitler.
Historian Benito Bermejo comments that Marco's version of events changed each time he told it.
Marco became Secretary General of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (ie the anarchist National Confederation of Workers - CNT - familiar to many readers of George Orwell) in 1980, was awarded the Creu de Sant Jordi by the Catalan government in 2003 and became president of Amical de Mauthausen in 2005. It appears that Marco pulled out of a ceremony at Mauthausen after being confronted with Bermejo's research, admitting that he had been a volunteer worker and had never been in a concentration camp.
He reportedly claims that he sought to keep alive the memory of Hitler's Spanish victims: "Who would have listened to me if I hadn't created that persona?".
