FBI training video focuses on new insider threat to intelligence agencies

(CBS News) Recent intelligence leaks - most notably cases like that of NSA leaker Edward Snowden and Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who leaked hundreds of thousands of documents to WikiLeaks - have raised questions about how to guard against insider threats to U.S. national security.

In an interview with The Guardian, Snowden shared his justification for the leak, explaining he wanted to "expose what the government was doing wrong."

Retired Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, acknowledges the growing risk but categorically rejects Snowden's moral grounds in an interview with CBS News.

"What kind of sense of moral superiority does it take to feel like your moral judgment trumps the moral judgment of not one but two presidents, both houses of Congress, and bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress, the American court system and 35,000 of your coworkers at NSA?" Hayden asked.

Counterintelligence agents have worked within a general profile of the insider threat for decades, according to CBS News senior correspondent John Miller, a former FBI deputy director. A would-be intelligence risk is typically an employee dissatisfied at work or under financial pressure with a tendency to believe he or she is under-appreciated. The profile fits with two particularly damaging insiders: CIA agent Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, both of whom sold secrets to the Russians "for the money," according to Hayden.

"And, I think, at least in the case of Hanssen," Hayden said, "he did it because he just thought he was smarter than everyone else."

But today the insider threat profile is shifting, moving more toward those like Bradley and Manning, who seem to be acting on principle.

"These two ... they're a bit different. They're probably doing it for ideology and almost this romantic, absolute commitment to transparency," Hayden said.

CBS News has obtained an FBI video used to train and warn intelligence officers of signs of a national-security threat lurking in the cubicle beside them.

It is uniquely challenging to guard against this new paradigm of intelligence leaker. Former top Homeland Security official Jack Johnson told Miller it is "very, very difficult" to screen against an at-risk leaker like Snowden, bent on transparency.

"What is new, that in this modern, connected era, the trusted insider who betrays us is far more empowered to do damage far greater than these kinds of folks were able to do in the past. And so we just have to be even more vigilant," Hayden said.