Public safety factor
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A public safety factor, or PSF, is a Bureau of Prisons designation that overrides a prisoner's calculated security level and bars placement in a lower-security facility. Kiriakou expected on arrival to be placed in the minimum-security camp situated literally across the street from FCI Loretto, but a PSF meant he would never be permitted to serve a single day of his sentence there.

The designation was made against the explicit recommendations of the two officials closest to the case. His sentencing judge, a Clinton appointee with twenty years on the bench, had recommended a minimum-security camp, and the U.S. attorney who represented the government against him had recommended camp rather than prison. Neither of the people responsible for imprisoning him believed he was a threat to the public. The decision instead came from the Bureau's Designation and Sentence Computation Center in Grand Prairie, Texas, which assigned him the same public-safety designation as murderers, members of organized crime, and child molesters.

The stated justification

The Bureau's stated basis was that Kiriakou had committed espionage, and that espionage, along with treason and sabotage, falls within what it terms the greatest severity scale. His attorneys pointed out that he had not been convicted of espionage at all. He was convicted of violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which is not in the same part of the U.S. Code as the Espionage Act, and which was among the reasons the judge and prosecutors had recommended camp in the first place.

Rather than answer the attorneys' letter itself, the DSCC forwarded it to the warden at Loretto for a response, a move Kiriakou characterised as cynical and disingenuous. The warden, one of the few officials there he semi-respected, replied that he could not reverse the decision, and reasoned that Kiriakou's crime was an "other related offense" within the same clause his lawyers had quoted.

The regional director's answer

The appeal that followed produced what Kiriakou regarded as the admission that mattered. The Bureau's regional director wrote that "your total offensive behavior is to be considered utilizing the most serious offense or act committed when determining offense security level." In Kiriakou's reading, this meant the designation had nothing to do with the crime of conviction and everything to do with whatever the government had originally accused him of, whether or not those charges were dropped or thrown out.

The original charge sheet, piled on at the insistence of then-CIA director David Petraeus, had included espionage. Kiriakou's response was to ask why, if the government genuinely believed he had committed those crimes, it had made five separate plea offers and ultimately dropped four of the five charges, and why, if he was so dangerous, the Bureau had placed him in a low-security prison rather than a penitentiary. He also noted that the only other person ever convicted of violating the IIPA had served nine months of a five-year sentence at the facility popularly known as Camp Cupcake, so that precedent favoured him even on the government's own theory.

Until that letter arrived, Kiriakou says he had believed Bureau officials were merely lazy or stupid. His conclusion afterwards was that they were malicious above all, and that the designation was punishment for exercising his right to freedom of speech.

The comparison that closed the argument

Late in his sentence a new prisoner moved in across the hall, a heroin dealer who had sold tainted product to a friend, causing the friend's death, and who had received twenty years and the identical greatest-severity classification. He appealed on the same grounds Kiriakou had, arguing he was not a threat to society. He won. His classification was downgraded and he was transferred across the street to the camp. Kiriakou's summary of the episode is that to the Bureau of Prisons he was more dangerous than a drug-dealing killer.

He concedes one version of the charge. The Bureau, he says, was not wrong to suspect he was dangerous, he was dangerous to them.

See also

- FCI Loretto
- Bureau of Prisons
- Intelligence Identities Protection Act
- David Petraeus
- Doing Time Like a Spy
