Reactions to the news that the National Security Agency ("NSA") has been spying on millions of Americans are all across the board. Some are cheering the agency's aggressiveness in "weeding out terrorists" and "stopping terrorist attacks." Others in contrast are highly upset now that they know that literally nothing may be private in their lives. The defense for the spying is that it uses "meta analysis" and that our personal e-mails are not being read and our phone calls are not being monitored. But is this actually true? Less than three months ago, government officials denied that they were doing what we now in fact know they were doing. The questions thus become (i) who do we trust and (ii) what could happen if the wrong individuals misuse information. I for one, do not have a high level of trust of government when it comes to this type of information. Perhaps I's a product of my youth in the 1960's and early 1070's when the U.S. government routinely lied about Vietnam. Here are highlights from a column in the Washington Post that looks at the issue:
Keep your distance: The director of national intelligence is having intestinal distress.
“For me, it is literally — not figuratively, literally — gut-wrenching to see this happen,” James Clapper told Andrea Mitchell over the weekend, referring to leaks about the government’s secret program to collect vast troves of phone and Internet data.
There might be a bit more sympathy for Clapper’s digestive difficulty if he hadn’t delivered a kick in the gut to the American public just three months ago. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) asked Clapper at a Senate hearing in March, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” “No, sir,” Clapper testified.
“It does not?” Wyden pressed. “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.”
We now know that Clapper was not telling the truth. The National Security Agency is quite wittingly collecting phone records of millions of Americans, and much more.
[Government] officials have only themselves to blame. It is precisely their effort to hide such a vast and consequential program from the American public that caused this pressure valve to burst. Instead of allowing a democratic debate about the programs in broad terms that would not have compromised national security, their attempts to keep the public in the dark have created a backlash in which the risks to national security can’t be controlled.
Edward Snowden, the leaker, did the honorable thing in revealing his identity; it would be more honorable if he would turn himself in and face the consequences for his law-breaking. But there is little honor in the way administration officials and lawmakers have avoided responsibility. Obama administration officials are blaming Snowden, while some lawmakers complain disingenuously that the administration kept them out of the loop.
All 535 members of Congress had authorization to learn all about the programs. Senators even received a written invitation in 2011 to view a classified report. Likewise, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), a former chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, said Monday that members “could have gotten a briefing whenever they wanted to.” But apparently few bothered. Worse, lawmakers quashed efforts to allow even modest public disclosure of the broad contours of the program.
“The pervasive secrecy on this topic created an information vacuum. If congressional oversight was not going to fill it in, it turned out leaks would. That’s not the optimal solution.”
Not optimal, but probably inevitable. Officials who denied the public a responsible debate on surveillance will now have a debate on Snowden’s terms — and there’s no use in bellyaching about it.
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