Edward Snowden’s NSA
leaks are backlash of too much secrecy
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.
As administration officials and some in Congress vent their anger
about leaks to The Post and to Britain’s Guardian newspaper, they 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 of us are sort of asking what in the world has gone on,” a
seemingly bewildered Eric Cantor (R-Va.), the House majority leader,
alleged Monday on CBS’s “This Morning.”
Host Norah O’Donnell asked whether he had known about the program
before the leaks.
“Well,” Cantor replied, “there are a variety of — of classified
programs that exist for us to, again, guard against a terrorist threat.
And . . . ”
Asked whether the Obama administration’s surveillance went further
than the George W. Bush administration’s, Cantor said that “these are
questions we don’t know the answers to.”
“How do you not know the answer?” O’Donnell asked.
Good question. 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. Steven Aftergood, who runs the
Federation of
American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, lists the
various ways in which the administration, Congress and the courts denied
the public any right to know:
The Justice Department and the DNI promised a new effort to
declassify opinions issued by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Court; Justice official Lisa Monaco, now Obama’s counterterrorism
director, said all significant FISA rulings would be reviewed for
declassification. But no new opinions were declassified under the
initiative.
The House last year turned back attempts to require public reports on
the general outlines of the government’s surveillance programs. The
various disclosure proposals, offered by Democratic Reps. Bobby Scott
(Va.), Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.) and Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.), were
defeated by the Judiciary Committee.
In the Senate, amendments to provide modest disclosures and
declassifications, offered by Wyden and fellow Democratic Sens. Jeff
Merkley (Ore.) and Mark Udall (Colo.) during the FISA renewal in
December, were all defeated.
The FISA court itself colluded in the secrecy. After senators asked
the court to provide declassified summaries of its decisions, the chief
FISA judge, Reggie B. Walton, responded with a letter on March 27 citing
“serious obstacles” to the request.
“It was a shoddy performance all around,” Aftergood said Monday. “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.
Twitter: @Milbank
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-edward-snowdens-nsa-leaks-are-the-backlash-of-too-much-secrecy/2013/06/10/eddb4462-d215-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html
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