Former Intelligence Officials Break Clapper's Media Gag Order To Complain About Clapper's Media Gag Order

from the security-through-obtusity dept

James Clapper's order forbidding both current and former employees from discussing almost anything with the media has raised more questions than it's answered. It appears to have been written as a response to the Snowden leaks (as well as various unnamed officials' responses to those leaks), but its restrictiveness does nothing to prevent document leaking and has created a whole lot of confusion.

To begin with, the very definition of media/press is impossible to pin down. According to the original order, anything from major networks to officials' own social media accounts were off limits. A clarification issued shortly thereafter offered nearly nothing in the way of clearing things up.

Now, former officials -- the same ones who have been forbidden from discussing almost everything without prior approval -- are offering up plenty of discussion on the policy itself, assuredly without prior approval. Shane Harris at Foreign Policy has collected a great deal of irritated statements from former intelligence officials who have a ton of problems with Clapper's gag order.

One former intelligence official who now works in the private sector said he declined five recent requests to discuss national security issues on television news shows because he was afraid of having his security clearance revoked or being fined for breaking the rules. Ironically, the former official said, he only learned about new restrictions on talking to the press from Gen. Keith Alexander, the former director of the National Security Agency, when he discussed it with comedian John Oliver for his new HBO talk show.

Much like many legislators and government officials learned of the NSA's activities from outside sources, former officials are learning more about a policy affecting their press interactions from other former officials interacting with the press.

Meanwhile, Clapper's office claims this policy has always been in place, despite the reactions that clearly indicate otherwise. It also should be noted that this "there all along" policy hasn't prevented various unnamed intelligence officials -- some of them still currently employed -- from offering their opinions on the NSA's programs over the past several months.

It also hasn't prevented former NSA head Michael Hayden from acting as the agency's biggest cheerleader, apparently appearing at any press venue that will have him.

Several sources cited Michael Hayden, the former director of the NSA and the CIA, as a prime example. Hayden writes a regular column for the Washington Times. Does that mean Hayden is now a journalist, some former officials asked? If so, are they prohibited from talking to him, too?

(The same question could be asked of Stewart Baker, the former NSA counsel who has written pieces for several venues, including regular appearances at the Volokh Conspiracy blog, now hosted by the Washington Post.)

Spokespeople for the agency claim Hayden runs everything by the agency first, but if that's true (something that seems unlikely given the number of appearances, including a live debate with NSA critics), that makes him the minority. Other former officials claim that if Clapper's going to pretend this policy isn't new, they'll just continue to route around his office, just as they did before the supposedly "not new" policy went into force.

The former intelligence official who said he first learned of the policy by watching HBO said he's reluctant to call Clapper's office because he thinks it'll only invite more scrutiny. Another said that until he hears otherwise, he will continue to clear articles through his former agency, not the ODNI. And, he predicted, his colleagues will do the same.

The policy, which "isn't new" but still comes as a surprise to many former officials, is typical of the NSA's responses over the past several months -- long on indignant righteous fury and short on substance. That this supposedly pre-existing policy needed both a clarification and a declaration that nothing has ever changed is also indicative of the agency's clumsy attempts to embrace transparency place one tentative arm a few inches above transparency's shoulder: needlessly convoluted and ultimately useless.

Filed Under: gag order, intelligence community, james clapper, reporting

James Clapper Admits What Everyone's Been Saying For Months: Snowden Didn't Take 1.7 Million Documents

from the a-bit-slow dept

You know, you'd think that the "intelligence community" would be a bit more intelligent. As we've discussed many, many times, nearly all of the estimates of "harm" concerning Ed Snowden's actions were based on the faulty assumption that he "took" (and revealed) every document he ever "touched" while at NSA -- somewhere around 1.7 million (sometimes referred to as 1.5 million, but then upped to 1.7 million). Except that two of the reporters who got the documents, Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill, have both said from the very beginning that it was about 60,000.

And yet, NSA defenders keep insisting that he's caused all of this harm because of what was in the 1.7 million documents... nearly all of which he did not take. Indeed, the much-hyped (by NSA defenders) Pentagon report on the "staggering harm" that Snowden has created doesn't actually say that. It says it's "staggering" how many documents he had access to, not that he took. Because the NSA, one year after the first Snowden revelation still has no idea how much he actually took (which certainly raises questions about their vaunted "auditing" of everything done at the agency).

In fact, James Clapper is now admitting that maybe Snowden didn't take so much, and maybe the "harm" wasn't as bad as he, himself, has been arguing:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says it appears the impact may be less than once feared because "it doesn't look like he [Snowden] took as much" as first thought.

"We're still investigating, but we think that a lot of what he looked at, he couldn't pull down," Clapper said in a rare interview at his headquarters Tuesday. "Some things we thought he got, he apparently didn't." Although somewhat less than expected, the damage is still "profound," he said.

In other words, exactly as pretty much all of us have been saying -- all of the frantic FUD-filled estimates of "harm" were actually massively over-hyped based on faulty assumptions. And yet that never stopped Clapper, Mike Rogers, Keith Alexander, Dianne Feinstein and others from continuing to trot out those bogus numbers, even though tons of people had debunked them. And now that Clapper is finally admitting that he himself over-hyped the supposed "harm" and the documents that Snowden took, he acts as if he's revealing some big news.

Amusingly, the report also claims that the DOD is also lowering its estimate of how much Snowden "touched" from 1.77 million (up from the 1.7 million they had been saying, actually) down to the 1.5 million which was the number they had been using back at the beginning of December anyway. It's almost as if they actually have no idea and are just pulling numbers out of thin air.

Filed Under: documents, ed snowden, fud, james clapper, nsa, surveillance

James Clapper: Yes, Snowden Emailed NSA Lawyer, But Not About His Concerns

from the so-there's-that... dept

Earlier today, we noted that NBC had confirmed that Snowden had raised some of his concerns to people within the intelligence community. In response, James Clapper's office (the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) has nowreleased what they claim is the only email Snowden sent to the NSA's legal team. The email was sent just about a month before Snowden went to Hong Kong, and, as ODNI notes, does not address the issues related to Snowden's whistleblowing concerns:
Furthermore, the ODNI notes:

There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.

Of course, it's worth noting that for all the talk of "proper channels" it's actually not so easy. In fact, the person that he would have gone to has already noted he would have told Snowden to shut up, and was completely insulting about Snowden. So it's not as if there really were legitimate channels. And Snowden already knew that going through the full whistleblowing process would get him labeled as a troublemaker.

That said, it does sound as though Snowden may have slightly exaggerated his claims concerning his conversation with the NSA's lawyers.

Filed Under: ed snowden, james clapper, odni, whistleblowing

Pentagon Report That Supposedly Shows How Much Harm Snowden Caused... Actually Shows No Such Thing

from the staggeringly-misleading dept

For a few months now, the NSA's defenders -- primarily Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and House Intelligence Committee boss Rep. Mike Rogers -- have been waving around a "classified" report from the Pentagon, concerning how much "damage" Snowden's leaks have caused. Rogers had put out a press release about the report as if it was proof of how much harm was caused -- and based on that release, people quickly realized that the claims of harm were based on two very questionable assumptions

1. That everything Snowden "touched" while employed at the NSA, he took with him and gave to reporters -- amounting to something like 1.7 million documents.
2. That all of those files are in the hands of America's adversaries

As many people have highlighted -- both of those claims are extremely questionable. Glenn Greenwald and Ewan Macaskill have both admitted publicly that Snowden only gave them around 60,000 documents.

Either way, the Guardian has a new report with a redacted version of the Pentagon's report, obtained via a FOIA request by FOIA champion Jason Leopold. Leopold wrote a summary of the report, noting that the Pentagon claims "the scope of the compromised knowledge related to US intelligence capabilities is staggering."

However, Julian Sanchez quickly pointed out that the Pentagon is playing word games. It's saying (as noted in our assumptions) that the scope of what Snowden touched is staggering, not the actual damage. As Sanchez points out:

The first thing to note is that the Pentagon report does not concern the putative harm of disclosures about the National Security Agency programs that have been the focus of almost all Snowden-inspired stories published to date. Rather, the Defense Intelligence Agency's damage assessment deals only with the potential impact of "non-NSA Defense material" that the government believes Snowden may have obtained. Any harm resulting from the disclosure of NSA-related material – in other words, almost everything actually made public thus far – is not included in this assessment.

In fact, the unredacted portions of the report don't discuss published material at all. Instead, the Pentagon was assessing the significance of the information "compromised" by Snowden – all the documents they believe he copied, whether or not they ever see the light of day.

As Sanchez notes, it absolutely makes sense for the US government to assess the possible damage from other possible leaks based on what Snowden has touched, but it's wholly irresponsible for politicians and the press to misrepresent the report as looking at the actual harm caused by the leaks to date. Because that's not what the report says at all.

In summary:

In short: the Pentagon damage report concludes that the "staggering" cache of documents that Snowden might have taken (most of which he probably didn't) could potentially cause grave harm if disclosed to a foreign power (which, as far as we know, they haven't been), and assumed that only genuinely super-sensitive information gets classified (which top intelligence officials concede isn't true).

And yet, Snowden's critics are totally misrepresenting the report to say things it clearly does not say.

Filed Under: defense department, dod, ed snowden, harm, james clapper, mike rogers, pentagon

Yet Again, A Freedom Of Information Act Request Results In LESS Information Being Freed

from the the-ODNI-will-be-around-shortly-to-redact-your-brain dept

Intelligence agencies seem to make some very un-intelligent decisions. Just last month, James Clapper told NSA employees they were no longer free to talk to the media in an extremely misguided attempt to head off future leaks.

Now, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has seen fit to issue a redacted document, which in itself is not an unusual event. The problem here is that the unredacted version, originally published by the ODNI itself, has been in the public domain for years now.

Last month, ODNI issued a heavily redacted version of its Intelligence Community Directive 304 on “Human Intelligence.” The redacted document was produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from Robert Sesek, and posted on ScribD.

The new redactions come as a surprise because most of the censored text had already been published by ODNI itself in an earlier iteration of the same unclassified Directive from 2008. That document has since been removed from the ODNI website but it is preserved on the FAS website here.

So, why would it do this? Steven Aftergood at FAS Secrecy News suspects it might be the ODNI caving to the CIA's desire to keep everything a secret.

A comparison of the redacted and unredacted versions shows that ODNI is now seeking to withhold the fact that the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency functions as the National HUMINT Manager, among other things.

The CIA is only rivaled by the New York Police Department in terms of unresponsiveness to FOIA requests. That it would demand information related to its "super-secret" HUMINT (human intelligence) work be redacted isn't a surprise. That it would have no idea that this information is out in the open is a bit more surprising. But considering the government's extremely scattershot approach to overclassification, it is not entirely unexpected.

The entire document is marked as "Unclassified," which means there's very little reason to have any of this redacted, especially considering its previous official, unredacted release. The CIA isn't the only agency to have its information withheld, although that is probably more a product of what the redacted statement says, rather than an indication of the other agencies' desire for secrecy. The sections for both the FBI and the Defense Department have this sentence blacked out.

Collects, analyzes, produces, and disseminates foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information, including information obtained through clandestine means.

Apparently, the ODNI would prefer that no one know (enemies or citizens) these agencies secure information through "clandestine means," which is something everyone expects the CIA to be doing, if not the FBI.

The exemption stated [b(3)] is bit strange itself. It's supposedly limited to information that is subject to other statutes prohibiting the information's disclosure. Whatever that unnamed statute is, it must have gone into effect at some point between 2009 (the latest date on the unredacted version) and last month. Or, more likely, the exemption was just a handy excuse for blotting out the CIA's involvement in this particular form of intelligence gathering, one the ODNI won't have to explain until the end of the year when it (like all government agencies) must list the statutes used to justify b(3) redactions.

This is just another example of the greatest irony of the FOIA Act. The ODNI publishes a completely unredacted version on its own site but when a citizen asks for a copy, it redacts half the document. A Freedom of Information Act response creates an information deficit. That makes sense.

Filed Under: foia, james clapper, odni, redactions

How White House's 'No Commenting' On Media Leaks Policy Makes Life Difficult For Professors

from the making-life-difficult dept

Last week, we wrote about the Obama administration's bizarre decision to ban any current or former intelligence community officials from even discussing media reports of leaked documents. The whole thing, coming from James Clapper, seemed bizarre (and likely unconstitutional). It's also just stupid. Denying people the ability to talk about information that is publicly being discussed serves no good purpose. And the impact is being felt in a variety of places. Famed crypto expert Matt Blaze is talking about how he's now in a tough spot, because if he assigns students to read content concerning media leaks, he puts intelligence community students in an "untenable position." And that's ridiculous. Denying the students the ability to even discuss very relevant, timely information that everyone else is discussing seems like a dangerous restriction -- especially on people who you should want to be involved in those discussions.

Filed Under: intelligence community, james clapper, matt blaze, odni, surveillance

Head-In-Sand Approach: White House Bans Current & Former Intelligence Staff From Discussing Any Media Leaks

from the that'll-work dept

The Obama administration continues to make incredibly ridiculous decisions in response to the whole Snowden thing. A few weeks ago, we wrote about new rules from James Clapper that banned intelligence community employees from interacting with anyone who was a reporter (or who just had a social media account) without first getting approval. And the latest is that Clapper has issued a new "instruction" which effectively bars all intelligence community employees (and contractors) from even referring to public news reports about any leaks. It appears that any current or former intelligence community official mentioning any of the reporting about Snowden's leaks without first getting permission may run afoul of these rules.

In the past, we've criticized the government's "head-in-sand" approach to dealing with leaked information. Back in 2010, we pointed out how idiotic it was for the Pentagon to tell all Defense Department employees that they weren't allowed to visit Wikileaks to see the State Department cables that were being littered all over the press. Similarly, after the Snowden revelations, the Defense Department blocked access to the Guardian's webiste, where the original documents were first posted. Similarly, Congressional staffers were told not to look at the Snowden documents -- and if they happened to see one accidentally, they had to call security "for assistance."

The thinking behind this approach is that those documents are technically classified, and if you don't have the proper clearance, you shouldn't have them on a government computer. And, yes, I do understand the complications it causes for government employees who have very strict rules about dealing with classified documents, and how it gets a bit trickier when classified documents are leaked publicly -- but at some point you have to sit back and realize the end result is preposterous and there are better ways to deal with it. In the business world, it's fairly standard for non-disclosure agreements to have a clause that says you're allowed to discuss the information you learned if it becomes public via other means. This is perfectly sensible. The intent is to try to block the initial disclosure. But once it's out there, it makes no sense to bar the discussion of it.

And while (as described above), it's always been the case that government officials were barred from making use of leaked classified documents, this new "instruction" expands things in two ridiculous ways. First, it appears to apply to former intelligence community employees in addition to current ones. And, second, it says they can't even refer to the news coverage of those leaks -- which has long been a way that people could refer to known leaks without referencing the leaked documents directly.

ODNI personnel must not use sourcing that comes from known leaks, or unauthorized disclosures of sensitive information. The use of such information in a publication can confirm the validity of an unauthorized disclosure and cause further harm to national security. ODNI personnel are not authorized to use anonymous sourcing.

The NY Times quotes a former White House intelligence employee, noting that this restriction is almost certainly a First Amendment violation:

Timothy H. Edgar, a visiting professor at Brown University who worked at the intelligence office and the White House from 2006 to 2013, said it was appropriate to block former officials from disclosing classified information and confirming leaks.

But, he said, it went too far to retroactively block former officials from citing news reports in the public domain, as long as they did so neutrally and did not confirm them as factually correct. That would amount to a prior restraint on former officials’ First Amendment rights that they did not consent to, he said.

“You’re basically saying people can’t talk about what everyone in the country is talking about,” he said. “I think that is awkward and overly broad in terms of restricting speech.”

Once again, beyond making a continued mockery of "the most transparent administration in history" claims, these rules just make no sense at all. Yes, Clapper and Obama don't want someone "confirming" what's in a leaked document, but to date there have hardly been many issues with anyone worrying about the legitimacy of leaked documents. Maybe this is part of a new idiotic strategy by Clapper to call into question the validity of future leaked documents from Snowden and from others.

Either way, barring intelligence employees (current and former) from even discussing clearly public information is the epitome of a head-in-sand approach in which denying reality seems like a better strategy than living in reality. I don't know about you, but I want a government that is willing to actually face up to the world we live in, rather than sticking its fingers in its ears and shouting "la la la -- I can't hear you." That doesn't seem like a sensible plan by any "intelligence" community.

Filed Under: classified information, ed snowden, free speech, james clapper, leaks, prior restraint

Feinstein And Chambliss Let James Clapper Talk Them Out Of Requiring Transparency On The Administration's Drone Strikes

from the editing-the-pre-edited-version dept

It looks like the American public won't be getting any answers on the government's extrajudicial killings any time soon. An intelligence bill that passed the Senate late last year contained a stipulation requiring the administration to provide statistics on drone strikes, including number of combatants and noncombatants killed or injured in these strikes. That requirement has now been excised, thanks to the efforts of Sens. Feinstein and Chambliss and their buddy at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, as Spencer Ackerman reports.

[T]he Guardian has confirmed that Senate leaders have removed the language as they prepare to bring the bill to the floor for a vote, after the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, assured them in a recent letter that the Obama administration was looking for its own ways to disclose more about its highly controversial drone strikes.

“The executive branch is currently exploring ways in which it can provide the American people more information about the United States’ use of force outside areas of active hostilities,” Clapper wrote to the leaders of the Senate committee, Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California and Republican Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, on 18 April.

CC'ed on the letter are the heads of the House Intelligence Committee, Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger. This decision wasn't in their hands, but even if it was, it wouldn't have played out any differently. Rogers, in particular, is a huge fan of the administration's drone work and has publicly lamented the fact that the slowly-turning wheels of bureaucracy are keeping the US from killing even more people.

Feinstein's relationship with drones is, of course, somewhat hypocritical. She feels there should be stricter regulations on commercial drone usage (partially prompted by a non-commercial drone appearing outside her house during a Code Pink anti-NSA protest) and seems generally opposed to drone surveillance. However, she does stand strongly behind the nation's counterterrorism efforts and believes killing people with drones (rather than just watching them) is more acceptable.

Even more oddly, despite her very public battle against the CIA over control of the so-called "Torture Report" (a battle also marked by a bouts of Feinstein hypocrisy), she's been very supportive of the agency's weaponized aircraft.

Feinstein has long been a defender of the CIA’s drone strikes. During a February 2013 confirmation hearing for CIA Director John Brennan, Feinstein stated that the CIA’s targeting procedures kills only “single digits” of civilians annually, an assertion that cannot be independently confirmed because of the official secrecy surrounding the strikes.

Even some intelligence officials have grudgingly agreed some transparency on this issue would be a positive step for the administration to take. But that number doesn't include James Clapper, whose unintentionally humorous letter asserts that the self-proclaimed "most transparent administration" is actively seeking ways to publicize drone strike numbers. Only in recent months has the administration even acknowledged there might be a downside to its drone strike program. There's been a rollback in the number of strikes and the administration did express its hesitance to kill American citizens with drones, even if they clearly were associating with known terrorists. But this hand-wringing was mostly about public relations and less about the reality of the situation -- that the US would have to piss off yet another country by blowing past its agreement with them to not engage in military strikes on its soil.

So, there's that. And all of that is indeed very little. For years, it's been even less, as Ackerman points out.

The sharing of even basic information about drone strikes has run into a wall of official secrecy. Several independent groups attempt to track the numbers of people killed in the strikes, but no official US confirmation has been possible.

For one obfuscation artists (Clapper) to claim another (the administration) will be taking the lead when it comes to transparency borders on farcical. Now that Senate intelligence heads have complied with Clapper's request, the intelligence community's accountability has been removed. This puts the whole thing in the administration's hands, which isn't really an improvement. I'm sure the current president has no desire to publicly announce his regime has been more deadly than his predecessor's, especially given Bush's proclivity for pushing military/surveillance solutions to the world's problems.

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, drone strikes, james clapper, saxby chambliss, transparency

James Clapper Bans Intelligence Community From Basically Any Interaction With Nearly Anyone With A Social Media Account

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Back in 2012, we wrote about how Senator Dianne Feinstein appeared to be a lot more focused on who leaked information about the US involvement in Stuxnet, rather than the question of whether or not the US should have been involved in Stuxnet in the first place. Soon after, Feinstein pushed for astoundingly broad "anti-leak" rules that would effectively make it illegal to blow the whistle. It automatically treated any leak as bad, even if such a leak was clearly to blow the whistle on illegal behavior. Thankfully, Senator Wyden stepped in and helped kill that effort, noting the serious consequences:

"I think Congress should be extremely skeptical of any anti-leaks bills that threaten to encroach upon the freedom of the press, or that would reduce access to information that the public has a right to know," Wyden said in a floor statement publicly announcing his hold. "Without transparent and informed public debate on foreign policy and national security topics, American voters would be ill-equipped to elect the policymakers who make important decisions in these areas."

This resulted in the anti-leak provision being withdrawn. However, it appears that, in late March, Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, more or less put in place the same rules issuing an intelligence community directive that bars all unauthorized contact with the media, no matter what the subject or the issue. You can read the directive here. While some may argue that of course no member of the intelligence community should be able to communicate with a member of the media without authorization, they are ignoring a few key points.

First, it makes no distinction at all between classified and non-classified information. That's a big deal. It's reasonable (to a certain extent) to suggest that intelligence employees should not be discussing classified information with the press, but when you get into unclassified material, it gets fairly ridiculous pretty quickly. Lots of members of the intelligence community will often help reporters out, providing explanations and details on background, and that's the sort of thing the intelligence community should support given that they frequently complain that the press gets important details wrong.

Furthermore, as Wyden himself pointed out in the debate about Feinstein's original attempt:

I am concerned that they will lead to less-informed public debate about national security issues, and also undermine the due process rights of intelligence agency employees, without actually enhancing national security.

But, of course, it gets even worse as you dig into the details. In the directive, "media" is defined incredibly broadly:

For purpose of this Directive, media is any person, organization, or entity (other than Federal, State, local, tribal and territorial governments):

a. primarily engaged in the collection production, or dissemination to the public of information in any form, which includes print, broadcast, film and Internet; or

b. otherwise engaged in the collection, production, or dissemination to the public of information in any ofrm related to topics of national security, which includes print, broadcast, film and Internet.

Perhaps I'm misreading it, but section "b" especially would appear to suggest that if you ever use your Facebook/Twitter/etc. account to share (i.e., "disseminate") any info concerning the "topic of national security," you're a part of the media. Did you share a Guardian story about Ed Snowden on Facebook? Or maybe comment about the Heartbleed bug? Congrats, you're now considered "the media" under this directive -- meaning that no one who works for the intelligence community is allowed to interact with you at all, except with authorization. For intelligence community employees, this effectively rules out their ability to do things like go to their neighbors' barbecue this summer if that neighbor has ever shared any information concerning an issue that might be under the big umbrella of national security.

And, while it's unlikely that the FBI is suddenly going to be tracking down a lowly NSA analyst for sharing small talk with his or her neighbor, if that same analyst is suddenly under investigation for other issues, you'd better believe that such interactions will be brought under scrutiny. We've seen it before. An investigation into Thomas Drake's whistleblowing turned up nothing, so the DOJ went after him because he had a classified meeting agenda on a computer (even though it was declassified anyway soon after) and threatened him with 35 years in jail. John Kiriakou blew the whistle on CIA torture, but was eventually charged with helping a reporter speak to another former CIA agent in a manner that revealed nothing that would have an impact on national security. In other words, when the DOJ wants to bring an intelligence community employee down, they'll find anything to do so. And this directive gives them another tool, while at the same time making sure to stifle the public discourse on what the intelligence community is doing.

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, intelligence community, james clapper, journalism, leaks, ron wyden, social media

James Clapper Giving Speeches To Students, Begging Them To Stop Thinking Of Ed Snowden As A Hero

from the desperation-sets-in dept

A few weeks back, I read a Washington Post story "Inside the admissions process at George Washington University" and noted this interesting tidbit towards the end:

GW also asks students to list a role model and two words to describe themselves. As for herself, Freitag said, she would list “Martha Stewart/Tina Fey” and “sassy/classy.” This year, she’s seeing a lot of Edward Snowden citations.

I had thought about writing it up, but decided it was a pretty small thing, really. It's not secret that, as a group, younger people have a much more favorable impression of Snowden than older people.

However, apparently it set off alarm bells in James Clapper's head. He recently gave a keynote speech at the GEOINT conference, and used the opportunity to vent about stupid kids and their stupid love of that stupid Ed Snowden. And apparently he's going to be doing a lot of that.

“An admissions officer from George Washington University told The Post that for the admissions’ essay question, ‘Who’s your personal hero?’ the admissions officer observed that she was seeing a lot more of Edward Snowden citations. And the idea that young people see Edward Snowden as a hero really bothers me. So I thought I needed to talk about Snowden at Georgetown and Georgia and I am going to do the same elsewhere at colleges and universities.”

His attempts to do so in the speech, not surprisingly, really seem to fall flat. He claims that "despite being a geezer" he gets why you stupid kids like Snowden:

“I understand that a lot of young people see Snowden as a courageous whistleblower standing up to authority. I personally believe that whistleblowing in its highest form takes an incredible amount of courage and integrity. But Snowden isn’t a whistleblower,”

To prove this, Clapper comes up with an example of a whistleblower that he thinks "did it right." The army reservist who alerted others to the photos of Abu Ghraib prisoners being abused. And that guy is a whistleblower too. But just because one whistleblower did things one way doesn't discount the experience of other whistleblowers. And the reason so many people look up to Ed Snowden and see him as a hero is that, unlike the Abu Ghraib situation, with the NSA setup, basically the whole system was stacked against him. Clapper insists Snowden had legitimate paths to go down.

"Snowden said he felt NSA’s surveillance program was being used to violate privacy and civil liberties. If that was his concern, he had a lot of options on where to go with it. He could have reported it to seniors at NSA, which he didn’t do,”

Of course, Snowden claims that this is a lie and that he did raise concerns through the proper channels, only to have them ignored.

“There’s an inspector general for NSA and another one for the entire intelligence community. My office has a civil liberties and privacy protection officer. Snowden could also have gone to the Justice Department or the Congress. And as we’ve seen Snowden is superb at finding information so I think he could have tracked those people down had he given it a little thought,”

Of course, the inspector general for the NSA has since made it clear that if Snowden had complained to him, he would have shut him down and insisted there was nothing to worry about. Okay, so what about the one for the entire intelligence community? You mean the one that has rejected Congress' request to investigate the NSA? Congress? Considering how much difficulty Senators Wyden and Udall had in getting anyone to listen to them over the past few years, that was clearly a dead end. The Justice Department has also been equally complicit in the whole thing, since the NSA works hand in hand with the FBI, and the DOJ itself is the one that goes to the FISA Court to request these secret interpretations of US law.

It's pretty clear that the options Clapper listed were not options at all if you really believed that the intelligence community was in the wrong (as over half of the American public now believes). And of course, that's what Clapper really means here. He would have been much, much happier if Snowden had gone down a path that would have completely buried his concerns, making sure there was no debate about the US's creeping surveillance state, dismissal of the 4th Amendment and increasingly secret interpretation of laws to spy on everyone. And I'm sure he would have been a lot happier to never have had the fact that he flat out lied to Congress revealed.

Clapper also repeated the old saw that because of the leaks, those darn terrorists are changing how they communicate:

“We’re beginning to see changes in the communications behavior of our adversaries, particularly and most disturbingly terrorists, a trend that I anticipate will continue. And as a consequence our nation is less safe and our people less secure.”

Of course, as Kevin Gosztola points out, the same claim has been made for nearly a year, so it's a bit bizarre to have Clapper say now that they're just "beginning" to see changes. Even more to the point, these claims are almost certainly bullshit anyway. Elsewhere, when no press was around, Clapper has admitted that the NSA isn't actually concerned about terrorists changing their communications practices, saying that they can track them just fine. Furthermore, the idea that any of the revelations really changed how terrorists view their communications habits seems unlikely. As we've pointed out a few times, it's pretty clear that terrorists were well aware of our intelligence capabilities over a decade ago, and have acted accordingly.

The only new thing that has really been shown is how the US uses these same techniques across nearly all American citizens, as well as friends and allies.

Finally, as Gosztola points out, Clapper's real guffaw-inducing statement in the speech is to argue that his "major takeaway from this whole experience though has been the need for transparency" followed by him taking credit for "the decision to declassify more than 2000 pages of documents beginning last summer because the best way to deal with the misconceptions that had resulted from the leaks was to increase transparency." Except, as we've pointed out a few times, nearly all of the documents he's released have not been because of any major epiphany by Clapper, but because of lawsuits from the EFF, ACLU and others, something Clapper's office almost never admits (though, the last few releases have sometimes acknowledged it -- the last one only acknowledged it on Twitter, though).

And trying not to gag while reading this:

But the same transparency that reassures our citizens comes with a cost. It hurts our capabilities because our adversaries go to school on that very transparency. But when we boil it all down, we felt I felt we needed to pay that cost. Even if it meant losing some sources and methods, we need to engage in the kind of national conversation that free societies have - to correct misunderstandings that lead to false allegations in the media and to counter misperceptions that the IC work force is violating civil liberties. So we made the painful choice to declassify critical documents in the interest of being more transparent

Yeah, right. There's a reason people think Ed Snowden is a hero and James Clapper is a lousy liar. And this little tour to try to convince students otherwise isn't likely to change that.

Filed Under: ed snowden, hero, james clapper, nsa, surveillance