Administration And NSA Continue To Avoid The Privacy Vs. Security 'Discussion'

from the more-uncomfortable-than-parents-handling-sex-ed dept

This "discussion" about the whole "security vs. privacy" thing the administration claims it has "welcomed" since the Snowden leaks began? Yeah. Still not happening. As Cal Borchers at BetaBoston reports, government reps at an MIT event focused on "big data and privacy" couldn't have appeared less interested in discussing any of the implications of widespread domestic surveillance.

The kicker came during an afternoon panel discussion, when John DeLong, the National Security Agency's director of compliance, should have been awarded an honorary degree in tongue biting. DeLong sat right next to Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, yet refused to engage when she made pointed comments, like this one: "Everything's being done in secret. But for Edward Snowden, we wouldn't even be having this conversation."

DeLong would look down and away (perhaps there was an interesting piece of metatada on the floor of Wong Auditorium), waiting silently for another panelist to move the discussion away from his agency.

This is nothing new for DeLong. Back in August of last year, he gave the Washington Post permission to quote him "by name and title" after holding a 90-minute interview with the paper, after the White House routed all press queries to him directly. When the paper refused to edit quotes after the government's "internal review" of the interview draft, the administration and the NSA then informed the Washington Post that nothing DeLong said could be used. All of his input was replaced with a bland, prepared statement.

Now, DeLong could have been interested in participating in this discussion, but this previous administration intervention seems to indicate that the NSA and the White House would prefer DeLong keeps his head down and his mouth shut -- at least in cases where it can't push through its own edit of the "discussion."

DeLong wasn't the only government rep uninterested in discussing government surveillance.

Before DeLong's group took the floor, US Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker made a brief speech in which she barely touched on the subject of privacy, then exited quickly without fielding questions.

Someone seated near me, in one of those fake whispers that's really meant to be heard by a lot of people, summed things up nicely: "No questions? Why have a real discussion, right?"

Snickers rippled a few rows in every direction.

As Borchers points out, there was plenty of discussion about private companies and privacy, but when it came to the biggest "company" of all, the US government, no one had much to say. White House counselor John Podesta somehow even managed to "phone in" his phoned-in statement (Borchers describes Podesta's contribution as "bland remarks") to open the event.

This is the US government's idea of "discussion." Canned statements and floor-gazing. The NSA made this bed and now refuses to lie in it. (Although officials will often lie outside of it -- ho, ho! *coughJamesClapper*) The administration plays along, making small gestures but refusing to consider making any substantial statements or changes. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence continues to pass out redacted documents with implied transparency, glossing over the fact that every document release so far has been compelled by an FOIA lawsuit.

This isn't a discussion. This is low murmurs and unintelligible mumbling being passed off as a "discussion" in hopes this new era of faux-openness will soon blow over and allow everyone involved to return to the opacity and darkness they've become accustomed to operating in.

Filed Under: edward snowden, john delong, nsa, privacy, security

NSA Defenders Insist Their Lawbreaking Should Be Ignored Because They 'Didn't Mean It'

from the let's-try-that-anywhere-else dept

We got a hint of what NSA defenders would say to try to respond to the latest revelations of thousands of abuses per year by NSA agents, but late Friday (the best place to try to hide from the news cycle) we saw the official response plan roll out and, my goodness, is it ridiculous. The NSA held a conference call, in which it said, sure, sure, agents had abused the system thousands of times, but it shouldn't count, because they didn't mean to:

"These are not willful violations, they are not malicious, these are not people trying to break the law," John DeLong, NSA director of compliance, told reporters.

Except... the NSA also admitted separately:

Mr. DeLong reported, however, "a couple" of willful violations in the past decade. He didn't provide details.

Wait, hadn't Keith Alexander just told us that there had never been a willful violation?

Meanwhile, Senator Feinstein is trying a similar "but they didn't mean it" argument with her statement:

The majority of these ‘compliance incidents’ are, therefore, unintentional and do not involve any inappropriate surveillance of Americans.

As I have said previously, the committee has never identified an instance in which the NSA has intentionally abused its authority to conduct surveillance for inappropriate purposes.

Two points in response to this. First, John DeLong admitted during the call that there have been willful violations. Feinstein -- the person in charge of oversight -- is claiming that she's never heard of an instance of intentional abuse. Either she's really, really, really bad at her job and should be removed from the Intelligence Committee, or she's lying (and should be removed from the Intelligence Committee).

Second, the next time someone is accused of a crime, can they just say they didn't intend to violate the law and get away with it? Because that seems to be what the NSA and Feinstein are saying here. Good news for Ed Snowden and Bradley Manning, right? Both of them have made it abundantly clear that they didn't "intend" any harm at all. In fact, they "intended" to help America. So, based on Feinstein and the NSA's reasoning, they should be in the clear, right?

The other talking point, which we'd briefly discussed last week is this idea that because these abuses are such a small part of the NSA's overall surveillance, this isn't a problem. The NSA's DeLong tried this line of reasoning as well:

The official, John DeLong, the N.S.A. director of compliance, said that the number of mistakes by the agency was extremely low compared with its overall activities. The report showed about 100 errors by analysts in making queries of databases of already-collected communications data; by comparison, he said, the agency performs about 20 million such queries each month.

Other defenders of stamping out the 4th Amendment, like commentator David Frum, bizarrely argued that as long as the NSA does more spying, that's actually better because the ratio of abuse to spying is so low. Uh, that's not how it works.

Again, going back to the Snowden and Manning examples, for the vast, vast majority of their lives, neither of them leaked a damn thing. It was really just one day in their life that they leaked something. So, according to the reasoning of the NSA and Frum, they couldn't have broken the law, since it was such a tiny, tiny part of their lives, right?

Does anyone actually think these arguments make sense? Systematic abuses of the system are not okay just because they're not "intentional," and they're not okay just because they're a small percentage of all the spying the NSA does. This is still about the NSA breaking the law, and then failing to have any real oversight concerning its activities (not to mention lying about these abuses repeatedly).

Filed Under: dianne feinstein, intention, john delong, keith alexander, nsa, nsa surveillance