Tag: Surveillance

How to speak the truth and yet lie? Ask General Alexander

Old joke in the industry: the difference between a sales person and marketing person is that the marketing person knows when he’s lying.  Which is General Alexander?

Let’s appreciate that the head of a spying agency is in a tough spot.  Allies and citizens of the U.S. alike are outraged, making an actual dialog difficult.  Leaders, however, must address hard issues head on and truthfully; and they must demonstrate command of the subject matter, or we waste our time.

Let’s go through some of the General’s statements:

“the assertions… that NSA collected tens of millions of phone calls [in Europe] are completely false”.

– From a BBC article

Maybe, but he and the president have in the past made the distinction between so-called “meta-data” (which the rest of us just call “data”).  And so maybe the NSA doesn’t have access to the calls, but he has not denied that they have access to who people called, the time and date they called, and for how long.  What is the truth?

Yesterday The Washington Post dropped another Snowden bombshell, indicating that the NSA was intercepting Google customer traffic by tapping into their communications lines.  The Guardian had previously reported that GCHQ was tapping fiber cables.  Alexander’s response, this time?

This is not NSA breaking into any databases. It would be illegal for us to do that. So, I don’t know what the report is. But I can tell you factually we do not have access to Google servers, Yahoo servers. We go through a court order.–From CNN

Except in this case, the NSA is not accused of breaking into servers, but rather tapping communications off of fiber cables.  By answering a charge that wasn’t made, either general doesn’t understand the issue and therefore cannot meaningfully inform the President or the public, or he does understand the truth and is intentionally prevaricating to the public.  What is necessary is a public debate over the policy issues relating to surveillance, and when it should and should not be authorized.  The people leading that dialog should be truthful and informed.

I’m sure the general is aware that everyone has their day of reckoning.  It’s time for his.  The president needs to find a new director of the NSA who can intelligently advance an honest discourse.

Snowden disclosures reveal NSA abuse

I had no knowledge of the NSA’s programs, but I’m not surprised by most of it.  James Bamford articulated in The Puzzle Palace in 1980 what the NSA was capable of, and it has always been clear to me that they would establish whatever intelligence capabilities they could in order to carry out their mission.  There are several areas that raise substantial concerns:

1.  NSA’s own documents indicate that they intended to interfere with and degrade crypto standards.  That on its own has caused the agency substantial harm to its reputation that will take decades to recover from.  But they haven’t just sullied their own reputation but that of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) who are a true braintrust.  Furthermore, they’ve caused the discounting in the discourse of anyone who is technology knowledgeable who have either recently held or currently hold government posts.  I will come back to this issue below.

2.  It is clear that the FISA mechanism just broke down, and that its oversight entirely failed.  Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court took its role seriously.  They all gave so much deference to the executive because of that bugaboo word “terrorism” that they failed to safeguard our way of life.  That to me is unforgivable and I blame both parties for it.  In fact I wrote about this risk on September 12, 2001.  I wrote then:

I am equally concerned about Congress or the President taking liberties with our liberties beyond what is called for. Already, millions of people are stranded away from their loved ones, and commerce has come to a halt. Let’s not do what the terrorists could not, by shrinking in fear in the face of aggression, nor should we surrender our freedom.

Sadly, here we are.

3. There are reports about law enforcement taking intelligence information and scrubbing the origin.  Where I come from we call that tampering with evidence in an egregious attempt to get around those pesky 4th and 5th amendments.

4. The NSA’s activities have caused great harm to U.S. services industry because other nations and their citizens have no notion as to when their information will be shared.  This is keenly true for companies such as Google and Microsoft who, it is reported, were ordered to reveal information.  The great Tip O’Neill said that all politics is local.  That may be true, but in a global market place, all sales are local.

It would be wrong to simply lay blame on the NSA.  They were following their mission.  Their oversight simply failed.  Congress needs oversight.  That is our responsibility.