Time To Tame The NSA Behemoth Trampling Our Rights - GuardianUK [View all]

[WillyT]

Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights
From leaks and Fisa court papers, it's clear the NSA is a bloated spying bureaucracy out of control. It can't be reformed by insiders
Yochai Benkler - theguardian.com
Friday 13 September 2013 08.15 EDT

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The spate of new NSA disclosures substantially raises the stakes of this debate. We now know that the intelligence establishment systematically undermines oversight by lying to both Congress and the courts. We know that the NSA infiltrates internet standard-setting processes to security protocols that make surveillance harder. We know that the NSA uses persuasion, subterfuge, and legal coercion to distort software and hardware product design by commercial companies.

We have learned that in pursuit of its bureaucratic mission to obtain signals intelligence in a pervasively networked world, the NSA has mounted a systematic campaign against the foundations of American power: constitutional checks and balances, technological leadership, and market entrepreneurship. The NSA scandal is no longer about privacy, or a particular violation of constitutional or legislative obligations. The American body politic is suffering a severe case of auto-immune disease: our defense system is attacking other critical systems of our body.

First, the lying. The National Intelligence University, based in Washington, DC, offers a certificate program called the denial and deception advanced studies program. That's not a farcical sci-fi dystopia; it's a real program about countering denial and deception by other countries. The repeated misrepresentations suggest that the intelligence establishment has come to see its civilian bosses as adversaries to be managed through denial and deception.

We learned months ago that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied under oath to Congress. Now, we know that General Keith Alexander filed a "declaration" (which is like testifying in writing), asserting an interpretation of violations that the court said "strains credulity". The newly-disclosed 2009 opinion includes a whole section entitled "Misrepresentations to the Court", which begins with the sentence:

The government has compounded its noncompliance with the court's orders by repeatedly submitting inaccurate descriptions of the alert list process to the FISC.

General Alexander's claim that the NSA's vast numbers of violations were the consequences of error and incompetence receive derisive attention. But this claim itself was in a court submission intended to exculpate the agency from what would otherwise have been an intentional violation of the court's order. There is absolutely no reason to believe the claims of incompetence and honest error; there is more reason to assume that these are intended to cover up a worse truth: intentional violations.

Second, the subversion...

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More: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/nsa-behemoth-trampling-rights