Dear national intelligence agency chiefs: you aren't helping your cause with statements like this.
'CIA Director John Brennan suggested that negative public opinion and "misunderstanding" about the US intelligence community is in part "because of people who are trying to undermine" the mission of the NSA, CIA, FBI and other agencies. These people "may be fueled by our adversaries," he said.'
Yes, the old "criticize us and you're just doing the work (either intentionally or as a dupe) of Sinister Enemies" approach. I thought that went out with the McCarthy Era, but some people have short memories, I guess.
If it is difficult to have calm, adult discussions and decision-making about electronic surveillance (domestic and foreign), it is not mostly because of ISIL-leaning fellow-travelers or folk in the employ of narco-terrorists. It is largely because, post-9/11 (14 years ago today, fergoshsakes), intelligence "homeland security" agencies took all the power they had been clamoring for over the previous decade, went beyond the wide-ranging scope handed them by Congress and the President, lied to the public and to courts about what they were doing, did everything they could to keep it all a deep, dark, ever-expanding secret — and then got outed by folk like Wikileaks and Edward Snowden.
And now they wonder why they aren't trusted.
They aren't trusted because they have both hidden the truth and lied — and done so not to keep the Bad Guys from knowing what they could do (hint: the Bad Guys, the ones organized enough to actually be a threat, already assume such capabilities), but to keep the US citizenry from knowing how their own privacy was being compromised. They have never demonstrated any significant accomplishments from such programs, even as they sucked up billions of dollars and petabytes of data. And they have waved off or denounced the potential dangers of such programs through statements like Director Brennan's.
They say "trust us," when we know historically the dangers of wide-ranging spy powers. And they say "trust us" while giving us no reason to do so, and every reason to think they will not tell us the truth if they find it inconvenient to do so.
'"I have something on my mind that affects all the work we do as an intelligence community," [FBI Director James] Comey said in his opening remarks. "I think that citizens should be skeptical of government power. But I fear it's bled over to cynicism. It is something that is getting in the way of reasoned discussion, and I'm very concerned about how to change that trend of cynicism." He sees that cynicism directed toward everyone from law enforcement officers on the beat to the intelligence community at large.
In particular, Comey said, he feels that his push for some way to gain backdoor access to encryption was "met with venom and deep cynicism." "How do we get to a healthier place in talking about authority?" he asked.'
By demonstrating that authority — especially authority in a democracy — can be trusted, can act with maximum and not minimum transparency, and that the obvious risks to things like "secret" backdoors to encryption systems outweigh the non-documented advantages.
Don't get me wrong: I understand the need to know about potential actions by acknowledged threats, foreign and domestic, to the nation, and about being able to ferret out as-yet-unrecognized threats as well. Abolishing the NSA, or the CIA, or the FBI, is not the answer.
But neither is letting them do whatever they desire in gathering data about everyone on the globe. Even if every single person on that stage is acting today out of the purest and finest of intentions, we know — from the history of other nations, and the history of our own — how unfettered intelligence gathering can be abused by abusive people, can leak to the wrong places, can be used for purposes very different than what are being proposed when the data is first gathered. Those are the givens of any discussion about cyber-spying programs, and until those are addressed in an open and transparent fashion, we won't be able to approach that "healthier place."
FBI, intel chiefs decry “deep cynicism” over cyber spying programs
Admit tough questions about things like backdoors have no easy answers.
