NSA Ill-Suited For Domestic Cybersecurity Role

Hugh Pickens writes "Former CIA counterterrorism analyst Stephen Lee has an interesting article in the Examiner asserting that the National Security Agency is 'a secretive, hidebound culture incapable of keeping up with innovation,' with a history of disregard for privacy and civil liberties. Lee says that for most of its sixty-year history, the NSA has been geared to cracking telecom and crypto gear produced by Soviet and Chinese design bureaus, but at the end of the cold war became 'stymied by new-generation Western-engineered telephone networks and mobile technologies that were then spreading like wildfire in the developing world and former Soviet satellite countries.' When the NSA finally recognized that it needed to get better at innovation, it launched several mega-projects, tagged like 'Trailblazer' and 'Groundbreaker,' that have been spectacular failures, costing US taxpayers billions. More recently, the NY Times reported that the NSA has been breaking rules set by the Obama administration to peer even more aggressively into American citizens' phone traffic and email inboxes. Whistleblower reports portray NSA domestic eavesdropping programs as unprofessional and poorly supervised, with intercept technicians ridiculing and mishandling recordings of citizens' private 'pillow talk' conversations. Lee concludes that 'if the Federal government must play a role, then Congress and President Obama should turn to another agency without a record of creating mistrust — perhaps even a new entity. Meanwhile, NSA should focus on listening in on America's enemies, instead of being an enemy of Americans and their enterprises.'"

Comments

Pathetic excuse

[tjstork]

It's the same concept with spy powers.

No its not. If President Obama cannot keep discipline within his NSA, then one should question his leadership. Bush had no problem trying to purge the CIA of liberals, and if Obama wanted to purge the NSA of those who would spy on American citizens, then, he would.

The real issue is that, now President Obama is in the hot seat, he is being barraged daily by a bunch of threat reports, classified and unaccountable, that he finds himself, thanks to 9/11, incapable of entirely ignoring. On one hand, his instincts might tell them 99% are pure b.s., and, honestly an even higher percentage of them probably are, but, if one is actually not b.s., then he has a problem.

Thus, despite all of his feelings otherwise, all of his misgivings and suspicions, the lion's share of the security apparatus started by Roosevelt, that every administration has built on, will continue to grow.