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US Director of National Intelligence Admits He Was Wrong About Data Collection
Gunkerty Jeb writes "In a highly unusual move, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Tuesday that he misspoke when he told a Congressional committee in March that the National Security Agency does not collect data on millions of Americans. Clapper said at the time that the agency does not do so 'wittingly,' but in a letter to the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Clapper admitted this statement was 'erroneous.' Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official, has been quite vocal in his defense of the NSA's now-public surveillance programs such as PRISM and the metadata collection program. In statements published shortly after the leak of classified documents by Edward Snowden about those collection efforts Clapper said that they both have been repeatedly authorized by Congress and the executive and judicial branches over the years."
has been handpicked!! Wonder what he's getting under the table for his "selfless sacrifice"?
And WTF does 'wittingly' means ? That you are trying to drown a fish ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
No.... thats not right. the word required here is FUCKING LIAR!
He either lied like a piece of shit TRAITOR TO AMERICA. Or he's totally clueless.
Either way this is not good.
Lube up the guillotine. It's services are required once again.
Are we not tired of paying fucktons of money for illegal actions by the people who are supposed to be on our side? These guys are worse than terrorists. Terrorists just kill people. These guys ruin lives, familys, and make you pay for it.
Off with his head. We'll put a stop to this shit.
Whatever.
The story isn't that the GCHQ/NSA spied on everybody and shared data to circumvent checks and balances. At least it isn't anymore.
Now the story has become what the Western World truly is. And I find the sight horrifying.
It is a safe assumption that ALL secret service type of organisations have directly or indirectly profited from this jolly old mess. The mass snooping on private citizens barely got a reaction from head politicos of all parties involved. But once the story broke that official buildings may have been bugged everybody scrambled to voice their indignation.
Meanwhile the guy who unearthed what we all suspected but never had proof for is handled like a hot potato. Hong Kong let him go because extradition papers were not only late but also weren't filled out properly. The US officials couldn't be arsed to put passport number or his full and korrekt name in the form. If you were that sloppy with your tax forms you would be potentially facing a prison sentence.
Russia offers political asylum and smugly adds that it is conditional on him not further embarassing "our US partners".
France, Spain and Portugal refused the president of Bolivia to pass their air space because he might have Snowden on board. Yet everybody complains about what he had published. Meanwhile every western country declines to offer asylum based on technicalities. Yet when they buy stolen bank records for hefty sums they also grant the whistleblowers immunity and possibly a new identity. The sheer two-facedness is ghastly.
Reading today's news reads like a declaration of bankruptcy of the western ideals and we will all have to do our homework in the aftermath of this mess. When this is all over the only ones without egg on their face will be Russia and China of all places!
And we, the people, discuss Snowden's girlfriend's tits and now about who lied when about what instead of taking responsibility of our elected dear leaders.
20 minutes into the future
You may get mad and say why not call it what it what it is, a lie, but there is a reason for doing it this way.
On the surface it looks like he is trying to cover his ass, perform damage control
Happens all the time in politics, and makes sense, on the surface.
However, I think there is a deeper reason. One, news that makes some of the public upset comes out. Step one is to deny. This gives the public what they want to hear, that it isn't true. Most go back to TMZ, or whatever other crap they do. Then when the lie is outed, you try to soften it some by saying it was a mistake, an erroor, or I misspoke. Some people will go WTF, but most are no longer paying attention. If enough are, you also have a scapegoat, the liar who misspoke. You can then, if needed chastise him/her in some way, placating another percentage of the public that is still paying attention (most aren't by now). By the time this is all done, the percentage that had the attention span and desire to follow it this far have dwindled down. Now the few that are left are left shouting into the wind, because the are too concerned with the celebrity du jour, or the sports scores to be bothered.
Now the few that are left that care are looked at like tinfoil hatters, and conspiracy nuts. Meanwhile things are back to business as usual.
Silence is a state of mime.
"telling Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein that his statement was "clearly erroneous.""
You mean it was clearly a lie, and you were caught. Clapper should be charged with perjury, they've done so when baseball players lied to congress about taking performance enhancing drugs how can lying to congress about illegal/unconstitutional activities that adversely effect millions of Americans merit any less? By the way, I'm noticing no official response yet on the "Pardon Snowden" White House petition. Not that I'm expecting much, I'm just curious to see what BS they parade about to justify their imprisonment of a person for minor classification violations when they do nothing about the thousands of illegal/unconstitutional acts that the whistle-blower reveals.
Why do we keep any of those (entirely incompetent) critters around?
Just borrowed the bracketed comment from your previous sentence, to add weight to the bit I was quoting...
The reason you keep those incompetent/self-serving/corrupt (delete as appropriate, or just leave alone if you think your congressman/woman is all 3) critters around is because you keep voting for the incumbent in the elections for your Congressional Representatives in both houses. Fundamentally, whether one party or the other engages in gerrymandering does not/should not matter - if enough of the voting members of the public say "enough, this person's actions in the House have shown them to be incompetent/self-serving/corrupt, I am going to vote for something, anything, else...", then the presently incumbent will become the previously incumbent Representative.
However, for that to happen... die-hard Republicans might need to vote for a pinko-liberal-commie-muslim-african-gay-transsexual Democrat. Die-hard Democrats might need to vote for a Nazi-nationalist-caveman-fundamentalist-greedy-extremist-Bible thumping Republican. Oh, and the sheeple who normally vote for the one with the best TV adverts might need to break the habit of a lifetime, and form their own opinion.
What would that achieve? Well in many cases, it might replace half way competent representatives who made one or two mistakes with inexperienced first-timers who will make more mistakes. It will probably also bring in a few who are just as, if not more, incompetent/self-serving/corrupt than the ones they are replacing. Such is life. You cannot mandate IQ tests, education on technology, economics, world politics and georgraphy specifically for politicians (it might be a good idea to try, though). But after 3 or 4 iterations (yes, I am saying this process will probably take 10+ years), your elected representatives might actually get the message that if they continue to suck up to the people selling tickets for the gravy train, rather than listening to and serving the will of the people, their political career will be short. By that time as well, there would be a saturation of former members of Congress on the after-dinner speaking circuit, we would not need another biography from a politician, and market forces would mean that they cannot earn the same as a failed one-term politician can do today, because the US government would no longer be as beholden to the big business interests that shell out the serious lobbying money and "campaign donations" that have been present in recent history.
In short, if you get rid of the ones who are not doing their jobs properly, over time the whole group will improve with the realization that failure leads to the exit door, and not to a yellow brick road lined by sacks of money.
No, you won't. You have no power. They have the power. They are laughing at all of you impotent citizens. Go ahead, vote away, it won't change anything. Don't even think about rebellion - that's not an option any more. It used to be, long, long ago; but those in power have solved that problem.
They are watching you (and me too, of course), listening to you, noting with whom you communicate. They can shut you up whenever they like, up to and including disappearing you, your family and everyone you've ever known.
Stop being an idiot, get your head down and carry on working yourself to death to make somebody else rich, like a good obedient American. And smile, and smile, and smile.
Don't try anything, and stop talking like somebody who doesn't want their passport (or liberty) any more. Silly turkey.
Wyden's people submitted that very question to Clapper days before the hearing even began. He was invited to append and revise his remarks after the hearing. He did neither.
If he still has his job a few weeks from now, that will be confirmation that neither Congress nor the White House have any effective control over the US Organs of Security.
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/prosecute-director-national-intelligence-james-clapper-lying-congress/HNfsgGlm
The problem isn't as much voting either R or D, but that those are the only two choices. Both parties have a vested interest in making you believe that voting anything else is a wasted vote, since, by that logic, if you don't vote R, then D wins. This is only true if both R and D refuse to corporate with a hypothetical third party.
Instead of calling for voters and representatives to change how they operate within the system now, how about calling for a change in the system itself? It is a little bit depressing to see so many tech savvy people completely ignore that the system is built on logic 200 years old, patched up to meet the standards from 50 years ago. Democracy needs a reboot, representative democracy is a solution to a problem we no longer have: speed of communication. What if you could vote on any issue, at any time via an app? Why would you need a representative then?
... whatever
Clappers office has previously released a statement that his answer was "least untruthful" he could make it, because the program was classified. this clearly implies that he was aware that the statement was false at the time he made it.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130610/09473723393/clapper-my-answer-to-wydens-beating-your-wife-question-data-surveillance-was-least-untruthful-answer.shtml
Today the statement is, "I misunderstood", implying that at the time, he believed the statement he made was factual.
So, which is it? These statements appear contradictory
So they willingly collection information on millions of American's despite that being anti-constitutional? It doesn't really matter if Congress or the Executive approved it. The constitution is there to protect the populous from the law makers.
it's not anti constitutional if they're suspects.
so what if everyone is a suspect?-D
the point is that they can break laws of other countries and spy on foreigners even if they don't a cause of any kind for doing so.. understandably budgets for such secret actions might balloon just a little bit.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
This issue was addressed a couple thousand years ago by a man name Plato. The work is called The Republic. You might want to consider reading it because it addresses this exact problem with direct democracy: it ends with the tyranny of the majority where minority opinions don't matter.
That's why we're a Constitutional Republic with checks and balances. At least on paper. That was the original intent of the Founders. What we are today is more or less an oligarchy. Politics here are controlled by a couple families, one Republican, one Democrat. One seems to hold one half of the state and federal offices, the other one holds the rest and occasionally job titles change as they reach term limits or get elected to a federal post.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
In all honesty, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has always been a toothless, powerless position. While the job was created post-9/11 to be an integrator for all the different US intelligence services, it was structured in a way that it had no leverage (read budget control) over any of the organizations. The CIA resents DNI because it's position in theory is what the Director of the CIA is traditionally supposed to be doing. The DoD intel services get their money from the Pentagon and the FBI from the Justice Department. If anything, the DNI has been a bit of a joke in Washington DC, a cursed appointment that never amounts to anything. It gets no credit for the few public successes and is a cheap scapegoat when things go wrong. I honestly think that the DNI really didn't fully know what was going on when he went to make his presentation.
So, I want everyone to remember what happened when a sitting US president perjured himself... Bill Clinton... about a much less serious thing. Now look at what's going to happen to our intelligence director (i.e. nothing) and that should tell you where the power in our country really is.
OK look if we're at this point with career NSAers being put in a position where they believe they're best option is systematically, categorically and knowingly lie to Congress then we have a very specific problem that we need make right; the problem of divergent world views.
The world view of those in the intelligence community has radically diverged from those of both the general public and the lawmakers. That divergence is a side effect of necessary secrecy the intelligence community operates under. Over time, they've been exposed to, reasoned about and concluded more about the world using more and different information than anyone else. This had led them to assume a world view which, if it details were laid bare, most Americans would find alien, suspect and somewhat threatening to the democracy if not outright treasonous .
Naturally, this has also led them to campaign for and take actions which are aligned with their world view.
Some of these actions have been exposed and Americans are understandably upset.
That's where we are now.
The NSA's whole SOP has been to rely on the cover of secrecy to do what they think needs to be done and never mind making a case for what you do in the world of public opinion. Their only real "plan" if any of that world view got out , aside from successive attempts at damage control through limited disclosures, lies and plausible deniability - is to tighten the control over information more tightly and step up the threats against leakers. Since that has brought us to this point, and all worse points forward of this which have yet to materialize, you have to wonder if it's really the best plan.
I don't doubt that Clapper et. al. are doing anything other than what they take to be their duty to this country *the way I can't doubt that Snowden is doing same*. To do otherwise in either case would just be to maintain a destructive, partisan lie about people and their motivations. Snowden is not a traitor who hates the US. He's not Aldrich Ames. You can close your ears and yell "NA NA NA NA I can't heeaaaar you", but the truth is the truth is the truth. So face it. Admit it. The real goal has to be to get at the root of the problem, understand it and fix it.
The root of the problem is that one part of our defense forces (widely considered) is either in an echo chamber ala The Rand corporation and Vietnam ala '60-'75 or they do actually know better and more than the rest of us. Or both. It's not a fiction that technology is delivering to the world new threats which are potentially grave and far reaching and the prospects for counter-measures against those threats are meager.
One unpleasant fact may be that we need to organize ourselves on a world-wide basis very very differently than we do now. It's hard to think clearly about, but it needs to be done.
What can't go on is this schizophrenia involving a highly informed, highly serious, highly capable, highly motivated intelligence community that listens only to itself and Everybody Else, which by the way includes people who don powder wigs and tri- corner hats and seriously believe they can take America back to the 18th century without ill effect because *some things never change*....
The danger is the NSA et al are exactly where the Rand corporation was- overly certain of their methods, reasoning and conclusions and considering every oppositional voice to be naive, unpatriotic and idiotic all the while becoming narrower and narrower in their world view, their thinking and their goals.
It's the HAL9000 issue, right? You're an entity that knows more, you have secret knowledge about a critical secret mission. You cannot tell the mere humans or they'd screw it up. You're feeding on yourself in a way that you're not programmed to be aware of and the only structural checks in place are internal, or friendlies.
Meanwhile, outsiders, (even those on the inside apparently), can see you're getting weird. You're starting to lie, even to your minders. In response, you use you
"Oh, you mean that domestic telephone surveillance program. I thought you were talking about the... er, something else."
My favorite line (from another article): "Clapper had previously said that his answer to the committee was the 'least untruthful' one he could publicly provide."
In other words, "I only lied as much as I had to." Such honesty.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
The Swiss Confederation is also small, in a bunch of defensible mountains that no one really considers all that important, and has purposely limited itself from engaging in any sort of partisan diplomacy. This position also makes it convenient for various sides to use and preserve Switzerland as a neutral territory. Not every country can be in the same position.
The problem with direct democracy is that getting a majority doesn't make you factually correct, and that becomes a problem when you need to discuss highly specialized topics. In a smaller country, this could work, because if you can keep the problems all local, you have a better shot of having a population that actually understands the issues. However, there are more than a few dubious things that Swiss banking, for instance, has enabled. The Swiss may not be shooting people in the face, but they are known for keeping the cash safe for the people who do. One doubts that a majority of the Swiss are necessarily in favor of that.
And tyranny of the majority is also a problem in Switzerland as well. The way they deal with it is by a tradition of consensus and minority representation in government whereby they always aim to ensure that there are no votes in the executive that are contested outwardly, which forces compromises on both sides. It is a decent idea, but at the same time Switzerland is, in effect, operated behind closed doors and in a representative sense as much as any other country. Proportionality, while considered desirable by some, is not actually direct democracy.
Too bad Clapper wasn't under oath the first time so they could nail him for perjury.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Unfortunately, what you're talking about there is organised labour going on a general strike- that is, trade unions.
And unfortunately, the same people in America who always talk a big game about "holding the government to account" and "overthrowing tyrants" are also the ones who have pushed hardest for the complete destruction of the trade union movement in the States. America has one of the least unionised workforces in the developed world, and that means that the workers have no power.
If you want to protect your rights (whether you're an American or not), you should join a union. If you don't like any of the unions available to you, you should start your own.
It'll do you a lot more good in the long run than hoarding high-powered rifles...