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Former Head of NSA Calls For Obama To Reject NSA Commission Recommendations
An anonymous reader writes that USA Today reports "Retired general Michael Hayden ... called on President Obama Monday to ... reject many of the recommendations of the commission he appointed to rein in NSA surveillance ... 'President Obama now has the burden of simply doing the right thing,' ... 'And I think some of the right things with regard to the commission's recommendations are not the popular things. They may not poll real well right now. They'll poll damn well after the next attack ...' ... The commission ... said the recommendations were designed to increase transparency, accountability and oversight at the NSA. Hayden ... oversaw the launch of some of the controversial programs ... He defended them as effective and properly overseen by congressional intelligence committees and a special court. 'Right now, since there have been no abuses and almost all the court decisions on this program have held that it's constitutional, I really don't know what problem we're trying to solve by changing how we do this,' he said."
He has no incentive to change anything. How it 'polls' is irrelevant. Someone with 2016 aspirations will need to make this their issue.
They'll poll damn well after the next attack
The next attack will happen with or without illegal, unconstitutional domestic spying. I don't want you magic tiger protection rocks sir.
Silence is a state of mime.
..who was on guard duty before 9/11.... why should anyone listen to him?
He argues that it is legal because it is useful. Using that logic, I should be allowed use claymore mines to protect my property from intruders. Indiscriminate, illegal but probably effective. He should remember, if you subvert the constitution, you corrode the very fabric of the nation. We're becoming just another regime.
[quote]They may not poll real well right now. They'll poll damn well after the next attack ...'[/quote]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_probability
I'm not an America, although I am a citizen of one of the 5eyes - the one with a fundamentally criminal past.
Freedom is about being about being able to live your life as you choose. Freedom is about disagreeing with other peoples' choices as to how they live their life, yet accepting that choice, as long as it doesn't to detrimentally affect yours.
"O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?"
Question mark is very well placed. The question mark was in the positive for around 200 years, however I think it is conclusive now. The answer is "Nope."
There is no question about America now about being home of the free and the brave. Terrorism won, because terrorism is about causing terror, and therefore ridiculous levels of measures against it.
(heh, this post will probably get me on the NSA list, but I'm probably already there anyway.)
His claim about there being no abuses is a bald-faced lie. Why should anyone believe anything in that sentence after the first major lie?
The record of prevented attacks, according to the official report, is zero. The surveillance programs the NSA runs have prevented no attacks. They have, however, fundamentally undermined our Constitution and the entire rule of law in the United States of America. The citizenry has been watching, stunned, while the Congress, Whitehouse, and courts in DC have been wiping their collective behind with our foundational document, and are now looking at each other, waiting to see who's gonna pick up the gun and put the mad dog down. The criminals in DC and Wall Street misread the apparent lack of reaction with acquiescence or agreement. It's not. It's the entire mass of the country, who already have their hands full with many, many deep problems, discovering this massive systemic betrayal and trying to process what the best course of action is. If DC does not act now to channel things into productive reform, they will explode to the detriment of all, but especially to the detriment of DC and their masters on Wall Street.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
I agree with this. I'm also really pissed that secret services refuse to create more transparency and do a lot of things that are not lawful (like dragnet surveillance, indiscriminate mass surveillance of ordinary law abiding citizens, economic espionage, etc).
That, however, doesn't mean that we'll have any progress by calling workers at the NSA traitors who should be killed or even heavily sanctioned. Processes should however be fixed.
I do think transparency and legality of their profession has to come back (by following the processes and requirements, and having a public debate on all this).
It's not a deal society can make to allow a surveillance police state (even if it's here already; it still doesn't make it OK for it to stay). The US can and should make legislation deals with the EU on this if the fear is that internationally laws and processes aren't worth a lot. It can make such deals even with China or Russia, and with other BRIC countries too. There is no need to have invasive non-targeted worldwide surveillance of ordinary citizens for America to be much more safe than before 9/11. Whoever in the US military and/or government who's telling you that is lying.
Right now, however, the US is showing absurd distrust in the rest of the world and actions done by your NSA as being seen in the population worldwide as military action against them. They are ordinary citizens with no intent to harm anybody in the US. But by invading their privacy so insanely massively you Americans ARE going to create a lot of nutcases for decades to come.
Stop it.
"After the next attack"
Wait a second - you mean that you admit the NSA is not able to prevent the attacks? OK, so explain again why it is a necessary, nay, "vital" government agency?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
"They may not poll real well right now. They'll poll damn well after the next attack ..."
So... these things aren't popular now... but the next time they fail to stop an attack... Americans will be glad the NSA was here to fail to stop the attack?
The sad part is he's probably right, the public actually is that stupid.
He's right in one way. It's probably not going to change.
And then he pulls the boogie man out of his pocket.
"The next attack."
"The next attack."
So we're supposed to just huddle up in a corner and live in fear for the rest of forever. Just so that, MAYBE, some day, they catch another underpants bomber?
Uhm...
Not to put too fine a point on that, FUCK NO!
At some point, reality sets in and people need to realize that The Real World (not the stupid "reality TV show") is NOT a safe place. And NO amount of watching will curtail EVERY attempt.
Nor will throwing away our rights like a hot potato make us any safer.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Looking at it from the outside, i.e not being a US citizen:
1. You piss of everybody else on the planet, so do not expect any goodwill.
2. There were abuses, please do google loveint.
3. Snowden walked ot of NSA with *all* their goodies, so how says that that did not happen before ? He was just the first to go public with the abuses.
4. How can any US citizen still talk about the "land of the free", that is totally ridiculous and hypocrite at the same time.
5. You do have the best democracy that money can buy
Actually, they'll poll really well if some SWAT team kicks in some doors and stops the next attack. And the NSA's contribution to that is revealed. I don't think the current surveillance regime (what we knew of it, anyway) polled terribly well after Boston. The Russians told us to watch these guys and still our entire bag of tricks didn't stop them.
True. Results would be a more effective argument. But they're not really interested in results -- at least from what people like Hayden do and say -- they're interested in pursuing unconstitutional total dragnet surveillance of everyone's communications for its own sake (and whatever nefarious uses they can come up with now or in the future). As you say, the system didn't help catch the Boston bad guys. It was never intended to. The Boston guys could have been caught by acting on the tip, getting a warrant based on that, which a judge would have certainly approved in a Constitutional, above-the-board process, tapping their phones, searching their place, interviewing acquaintances and other old-fashioned police work. All things that could be done with regular oversight and due process. No new laws, no secret courts, no black budgets.
The NSA and the Executive branch want unfettered, unlimited, unaccountable surveillance for their own reasons. "Catching terr'ists" is just the excuse. I've even got a car analogy. Back in the day, I wanted a 4 barrel carburetor and high performance manifolds from my Mustang. I told my dad that it would get better mileage that way -- you know, 'cause "better breathing." Of course he didn't fall for that, he knew I just wanted it to go faster to impress friends and (in my mind) girls.
I am not a crackpot.
It might not be an abuse by a majority of people, but it is an abuse. Hayden specifically stated that there were NO abuses and that the absence of abuses shows that the program should continue. Demonstrating that there WERE abuses (even if they weren't NSA-approved abuses) shows this line of argument to be completely false. (The fact that a program shouldn't be evaluated solely on the basis of "is it being abused right now" is a different conversation, though a relavent one to the overall discussion.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.