Well during, there's a lot of speeches that were given but Tim Samples who was then one of the house intel committee staffers was actually up on the dais with this big check, this big fake check like the ones you see on TV from Publisher's Clearing House so there's this gigantic fake check that has nine zeroes after a multi-single digit number so we're talking billions and he is handing this check to Hayden who is on the other side of the fake check and I remember Hayden had like this Cheshire grin on his face that only Hayden could have if you have gotten to know Hayden like I did in the executive session and I could see him mouthing the words though I could not hear them, he is pointing down at Tenet and he's pointing back at the check then he's pointing back at Tenet saying George, George, I got my money. I got my money. Like a little kid.
This is 9/11 but see Maureen Baginski, while we went around trying to console the workforce because they knew that we had failed the nation, we had failed to keep Americans and others out of harm's way. So we went around saying 9/11 is a gift to NSA, we'll get all the money we need and then some. This is really pathological so instead of actually acknowledging their own failure, they just simply said we're too big to fail, we have the power to cover up the truth which is precisely what they did. They knew where the skeletons were, they actually did an internal study.
That's the one thing I was never able to get a hold of. For all the accesses I had I was never able to get a hold of the internal study which is a multi volume retrospective analysis of what NSA knew, should have known, or didn't share. What happened is that the highest levels of NSA they generated a report and then buried it with the instructions that it will never see the light of day and no investigator will ever be given a copy and I am not aware of any investigator that was ever given a copy. But then I-
R.K.: You're talking about 9/11?
T.D.: Yeah it was specifically about 9/11. It was a retrospective analysis of NSA's role in 9/11. This is the pathology. They knew that they had failed. They knew that. But they were unwilling to acknowledge it. So by being unwilling to acknowledge it, 9/11 became, interestingly enough, became the frame for plausible deniability and you think about the pathology.
You have responsibility in 9/11 but you're denying that you do, so how do you compensate for it? And this is really critical I think as we wrap up here. It's really critical in terms of culture. To understand that NSA's response which is what I ran full head into it in those days and weeks after 9/11, their response was, you know what? We failed because we didn't have enough data.
Although they had enough data, but we didn't have enough data, we need to take it all, I don't care where it is, doesn't matter, just take it. That was precisely what happened and now we're twelve years later you have all of these bulk collection programs, more than I think will be ever disclosed, besides just the phone meta data collection program. You have all of these programs and it's not just NSA, you have got CIA, there was a report that came out even in the Wall Street Journal back from November 15, 2013 about CIA doing bulk copy collection of financial data including vast numbers of Americans. What's that about? What about the FBI?
I mean the FBI in some ways the FBI is getting to hide in the shadows of the CIA and the NSA. Because they're involved in all kinds of bulk copy collection but they don't call it that, because their primary instrument to gain access to all of this is national security letters. And that doesn't even take into account the fact that NSA has deployed huge numbers of hacker teams, who absent all these administrative subpoenas, NSLs, absent real warrants that still go before by the way there are real warrants issued by the secret court and absent the bulk warrant, what I call the general warrant orders like Verizon turning over all phone records each and every day to NSA which is still ongoing to this day, that has not stopped.
Leaving aside the fact that even if NSA doesn't have it it is given to third parties and they already have pending agreements with third parties that access their data anyway so what's the real difference other than there being a few more controls but that's never stopped NSA. But what about even if that is too constraining for NSA? Well let's just hack our way into these systems. Which they do. Because why?
Well we have proof of that with the Yahoo and Google offshore servers. Let's just upstream collect everything that's going in. That way we know we get it all. Which harkens back to when I used to fly in an RC135 listening in on East Germany because the Stasi motto was to know everything. Look, they have interviewed Stasi officers who said "we would drool at the prospect of having the technology of NSA for surveillance in what was our society".
And it's naïve, one of them I am paraphrasing, direct quote, although my German is not as good as it used to be, I can still read in German and understand much of what they say even the technical stuff, he actually said, "it's naïve, absolutely and utterly naïve for people to believe that when you collect all of this data that you don't use it for other purposes, especially surveillance data". Non-target surveillance data which allows you to target anybody at will.
Remember, this Stasi, people don't, you have got to understand the history, watch the Lives of Others, but the Stasi developed an extraordinary, I mean monstrously efficient filing system of surveillance. They had these incredibly well, unbelievably indexed analog, tabular format, they had their indexing scheme sort of like the Dewey decimal system in terms of traditional library card catalog system. They kept track of all of this information. It is so much easier to do in the digital space in fact you get lazy because hey I just have to run a few search routines and I can extract all kinds of information from the haystack.
The problem is if the data you're collecting is ostensibly for the purpose of finding needles then every straw becomes a needle so what's the difference? I can't tell the difference anymore which means I am going to actually lose, I am going to miss critical intelligence although the system is really good at finding stuff after the fact.
R.K.: Tom, if you were the President how would you change things?
T.D.: How would I (chuckles) change things? Besides the speech he gave today? That's not change, hope is not a strategy, the status quo is not change. You have got to remember the Machiavellian principle here, the ends justify the means and if the means are being disturbed you find other means. We modify.
R.K.: I believe that in addition to criticizing what's wrong you have got to put forward a vision of what you need. What would be the ideal?
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