This piece was reprinted by OpEd News with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.
NSA Heroes, Saving Lives of Potential Consumers
While participants in the Security Forum expressed total confidence in American empire, they could not contain their panic, outrage, and fear at the mere mention of Snowden.
"Make no mistake about it: These are great people who we're slamming and tarnishing and it's wrong. They're the heroes, not this other and these leakers!" NSA chief General Keith Alexander proclaimed, earning raucous applause from the crowd.
Snowden's leaks had prompted a rare public appearance from Alexander, forcing the normally imperious spy chief into the spotlight to defend his agency's Panopticon-style programs and its dubious mechanisms of legal review. Fortunately for him, NBC's Pete Williams offered him the opportunity to lash out at Snowden and the media that reported the leaks, asking whether the "terrorists" (who presumably already knew they were being spied on) had changed their behavior as a result of the leaks.
"We have concrete proof that terrorists are taking action, making changes, and it's gonna make our job harder," Alexander declared, offering nothing to support his claim.
Alexander appeared in full military regalia, with colorful decorations and medallions covering his left breast. Casting himself as a stern but caring father who has the best interests of all Americans at heart, even if he can't fully disclose his methods, he turned to the crowd and explained, "The bad guys...hide amongst us to kill our people. Our job is to stop them without impacting your civil liberties and privacy and these programs are set up to do that."
"The reason we use secrecy is not to hide it from the American people, but to hide it from the people who walk among you and are trying to kill you," Alexander insisted.
Corporations like AT&T, Google and Microsoft that had been compelled to hand over customer data to the NSA "know that we're saving lives," the general claimed. With a straight face, he continued, "And that's good for business because there's more people out there who can buy their products."
Self-Reporting
So who were the "bad guys" who "walk among us," and how could Americans be sure they had not been ensnared by the NSA's all-encompassing spying regime, either inadvertently or intentionally? Nearly all the Security Forum participants involved in domestic surveillance responded to this question by insisting that the NSA had the world's most rigorous program of oversight, pointing to Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts as the best and only means of ensuring that "mistakes" are corrected.
"We have more oversight on this [PRISM] program than any other program in any government that I'm aware of," Alexander proclaimed, ramming home a talking point repeated throughout the forum.
"I can assure these are some of the judges who are renowned for holding the government to a very high standard," John Carlin, the Assistant US Attorney General for National Security, stated.
But in the last year, FISA courts received 1,856 applications for surveillance from the government. In 100 percent of cases, they were approved. As for Congress, only two senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, demanded the NSA explain why PRISM was necessary or questioned its legality. Despite the fact that the entire regime of oversight was a rubber stamp, or perhaps because of it, none of those who appeared at the Security Forum to defend it were willing to consider any forum of independent civilian review.
"You have to do [domestic surveillance] within a closed bubble in order to do it effectively," Dennis Blair, the director of National Intelligence conceded under sustained grilling from the Washington Post's Barton Gellman, one of the reporters who broke Snowden's leaks and perhaps the only journalist at the Security Forum who subjected participants to tough scrutiny.
When Gellman reminded Alexander that none of the oversight mechanisms currently in place could determine if the NSA had improperly targeted American citizens with no involvement in terror-related activity, the general declared, "we self-report those mistakes."
"It can't be, let's just stop doing it, cause we know, that doesn't work," Alexander maintained. "We've got to have some program like [PRISM]."
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
2
1
