First, I'm not doubting the documents Ed Snowden has brought forward. I'm not doubting the illegal reach of the NSA in spying on Americans and the world.
But as to how this recent revelation happened, and whether Ed Snowden's history holds up…I have questions.
Could Snowden have been given extraordinary access to classified info as part of a larger scheme? Could he be a) an honest man and yet b) a guy who was set up to do what he's doing now?
If b) is true, then Snowden fits the bill perfectly. He wants to do what he's doing. He isn't lying about that. He means what he says.
Okay. Let's look at his history as reported by The Guardian.
In December 1974, when a previous program of secret government surveillance was revealed by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times, the ensuing public uproar led directly to extensive congressional investigations and the creation of new mechanisms of oversight, including intelligence oversight committees in Congress and an intelligence surveillance court.
The public uproar over the latest disclosures of secret domestic surveillance by The Guardian and the Washington Post different cannot produce a precisely analogous result, because the oversight mechanisms intended to correct abuses already exist and indeed had signed off on the surveillance activities. Those programs are “under very strict supervision by all three branches of government,” President Obama said Friday. In some sense, the system functioned as intended.
Nevertheless, all three branches of government performed badly in this case, by misrepresenting the scope of official surveillance, misgauging public concern and evading public accountability.
Many loyal Republicans opposed impeaching George W. Bush. So did most liberal and progressive activist groups, labor unions, peace organizations, churches, media outlets, journalists, pundits, organizers, and bloggers, not to mention most Democratic members of Congress, most Democrats dreaming of someday being in Congress, and — toward the end of the Bush presidency — most supporters of candidate Barack Obama or candidate Hillary Clinton.
Remarkably in the face of this opposition, a large percentage and often a majority of Americans told pollsters that Bush should be impeached. It's not clear, however, that everyone understood why impeachment was needed. Some might have supported a successful impeachment of Bush and then turned around and tolerated identical crimes and abuses by a Democrat, assuming a Democrat managed to engage in them. But this is the point: whoever followed Bush's impeachment would have been far less likely to repeat and expand on his tyrannical policies. And the reason many of us wanted Bush impeached — as we said at the time — was to prevent that repetition and expansion, which we said was virtually inevitable if impeachment was not pursued.
Government officials and the document itself made clear that the NSA regarded the identities of its private partners as PRISM’s most sensitive secret, fearing that the companies would withdraw from the program if exposed. “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft; we need to make sure we don’t harm these sources,” the briefing’s author wrote in his speaker’s notes.
An internal presentation of 41 briefing slides on PRISM, dated April 2013 and intended for senior analysts in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, described the new tool as the most prolific contributor to the President’s Daily Brief, which cited PRISM data in 1,477 items last year. According to the slides and other supporting materials obtained by The Post, “NSA reporting increasingly relies on PRISM” as its leading source of raw material, accounting for nearly 1 in 7 intelligence reports.
That is a remarkable figure in an agency that measures annual intake in the trillions of communications. It is all the more striking because the NSA, whose lawful mission is foreign intelligence, is reaching deep inside the machinery of American companies that host hundreds of millions of American-held accounts on American soil.
We also learned that James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, flat-out lied to the Senate when he said that the N.S.A. did not “wittingly” collect any sort of data on millions of Americans. And we were reminded of how disappointing President Obama can be. These were all things the public deserved to know.
VIDEO (1:14) Here is Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing in March asking Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, “Does the NSA collect any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” For those who can’t view the video, Clapper’s answer is, “No, sir. … Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.” Maybe the way Clapper rubs his forehead while responding is his “tell.” Anybody ever play poker with the guy?
Update, 5:13 p.m.: Clapper tells the National Journal, “What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that.” Except … that's not what he said.
Then watch Feinstein embarrass herself defending Clapper. “Well, I, I, this is very hard. There is no more direct or honest person than Jim Clapper, and I think Mike and I know that. You can misunderstand the question. Th, this” — et cetera.
