{"id":30409,"date":"2013-12-26T23:29:40","date_gmt":"2013-12-26T23:29:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=30409"},"modified":"2013-12-26T23:32:24","modified_gmt":"2013-12-26T23:32:24","slug":"an-absurd-column-by-walter-pincus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=30409","title":{"rendered":"An Absurd Column by Walter Pincus"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k.a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

Walter Pincu<\/strong>s, taking notes for the embattled bureaucrats of the\u00a0creepy-state<\/a> here:<\/p>\n

\u2018Front-Page Rule\u2019 is unprecedented in U.S. intelligence community<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

….\u201cAccountability and secrecy\u201d were two watchwords a former senior intelligence official said guided operations during his 40-year career, not whether the public would approve of everything he was doing.<\/strong><\/p>\n

However, that\u2019s not what President Obama\u2019s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies said last week after its study of intelligence gathering in the wake of disclosures generated by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden\u2019s leaking of tens of thousands of previously secret NSA documents.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The president\u2019s five-member panel called for reinstituting what it called the \u201cFront-Page Rule,\u201d which it described as an \u201cinformal precept, long employed by the leaders of U.S. administration.\u201d It said such activities should not be undertaken if the public couldn\u2019t support them if exposed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

In some 40 years of covering intelligence, I have never heard of such a rule, nor have several former senior intelligence officials with whom I have talked.<\/strong><\/p>\n

….Today, within the ranks of the intelligence community, there is concern that, in the face of the political uproar growing out of the Snowden disclosures, Obama might be backing away from the NSA after initially supporting the agency. \u201cThe White House may be looking to escape responsibility,\u201d the former official said, adding that recently not enough public support has been given to Director of National Intelligence\u00a0James R. Clapper Jr.<\/a>\u00a0and NSA Director\u00a0Gen. Keith B. Alexander<\/a>, who are out front defending the programs.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are other recommendations and statements put forward by the president\u2019s review board that run contrary to past and present operations.<\/strong><\/p>\n

For example, the panel said a collection effort should not be initiated \u201cif a foreign government\u2019s likely negative reaction\u201d to it being revealed \u201cwould outweigh the value of the information likely to be obtained.\u201d That\u2019s a judgment call that every CIA officer, from junior to senior, routinely makes.<\/strong><\/p>\n

….The president\u2019s review board writes that \u201cif we are too aggressive in our surveillance policies under section 702 [a program that permits collection of intelligence from foreign targets associated with terrorists], we might trigger serious economic repercussions for American businesses.\u201d<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

It is true that the Church and Pike hearings left a generation of IC personnel feeling burned and very risk averse toward covert operations and distrustful of politicians as a career philosophy. We are seeing that longstanding IC bureaucratic preference for risk aversion here in the veiled threat by senior insiders that the IC will have to sit on their hands vis-a-vis foreigners unless the NSA is greenlighted to spy on Americans to an unlimited degree.<\/p>\n

What utter rubbish.<\/p>\n

The Church and Pike hearings were primarily about the so-called CIA “crown jewels” – clandestine operations, actual and proposed, against foreign targets that were hostile to the United States and usually sympathetic to the Soviet Union when not outright Communists. Some of these operations were ill-considered and harebrained while others were well conceived if not executed, but the driving force behind the hearings was that many prominent committee members were very liberal to leftist antiwar Democrats, some had monumental egos or presidential ambitions and many strongly opposed anti-communist and interventionist foreign policies for ideological reasons.<\/p>\n

It is also true that this 1970’s history has little or nothing to do with the NSA becoming an unconstitutional organ of mass\u00a0domestic\u00a0<\/em>surveillance. Apples and oranges. Letting the NSA control all our private data data does not mean the CIA then runs a more robust HUMINT clandestine program against the Iranians, al Qaida, the Chinese or Pakistanis. Likely it will produce the opposite<\/em> effect as relying systemically more and more on SIGINT is a dandy bureaucratic excuse to approve fewer and fewer covert operations or risky espionage targets.<\/p>\n

\n
Americans, outside State Department personnel who have to deal with the resultant headaches, could really care less if the NSA bugs the German chancellor’s cell phone or the ex-terrorist Marxist president of Brazil. To the extent they think of it at all, most would probably say “Hell, yeah!” because that is exactly what a foreign intelligence service is for. If Americans heard the NSA or CIA conducted some surveillance that resulted in Ayman al-Zawahiri being killed in a horrible way it is likely to meet with high approval ratings.<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
The idea that Americans as a whole, outside of the usual anti-American activist-protestor crowd, dislike successful covert ops against our enemies is a proposition for which there is scant evidence. The so-called “Frontpage rule” being touted by Pincus is complete B.S. intended to blur the lines of what institutional missions are really being discussed.<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
If senior managers of the NSA and CIA would rather investigate American citizens on a national scale in secret then they are in the wrong line of work and should resign or retire so that people more motivated to harry our enemies can take their places. Mass surveillance is the job of a secret police, not a foreign intelligence or even a counterintelligence service. In some countries a secret police agency is a normal and legal part of the government structure. The United States is not one of those nations and the “big boy rules” for IC operations overseas against specific, dangerous, hostile foreign targets cannot apply inside the United States against the broad mass of citizens while having the US remain a constitutional democracy anchored in the rule of law.<\/div>\n
.<\/div>\n
You can have one or the other but not both.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] Walter Pincus, taking notes for the embattled bureaucrats of the\u00a0creepy-state here: \u2018Front-Page Rule\u2019 is unprecedented in U.S. intelligence community\u00a0 ….\u201cAccountability and secrecy\u201d were two watchwords a former senior intelligence official said guided operations during his 40-year career, not whether the public would approve of everything he was doing. However, that\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[680,476,132,84,425,239,278,545,270,187,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fail","category-democracy","category-dystopia","category-fisking","category-government","category-ic","category-legal","category-liberty","category-national-security","category-politics","category-reform"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30409"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30420,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30409\/revisions\/30420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}