U.S. intelligence community is out of control
Some did it for the money, some
did it for idealism, others didn't do it at all. The U.S. has seen a
number of high profile leak scandals including the Pentagon Papers
during the administration of President Richard Nixon.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- David Rothkopf: The U.S. intelligence community is being slammed as overreaching
- He says more news of spying, on United States' European allies, has drawn shock and anger
- He says it's out of control, with poor oversight and disregard for laws and U.S. values
- Rothkopf: There are real threats, but intelligence community hasn't shown spying is only answer
Editor's note: David Rothkopf writes regularly for CNN.com. He is CEO and editor-at-large of the FP Group, publishers of Foreign Policy magazine, and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Follow him on Twitter.
The list of recent
revelations grew over the weekend with allegations that America has been
systematically spying on its European allies. Reports in the European
press, apparently drawn from documents provided by Edward Snowden,
suggested that America spied on the European Union, France, Italy,
Greece and other close international friends, listening in on encrypted
fax transmissions and planting bugs and other devices at 38 embassies
and missions in Washington and New York, as well as locations in Europe.
David Rothkopf
The timing is not great:
the eve of scheduled trade talks with the Europeans, a priority of the
Obama administration.
The new reports have caused a furor across the
continent, stoking the uproar caused by earlier Snowden-related revelations that America has been listening in on millions of German calls and e-mails.
Top officials, like
Secretary of State John Kerry, shrugged it off by saying allies often
spy on each other, and others, like former Director of the NSA and CIA
Gen. Michael Hayden, noted that some friends spied on us. But the damage
was done to important relationships and to the Obama administration's
prior claims that it would conduct itself according to a different
standard than past U.S. governments. "Officials have bought into the post 9/11 paranoia...and come to
accept that even the possibility of a meaningful attack on the U.S.
warrants disregard for U.S. laws and international agreements."
This all comes on the
heels of reports that the overreach of the intelligence community begins
at home. While it will be cold comfort to our NATO allies that we are
only treating them as we do our own people, the details of programs that
warehouse massive amounts of phone metadata and e-mail traffic were the
first shock waves produced by the Snowden leaks.
But the problems go
beyond what Snowden leaked to the very fact that a comparatively junior
contractor could gain top level clearances and access to so much
information. Indeed, it is deeply disturbing that hundreds of thousands
of private contractors had Top Secret clearances and that, as we have
learned, many may have gone through inadequate screening procedures or
been inadequately managed.
Earlier news -- about the
scope of U.S. drone programs managed by the intelligence community,
"kill lists," extra-judicial targeting of perceived threats, the scope
of America's cyberwarfare programs against enemies in Iran (Stuxnet),
China and elsewhere -- have already called the role of the community
into question. Just last week NBC News reported that a senior U.S.
military leader very close to President Obama and his national security
team, Gen. James Cartwright, was a target of a leak investigation
concerning Stuxnet.
These are all stories of a
culture of secrecy and of arrogance that has simply gone too far.
Perhaps each and every one of these missions began with a reasonable
national security goal. But because so much of the planning and
execution takes place behind closed doors or in situations in which the
term "oversight" is laughably applied to wink-and-a-nod rubber stamping
of initiatives, it is perhaps more surprising we have seen so few
scandals than that we are dealing now with what seems like so many.
Consider: According to the U.S. government's own figures, last year
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court received 1,789 applications
for approval of government spying operations and OK'd all but one.
Since 2001, according to a report in Salon based on government figures collected by the Federation of American Scientists,
more than 15,000 applications were approved and only 10 denied. The
Supreme Soviet of Cold War Russia was a less effective rubber stamp.
The FISA Court is just
one of the feeble oversight mechanisms that apparently did not do its
job. Congressional and executive branch officials have bought into the
post 9/11 paranoia and hopped up threat mentality and come to accept
that even the possibility of an attack on the United States warrants
disregard for U.S. laws and international agreements. Not to mention the
principles of respect for individual liberties and reasonable
constraints on government power on which the United States was
established.
This was well
illustrated when NSA Director Keith Alexander argued that the agency's
massive surveillance programs were warranted because they allegedly
stopped "over 50" terror attacks, with scant reference to the size of
the attacks, the real risk posed, whether other means to stop them that
didn't involve massive surveillance might exist, or to the possibility
that the damage done to civil liberties might be worse than that which
might have been produced had the terror plans gone forward.
Indeed, senior U.S.
officials have told me that, in their view, a primary motivator for
accepting all these programs was fear that resisting would hold dire
political consequences for them, should an attack occur. In other words,
in the modern U.S. intelligence community, CYA has become more
important than CIA.
There are real threats
out there. And, yes, other nations spy on us. Terrorists use new
technologies to target American interests and citizens and must be
contained. Cyberwarfare poses a growing threat to the United States as
well as other nations.
All these facts require
analysis and countermeasures by the U.S. government. Some require the
United States to go on offense. But what the revelations show is a
series of errors of overreach and bad judgment, not that all our
programs should be eliminated. The problem here is one of scale and of
profoundly compromised and twisted values.
That problem itself is
complicated and exacerbated by America's emergence as the world's first
cybersuperpower. As such, we have sought to flex our technological
muscles not only in ways that make us safer but that introduce a new
form of constant, low-grade, invisible conflict that makes Cold War spy
games seem quaint in their narrowness--even if their stakes were much
higher. In the past, I've called this Cool War—neither cold nor hot but
dangerous nonetheless, not just to our enemies but also to our friends,
our interests and our values.
Edward Snowden broke the
law and if the United States can bring him in, he deserves to be
prosecuted. But the ones who should be in their own hot seat are those
who created, approved and rationalized into existence the sprawling,
seemingly uncontainable global intelligence and cyberwarfare apparatus
that is as much of a threat to the kind of country we want to be as any
terrorist group.
The problem for us, of
course, is the only people with the power to restore balance and common
sense limitations to these programs are the ones who let them get so out
of control in the first place.
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