In the wake of the Edward Snowden affair, the public has adopted an increasingly negative view of government agencies such as the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency. Though I believe that the NSA and other intelligence-gathering agencies have overstepped their boundaries, accusing individual agency officials of malice misses the larger issue. The very claim that the NSA has overstepped its limits is problematic, because the agency lacks adequate oversight. The issue is not so much that the NSA concealed malignant invasions of individual privacy, but rather that the agency is plagued by complications in management and a lack of adequate external controls.
This past week, the recently founded student-run politics journal Seriatim held a discussion between Frederick Hitz, a lecturer in the Law School, and History Prof. Philip Zelikow on this central question: “has the American security establishment overstepped its limits?” If one point is clear from the dialogue, it is that the conflict between constitutional privacy rights and national security is far from black-and-white. As the public grows more aware of ongoing intelligence-gathering efforts, it may now be advantageous to determine, through congressional oversight, exactly what information the intelligence agencies can and should collect.
The recent revelation that the NSA had been tapping the cell phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel struck nearly every American as an unreasonable practice. If the public wants to reduce this sort of activity, it should pressure Congress accordingly. Yet the question of what information should be gathered remains tricky. As Zelikow pointed out in his talk, the communications between the 9-11 hijackers while they were in the U.S. were not recorded by the government, because prior to the Patriot Act, the government was not authorized to wiretap domestic phone lines. We should thus consider the possible tradeoffs of limiting the intelligence gathering capabilities of the American security establishment.
Accordingly, any attempt to reform the NSA and other such agencies should not be so impassioned as to render the agencies themselves ineffectual. Instead, we should attempt to eliminate impermissible invasions of personal privacy while allowing reasonable intelligence-gathering for national defense purposes.
Such a balancing act raises a fundamental problem: it is difficult to know whether intelligence-gathering is actually preventing terrorist attacks, so there is no clear way to determine what is “reasonable.” In retrospect, it may be expedient to assume that wiretapping U.S. phone lines prior to Sept. 11 would have prevented the attacks, but the track record of prevention is misty at best. Indeed, Zelikow and Hitz attested to the fact that the NSA falsely informed not only Congress but also Obama that wiretapping and other procedures had successfully prevented 54 terrorist attacks. Even the people who we commonly regard as knowing all the secrets clearly don’t know the whole truth. Extra-constitutional methods may be necessary to preserve the country’s safety, yet it seems that such measures are not having the desired effect.
Intelligence-gathering has the potential to shield the U.S. from terrorist threats, but national security agencies that perform such intelligence-gathering lack clear authority structures. The intelligence agencies have grown into increasingly complex organizations with decentralized networks of command; the agencies, consequently, are difficult to manage. The agencies’ habit of contracting — of getting various private agencies to create intelligence-collection tools — has reduced their accountability.
This inefficiency may point to the source of particularly objectionable practices. For example, some NSA surveillance programs have failed due to incompetent management, including the recently declassified “Trailblazer program,” which the inspector general of the Department of Defense said was a fraudulent and excessively wasteful use of taxpayers’ money.
Though certain practices such as wiretapping have been federally authorized, specific instances such as monitoring Angela Merkel’s communications may not necessarily stem from high-level directives. The extreme complexity of the American security establishment has reached a degree that makes effective management of security agencies close to impossible.
The development of intelligence-gathering technology has been so rapid that agents have simply applied new technology to expand the realm of collectible intelligence without stopping to consider the propriety of their actions. The complexity of the security establishment, combined with the lack of explicit internal and external limits, has perpetuated the life of an organization that is, quite literally, out of control.
Authority structures should be shaped by the balance between privacy and security so that individual agents are not given far-reaching, and potentially invasive, authority over particular aspects of intelligence collection. Congress, also, should provide stricter guidelines in the case that the agencies should fall short in making such reforms; indeed, they have already violated Congress’ trust. The struggle over individual privacy and national security requires us to balance weighted interests. The public should endeavor to demarcate lines of impermissibility, but it should also be willing to meet the potential consequences of security tradeoffs.
Conor Kelly is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run Tuesdays.
Read More
LETTER: Medical students stand in support of transgender youth
By Rachel Rezabek , Russell Hawes , Ishaan Rischie , Elianna Dunster , Kaile Maske , Zain Ahmad and Zoe Ziff | 13 hours agoAs future physicians, we cannot remain silent, especially since U.Va. Health is one of the most comprehensive gender health centers in the country.
HUYNH: The Supreme Court must support civil rights litigation in Virginia and beyond
By Viet Huynh | 18 hours agoThe Supreme Court must prioritize protecting the litigating power of the people against potentially tyrannical laws by their government.
EDITORIAL: U.Va. Health lets fear trump its mission to do no harm
By Editorial Board | YesterdayIt is high time to resist these authoritative and dangerous actions before there are no federal avenues left for resistance.
