To call yesterday's Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) "oversight" hearing "under-sight" would be giving SSCI too much credit. (WaPo has a transcript.) With far too few noteworthy exceptions, such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), SSCI members gave Director of National Intelligence James Clapper a platform to trash National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, call journalists criminal "accomplices" and shamelessly fear-monger about the damage done now that the public knows the extent of the NSA's mass surveillance programs.
Politico reported on Clapper's chilling accusations:
". . . I call on [Snowden] and his accomplices to facilitate the return of the remaining stolen documents that have not yet been exposed to prevent even more damage to U.S. security,” Clapper said at a Senate hearing.
Clapper did not specify who he considered Snowden’s “accomplices," but in statements to the media, DNI spokesperson Shawn Turner said he was referring "to anyone who is assisting Snowden to further threaten our national security through the unauthorized disclosure of stolen documents related to lawful foreign intelligence collection programs.”
By "accomplices" Clapper is undoubtedly referring to journalists such as Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman of the
Washington Post who have reported on Snowden's revelations, which sparked a public debate that even the President agrees was necessary. Clapper's shockingly broad definition could also apply to lawyers like myself and the ACLU, who are advising Snowden, and Wikileaks journalist Sarah Harrison, who risked her life to rescue him.
Clapper's position that whistleblowers are criminals and journalists who report information in the public interest are criminal accomplices should send a chill down the spines of all Americans who value the First Amendment. The war on whistleblowers has morphed into a war on journalists and a war on information and control of information. Clapper and his powerful surveillance apparatus would have the government know more about the American people than the American people know about their government. Such an undemocratic scenario violates the Americans' fundamental rights of individual privacy and shields the government from necessary accountability.
With all of this talk of how to hold Snowden accountable for telling the public the truth about NSA, there was nothing about how to hold CLapper accountable for lying to Congress and deliberately misleading and concealing from Congress, the American people, and the world the scope, ineffectiveness and illegality of the NSA's mass surveillance. There was no talk of accountability for the NSA employees who spied on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans, much less the high-level officials who ordered the surveillance and wasted billions on ineffective, invasive programs. There was no talk of accountability for the employees who NSA admits violated policy by spying on love interests, a practice common enough for the nickname "LoveInt." (A few of the "Loveint" employees received slaps on their wrists, if that, by the way).
Senator Angus King's (D-MD) "question" on the government bulk metadata collection is emblematic of SSCI's abject failure to properly question and oversee the national security apparatus, a failure that Snowden's revelations made abundantly clear:
SEN. KING: Director Comey, do you have views on the significance of 215? You understand this is not easy for this committee. The public is very skeptical and in order for us to continue to maintain it, we have to be convinced that it is in fact effective and not just something that the intelligence community thinks is something nice to have in their toolkit.
SSCI was created to provide critically-important oversight of the Intelligence Community on behalf of the American people, not to assist the Intelligence Community in restoring public trust in order to continue a massive domestic surveillance program that a federal judge held is "likely unconstitutional." However, most members of SSCI, chiefly its leader Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), spend far too much time protecting the Intelligence Committee they are supposed to be overseeing and buying into Clapper's unsupported allegations against whistleblowers and journalists and rationalizations for his agency's continuing failure to produce evidence that mass surveillance is an effective way to protect Americans rather than simply a convenient way to spy on hundreds of millions of innocent Americans. If SSCI focuses on holding anyone accountable, it should be Clapper, not whistleblowers and journalists.