This week is the one year anniversary of whistleblower Edward Snowden's groundbreaking revelations about the National Security Agency's (NSA) mass surveillance apparatus.
Last week, Edward Snowden appeared on NBC News and gave an interview completely consistent with the first interviews he gave when we voluntarily went public as the source for Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras' award-winning reporting on NSA mass surveillance.
Meanwhile, in the decade since NSA used 9/11 as the excuse to engage in mass surveillance of hundreds of millions of innocent people, senior government officials have treated the public with disdain, engaging in a pattern of misleading explanations and outright lies to preserve the ability to continue NSA's invasive surveillance in secrecy and without oversight from Congress or the courts.
Specifics after the jump.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's now infamous lie to Congress is well-known, but when Clapper lied to Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), he was continuing a long tradition of national security officials lying about or - at best - misleading the public to cover-up the extent of mass surveillance.
Turn back the clock to 2006, when the Senate Judiciary Committee was debating changes to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in response to the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times story revealing the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" or "President's Surveillance Program" - both names NSA invented to cover-up the full extent of the program - which we now know was Stellar Wind: the bulk metadata collection on a "routine, ongoing basis" of domestic phone calls (and who knows how much other electronic third-party data). Here's what former NSA Director then-CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden told Congress about the program:
HAYDEN: Even in the bowels of the office that is responsible for this program, it is done very carefully. It is very targeted. There is a probable cause standard before any communication is intercepted that one or both communicants is -- again, to a probable cause standard -- associated with Al Qaida.
. . .
LEAHY: I understand that. For example, if you had -- this will allow you to seize and record, say, all the calls between the United States and India -- just blanket.
HAYDEN: No, it would not.
. . .
LEAHY: If on these calls -- and I understand, without going into the specifics of the program, you're taking a huge number of calls, not in e-mails, not specifically on a person, are those then stored for retrieval and analysis by NSA?
HAYDEN: Senator, your premise is incorrect. Under the president's program, when NSA collects the content of a communication, it has already established a probable cause predicate that one or both communicants is associated with Al Qaida.
So we do not vacuum up the contents of communications under the president's program and then use some sort of magic after the intercept to determine which of those we want to listen to, deal with, or report on.
(emphasis added)
In January 2006, right after the New York Times exposed NSA warrantless wiretapping, NSA Director Hayden took to the public stage to defend NSA. Hayden had this to say about NSA's surveillance:
The trigger is quicker and a bit softer than it is for a FISA warrant, but the intrusion into privacy is also limited: only international calls and only those we have a reasonable basis to believe involve al Qaeda or one if its affiliates.
...
This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the Untied States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda.
(emphasis added)
When Hayden was nominated for CIA Director, he testified under oath about warrantless surveillance:
HAYDEN: We are narrowly focused and drilled down on protecting the nation against Al Qaida and those organizations who are focused with Al Qaida.
[Note Hayden conceals that in the supposed effort to protect the U.S. against al Qaeda, NSA is collecting the communications of entire innocent populations, including hundreds of millions of Americans.]
. . .
HATCH: So this just wasn't monitoring calls of domestic people. This was monitoring calls into the country and out of the country to or from suspected affiliates of Al Qaida.
HAYDEN: That's accurate. That's precisely accurate.
. . .
HATCH: But your major goal here was to protect the American people.
HAYDEN: Oh, sir, the only goal.
I mean, let me narrow it down so it's very, very clear.
This activity wasn't even used for any other legitimate foreign intelligence purpose. I mean, there were lots of reasons, lots of things that we need to protect the nation against. This extraordinary authority given to us by the president
...
HATCH: Now, as I understand it, you were not monitoring domestic-to-domestic calls?
HAYDEN: No, sir.
HATCH: That was not your purpose?
HAYDEN: No.
HATCH: And that was an explicit direction by you and others to not do that.
HAYDEN: Oh, yes, sir. When we had the original conversations as to what NSA could do further, certainly that's what we talked about.
. . .
Hayden's statements and sworn testimony leave an incredibly misleading impression about the breadth and scope of NSA's mass surveillance.
*He touts the "probable cause" standard, when in fact there is no such standard for bulk meta-data collection.
*He denies not "vacuum[ing] up the contents of communications," when NSA was actually collecting meta-data AND content in bulk.
*Hayden claims the program is "very targeted," but his definition of targeted is nowhere near Webster's considering the hundreds of millions of people whose information was sitting in an NSA database.
*He talks about "this program," while concealing the hundreds of other NSA programs engaging in domestic spying.
*Hayden's testifies repeatedly that "the program" was only for al Qaeda and "wasn't even used for any other legitimate foreign intelligence purpose." (Today, NSA argues it can used collected data for any reason, including criminal investigations.)
The pattern of deception did not end with the change in NSA Director or administration. Gen. Keith Alexander testified in March of 2012:
REP. JOHNSON: Thank you, yes it does. General, an article in Wired Magazine reported this month that a whistleblower, formally employed by the NSA, has stated NSA signals intercepts include, quote, "eavesdropping on domestic phone calls and inspection of domestic e-mails" end quote. Is that true?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No, not in that context. The question that -- I think what he's trying to raise is, are we gathering all the information on the United States. No, that is not correct.
. . .
REP. JOHNSON: Yes. Does the NSA routinely intercept American citizens' e-mails?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No.
REP. JOHNSON: Does the NSA intercept Americans' cell phone conversations?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No.
REP. JOHNSON: Google searches?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No.
REP. JOHNSON: Text messages?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No.
REP. JOHNSON: Amazon.com orders?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No.
REP. JOHNSON: Bank records?
GEN. ALEXANDER: No.
REP. JOHNSON: What judicial consent is required for NSA to intercept communications and information involving American citizens?
GEN. ALEXANDER: Within the United States that would be the FBI lead. If it was a foreign actor in the United States, the FBI would still have to lead and could work that with NSA or other intelligence agencies, as authorized.
But to conduct that kind of collection in the United States, we would have to go through a court order and the court would have to authorize it. We're not authorized to do it, nor do we do it.
Alexander's testimony implied that the claims of NSA's domestic mass surveillance were overblown, that any time the NSA is spying on Americans, it is pursuant to a warrant.
Hayden and Alexander will no doubt have predictable rationalizations for each and every statement as to why each statement is "technically" not a lie: the definition of "intercept" is different from "collect" or "in order to target al Qaeda we need to collect 'the whole haystack'" or an "Court approval" includes secret approval based on secret interpretation of law.
None of these explanations can be persuasive now that the public knows the truth, as reflected in the reaction to the revelations, including widespread bi-partisan support in Congress to end bulk collection, widespread public outrage in the US and worldwide, an independent federal agency declaring the bulk collection program illegal, and a federal court calling one of the programs "almost Orwellian."
Taken in the aggregate, the statements of Hayden, Alexander, Clapper and the rest of the surveillance state's leaders were intended to misinform the public, to gain public support for mass surveillance by misleadingly spinning the programs as far less invasive than they are in reality. The deception was calculated and systematic and protected by secrecy. It was antithetical to democracy - a betrayal of the fundamental public trust between a people and their government - and without whistleblowing, without Edward Snowden, we would still be in the dark.
As we commemorate the day the public learned of NSA's intrusive and ineffective surveillance programs, let's not forget the lies our leaders told us about them. Kossacks - add your own deception retrospectives in the comments.
