The Intelligence & National Security Summit is usually one of those inside-baseball meet-and-greets for officials and contractors to give presentations, exchange information, set up revolving-door employment opportunities, etc. This week's summit, however, concluded with a gripe session where the heads of the FBI, the CIA, and the NSA complained about how everybody's been so goshdarn mean to them lately.
Details beyond the golden-orange key....
FBI Director James Comey reiterated what has become his standard talking point -- the clever geniuses in Silicon Valley could create a magic back door that only The Good Guys[tm] can use if they'd just get off their butts and do it, already:
"I don't think we've really tried to find answers yet because no one in the private sector has been properly incentivized."
Alas, those persnickety geeks insist on copping a bad attitude:
In particular, Comey said, he feels that his push for some way to gain backdoor access to encryption was "met with venom and deep cynicism."
"How do we get to a healthier place in talking about authority?" he asked.
NSA Director Michael Rogers was quick to identify the underlying problem -- some malcontents insisted on dragging out the dirty laundry:
all the revelations [a reference to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks] have made life more difficult for us
To his credit, he did try to suggest a constructive strategy for moving forward:
We need to sit down and talk as a nation about a direction forward. You can't get there if you don't work together, and vilify each other.
However, he probably should have checked with his colleagues before the session to make sure everybody was on the same page. One of them definitely didn't get the "no villifying" memo:
CIA Director John Brennan suggested that negative public opinion and "misunderstanding" about the US intelligence community is in part "because of people who are trying to undermine" the mission of the NSA, CIA, FBI and other agencies. These people "may be fueled by our adversaries," he said.
The remainder of the diary addresses all the ways Comey, Rogers, and Brennan acknowledged their own errors and resolved to avoid repeating them.
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FINIS