General
Michael Hayden was made Deputy Director of National Intelligence this year.
It's time we get to know him better, if only slightly. And that's the aim of this diary.
http://intelligence.senate.gov/...
STATEMENT FOR THE RECORD BY
LIEUTENANT GENERAL MICHAEL V. HAYDEN, USAF
DIRECTOR, NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY/
CHIEF, CENTRAL SECURITY SERVICE
BEFORE THE JOINT INQUIRY OF THE
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
AND THE HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE
ON INTELLIGENCE
17 OCTOBER 2002
35.As a practical matter, we have chosen as a people to make it harder to conduct electronic searches for a law enforcement purpose than for a foreign intelligence purpose. This is so because law enforcement electronic searches implicate not only 4th Amendment privacy interests, but also 5th Amendment liberty interests. After all, the purpose of traditional law enforcement activity is to put criminals behind bars.
36.There is a certain irony here. This is one of the few times in the history of my Agency that the Director has testified in open session about operational matters. The first was in the mid 1970s when one of my predecessors sat here nearly mute while being grilled by members of Congress for intruding upon the privacy rights of the American
people. Largely as a result of those hearings, NSA is governed today by various executive orders and laws and these legal restrictions are drilled into NSA employees and enforced through oversight by all three branches of government.
37.The second open session was a little over two years ago and I was the Director at that time. During that session the House intelligence committee asked me a series of questions with a single unifying theme: How could I assure them that I was safeguarding the privacy rights of those protected by the U.S. constitution and U.S. law? During that session I even said--without exaggeration on my part or complaint on yours--that if Usama bin Laden crossed the bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario to Niagara Falls, New York, U.S.
law would give him certain protections that I would have to
accommodate in the conduct of my mission. And now the third
open session for the Director of NSA: I am here explaining what my Agency did or did not know with regard to 19 hijackers who were in this country legally.
So Mr. Hayden, were those legal restrictions really there or were you directing some sunshine up our you-know-what? Bush's NSA spying was already said to have begun during your tenure.
Skipping ahead...
40.In the context of NSA's mission, where do we draw the line between the government's need for CT information about people in the United States and the privacy interests of people located in the United States? Practically speaking, this line-drawing affects the
focus of NSA's activities (foreign versus domestic), the standard under which surveillances are conducted (probable cause versus reasonable suspicion, for example), the type of data NSA is permitted to collect and how, and the rules under which NSA retains and disseminates information about U.S. persons.
41.These are serious issues that the country addressed, and resolved to its satisfaction, once before in the mid-1970's. In light of the events of September 11th, it is appropriate that we, as a country, readdress them. We need to get it right. We have to find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty. If we fail in this effort by drawing the line in the wrong place, that is, overly favoring liberty or security, then the terrorists win and liberty loses in either case.
Let's go back in time a little over two years:
(I want to thank RawStoryfor the tip)
It was one of Hayden's favorite themes in public speeches and interviews: the agency's mammoth eavesdropping network was directed at foreigners, not U.S. citizens. As a PowerPoint presentation posted on the agency's Web site puts it, for an American to be a target, "Court Order Required in the United States."
In fact, since 2002, authorized by a secret order from President Bush, the agency has intercepted the international phone calls and e-mail messages of hundreds, possibly thousands, of U.S. citizens and others in the United States without obtaining court orders. The discrepancy between the public claims and the secret domestic eavesdropping disclosed last week have put the NSA, the nation's largest intelligence agency, and Hayden, now principal deputy director of national intelligence, in an awkward position.
This is Michael Hayden's testimony from April 2000.
Recently, NSA has been the subject of media reports which suggest that NSA collects all electronic communications, spies on U.S. citizens, and provides intelligence information to U.S. companies. There also have been claims that NSA activities are not subject to regulation or oversight. All of these claims are false or misleading. Today, I will describe NSA's electronic surveillance authority, the framework regulating that authority for the purpose of protecting privacy rights, and the oversight mechanisms in place to monitor NSA's activities.
Judicial Oversight
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to issue court orders for electronic surveillance directed against foreign powers or their agents. In reviewing applications for court orders, the FISC judges scrutinize the targets, the methods of surveillance, and the procedures for handling the information collected.
There is even this handy slide show mentioned in the RawStory blurb above:
http://www.nsa.gov/...
Hayden has some answering to do, and pronto. He's two-faced. The House and Senate should be furious.
This is from David Sirota:
And three days later, you let the court know what you have done, and deal with it that way." Now, with two swings and misses, the White House is offering up perhaps the most pathetic rationale possible: we were lazy, and we just didn't feel like upholding the law. The administration is trotting out Michael Hayden, who was NSA director when the surveillance began and is now Bush's deputy director of national intelligence. The Washington Post reports that Hayden told reporters that "getting retroactive court approval is inefficient because it 'involves marshaling arguments' and 'looping paperwork around.'"
