Former NSA analyst: spying hurts our national security

One of the most frustrating things about the Bush era is that the adminstration's justifications for a given policy are often so vague, so numerous, and/or so logically flawed, that it becomes difficult for any one person to make a full rebuttal. As a result, the debate becomes framed in simplistic terms based on the loudest voices' main arguments, at the exclusion of the other relevant issues.

For example, during the leadup to the war in Iraq, the loudest voices in favor of the war claimed that Iraq was involved with 9/11 and/or had links to Al Qaeda, that Iraq had WMD, and that Iraq's transition to democracy would be a cakewalk; the loudest voices of opposition were pacifist antiwar protestors who argued that the war was morally wrong (and, at least to a large extent, that military action is never the answer).

As a result, our national "debate" over whether to invade Iraq was essentially reduced to whether one agrees with the Biblical adage that "a time to kill" arises in certain circumstances - and most Americans do, especially in the wake of 9/11. In other words, it was an ideological debate, with little discussion over whether there was really an Al Qaeda link, or whether WMD existed, or whether there was a risk of civil war. The questions of how much the war would cost, and whether it would cause long-term damage to our goodwill abroad, barely came up at all.

We risk repeating the same mistake in the debate over the NSA's domestic surveillance program (see this post for an explanation of why I use the term "surveillance" instead of "wiretapping"). Most critics of the program have focused on the question of whether the program is legal. While the program's questionable legality is almost certainly the most important issue at stake, we also need to point out that the surveillance may not even be helpful from an intelligence perspective. As long as the debate is focused strictly on the legality of the surveillance, most people will just assume that the program is something that is actually making them safer, and the debate will continue to be framed as a simplistic question of whether Americans are willing to sacrifice some liberty for security.

In a column for Computerworld, former NSA analyst Ira Winkler counters all of the major justifications for the domestic surveillance program, including the widely-held assumption that it is making America safer from terrorists. Here is an excerpt:

Ignoring FISA's rules concerning warrants is illegal. It also weakens national security, since the process of obtaining the warrants has an effect on quality control. To date, FBI agents have been sent out to do thousands of investigations based on this warrantless wiretapping. None of those investigations turned up a legitimate lead. I have spoken to about a dozen agents, and they all roll their eyes and indicate disgust with the man-years of wasted effort being put into physically examining NSA "leads."

This scattershot attempt at data mining drags FBI agents away from real investigations, while destroying the NSA’s credibility in the eyes of law enforcement and the public in general. That loss of credibility makes the NSA the agency that cried wolf -- and after so many false leads, should they provide something useful, the data will be looked at skeptically and perhaps given lower priority by law enforcement than it would otherwise have been given.

Worse, FBI agents working real and pressing investigations such as organized crime, child pornography and missing persons are being pulled away from their normal law enforcement duties to follow up on NSA leads.

"Why NSA spying puts the U.S. in danger" [Computerworld]