Attempts to operate intelligence gathering and sharing systems in obscurity put the entire homeland security mission at risk. Since 9/11, several scandals have suggested that public backlash can scotch programs. The solution is not to tighten the secrecy around these programs: almost nothing the government does is kept secret for long. Rather, federal and state officials must bring legislators, civil liberties groups, and the public into a wide-ranging political discourse on the appropriate level of domestic surveillance in a time of terrorism. Robust public debate, legislative oversight, and checks on agents will give our domestic intelligence efforts—which most observers consider necessary—a certain level of trust and resiliency to weather the snafus inevitable with new or newly-tasked bureaucracies.
While the legality and efficacy of the NSA program is still in doubt, there are several domestic surveillance programs that are both legal and efficacious whose support is put at risk by other, too eager, too secret, and overreaching ones.
Pouring rays of sunshine into the system-- in a way that doesn't put our intelligence operations at risk-- will begin a public policy process that can add democratic legitimacy to these programs, and likely improve their design. It can build public support for needed programs while avoiding programs doomed by their illegitimacy from the start.
And I do not believe that, should the government engage a public, policy discussion, the public would approve no programs. The public, by wide margins, supports surveillance activities narrowly aimed at terrorists. But repeated scandal puts that support at risk. Operating in a permanent state of public relations crisis cannot be a good way for our domestic intelligence agencies to wage the war on terror at home.
Here are summaries of just a few of the scandals, involving secret and near-secret domestic surveillance programs revealed in the media. There’s even one from California!
Total Information Awareness: Iran contra figure Adm. John Poindexter ran a short lived, but massive data mining operation out of the Department of Defense. When the program was revealed in the print media, the public outcry and outraged Congress scotched the program.
California Anti-Terrorism Information Center: This program, established in response to 9/11 by Attorney General Bill Lockyer, aimed to provide local law enforcement officers with intelligence on terrorist threats to California. When CATIC issued terrorist alerts about anti-war protesters in 2003, an embarrassed Lockyer shook up the entire agency.
MATRIX: The Markle report cites several cases where states were forced to retreat from intelligence gathering and sharing networks because the protocols surrounding the system were poorly understood, unclear, or undemocratic. The widely touted MATRIX program is one example. The system, “a data-mining effort run by a private company for the participating states…aided by the Federal government,” uses police and court databases with information purchased from private sources, and “allows officials to look for patterns and linkages among people.” However, “privacy concerns have reportedly caused several states to reconsider their initial decision to participate.”
We do not yet know the fate of the NSA program is still unknown, but if previous examples of public outcry are any indication, the program will be killed, or transformed in some significant way. Public fears of Big Brother have been stoked, public trust in government to gather intelligence appropriately has certainly been hurt, and the agency itself is probably in turmoil.
