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This way, one is not reduced to watching attack after attack -- and then wiping up the blood and searching data bases for clues to the perpetrators -- primarily the job of law enforcement.
Problems With Honesty
Sadly, recent history has shown that the directors of U.S. intelligence services lie, and that directors of the NSA lie blatantly -- and suffer zero consequences. On March 12, 2013 (less than two months before the Snowden revelations), National Intelligence Director James Clapper lied under oath in denying that NSA was "wittingly" collecting "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans."
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, had put that question to Clapper that day at a formal, open Senate Intelligence Committee hearing.
Similarly, on June 27, 2013, three weeks after the first Snowden revelations started coming, then-NSA Director Keith Alexander lied in telling the same Senate committee that NSA's bulk telephone surveillance program had thwarted 54 terrorist "plots or events." On Oct. 2, 2013, Gen. Alexander admitted, in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, that the number of terrorist plots thwarted was not 54, but one. (And that particular one cannot bear close scrutiny.)
The failure to demand accountability for these deceptions proves -- as if further proof were needed -- that the Senate intelligence "oversight" committees has long since become the Senate intelligence "overlook" committee.
If democracy still means anything, we the people need to devise some kind of replacement for the sleepy "watchdogs" in Congress who have forfeited their responsibility to oversee and verify what the intelligence agencies are doing. Again, Bill Binney has what seem the most sensible -- and doable -- suggestions toward that end.
He has called for a properly cleared technical team, responsible to the courts, with clearly spelled-out authority to go into any intelligence agency and look directly into and inspect data bases and the tools in use. This would be a giant step toward ensuring that we the people -- through this intrusive inspection regime -- could monitor in some rudimentary way what our intelligence agencies are doing.
Binney suggests further that intelligence agencies be required to implement software to monitor their own networks to detect automatically and to report immediately violations of law and regulation.
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