“Could there be abuses?…I am looking you and the American people in the eye and saying: There are not.”
by digby
I find this amusing if unsurprising:
The National Security Agency was worried about their image when the 1999 blockbuster Will Smith film Enemy of the State was released. In an interview with CNN in 2001, then-NSA chief Michael Hayden invited the cable news network to profile the agency in part because of the movie.
The film revolves around attempts by Congress, pressed by the National Security Agency, to pass a bill which would expand the agency’s surveillance powers. Rogue NSA agents kill a U.S. congressman who opposes the bill in a park, only to realize they were recorded by a bird watcher. The bird watcher, chased by the NSA, passes the information along to Will Smith’s character — and Smith’s character then finds his phones tapped, clothing bugged, house burglarized, among other attempts by the agency to get Smith.
“I made the judgment that we couldn’t survive with the popular impression of this agency being formed by the last Will Smith movie,” Hayden said in the interview, which aired in March 2001.
You can see why he was concerned. Of course we didn’t know then what we know now …
“It has to be somewhat a secretive agency, and right in the middle of a political culture that just trusts two things most of all: power and secrecy,” Hayden continued. “That’s a challenge for us, and that’s why, frankly, we’re trying to explain what it is we do for America, how it is we follow the law. Could there be abuses? Of course. Would there be? I am looking you and the American people in the eye and saying: There are not.”
[…]
Interestingly, Hayden also said in the interview the NSA had “not spied on Americans since the ’70s, after it was found to be eavesdropping on Jane Fonda, Doctor Benjamin Spock, and other anti-Vietnam war activists. Hayden also said reports the NSA exchanged industrial espionage against European companies was “absolutely not true.”
This was before 9/11, of course when the proverbial gloves came off.
One of the big differences between today and the bad old days of the Hollywood Blacklist is that the government is much more subtle than it used to be in the way it coerces and manipulates the industry. It doesn’t hold hearings (so far) demanding to know if screenwriters are anarchists or terrorists and making them stand up for their rights at great personal cost, sending the message to the studios that employing these potential traitors would rain down some big problems on them. It cajoles filmmakers into toeing the party line by giving them “special access” to classified information that shapes their perceptions and providing them with equipment and locations that save huge amounts of money. (See: Zero Dark Thirty)
Or in this case, after the fact, to try to stroke someone they saw as a critic:
In an interview with New York Magazine in 2013, Enemy of the State screenwriter David Marconi said he met with the Department of Defense after his film was released.
“The Department of Defense asked me to come down and speak to them after the film came out. I met CIA guys and NSA guys,” Marconi said. “I found them all to be very professional. They were very focused on the mission and on defending the country. I didn’t walk away with a sense that any of them were malevolent. But some of them also had a very myopic view—here’s what you do, and you sit at your computer and you do it.”
That translates into yet another kind of myopia. This is from that more recent NSA field trip for certain reporters and commentators:
[T]he best example of this cognitive dissonance is one specific exchange late in our day on campus. One official described the difficulties he had while speaking to school groups about the NSA, and his inability to convince students that Snowden was a “bad guy” who had done serious harm to U.S. national security. He asked us how he could more compellingly and convincingly make that case to young people. Bewildered, we asked why the merits of the surveillance programs turn in any way on whether Snowden’s a patriot or a traitor. Even President Obama has conceded that the public debate we’re now having is “welcome,” regardless of where we end up as a result.
But the NSA official’s reply seemed to suggest that these two perspectives are mutually exclusive—that we must choose between Snowden and the NSA. If we believe Snowden is a bad guy, then the NSA must be right. And if we believe he acted in what he thought were the best interests of the country, the NSA must be wrong.
The premise of the question suggested that we would all be better off if the American public were still as ignorant about the surveillance programs disclosed as a result of Snowden’s action. For the NSA, the problem appears to be about the need to respond to transparency and not the substance of the programs themselves (or the fact that they were authorized in secret).
In the end, this is the most entrenched problem I encountered during my visit: the NSA remains committed to the idea that, because a surveillance program will be much more effective if no one knows about it, it necessarily follows that the public should remain ignorant of it. Therefore, the NSA’s programs must be approved and implemented in secret unless and until the next Snowden reveals them.
That cloistered environment of secrecy and intrigue naturally leads to a certain kind of paranoia. And that’s a very dangerous thing for a powerful government spying agency. They don’t even know what they’ve become themselves. They’re just doing a necessary job. Nothing to see here.
As an aside, I wonder where these guys think Hollywood gets its image of the evil spymasters manipulating the government and the people for their own ends? After all, Michael Hayden, Keith Alexander and James Clapper have been the public faces of this agency.
Ah.
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