Why won’t the President rein in the intelligence community?

[n2doc]

BY RYAN LIZZA


On March 12, 2013, James R. Clapper appeared before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to discuss the threats facing America. Clapper, who is seventy-two, is a retired Air Force general and Barack Obama’s director of National Intelligence, in charge of overseeing the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and fourteen other U.S. spy agencies. Clapper is bald, with a gray goatee and rimless spectacles, and his affect is intimidatingly bureaucratic. The fifteen-member Intelligence Committee was created in the nineteen-seventies, after a series of investigations revealed that the N.S.A. and the C.I.A. had, for years, been illegally spying on Americans. The panel’s mission is to conduct “vigilant legislative oversight” of the intelligence community, but more often it treats senior intelligence officials like matinée idols. As the senators took turns at the microphone, greeting Clapper with anodyne statements and inquiries, he obligingly led them on a tour of the dangers posed by homegrown extremists, far-flung terrorist groups, and emerging nuclear powers.

“This hearing is really a unique opportunity to inform the American public to the extent we can about the threats we face as a nation, and worldwide,” Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and the committee’s chairman, said at one point. She asked committee members to “refrain from asking questions here that have classified answers.” Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, asked about the lessons of the terrorist attack in Benghazi. Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, asked about the dangers of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Toward the end of the hearing, Feinstein turned to Senator Ron Wyden, of Oregon, also a Democrat, who had a final question. The two senators have been friends. Feinstein held a baby shower for Wyden and his wife, Nancy Bass, before the birth of twins, in 2007. But, since then, their increasingly divergent views on intelligence policy have strained the relationship. “This is an issue where we just have a difference of opinion,” Wyden told me. Feinstein often uses the committee to bolster the tools that spy agencies say they need to protect the country, and Wyden has been increasingly concerned about privacy rights. For almost a decade, he has been trying to force intelligence officials like Clapper to be more forthcoming about spy programs that gather information about Americans who have no connection to terrorism.

Wyden had an uneasy kind of vindication in June, three months after Clapper’s appearance, when Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the N.S.A., leaked pages and pages of classified N.S.A. documents. They showed that, for the past twelve years, the agency has been running programs that secretly collect detailed information about the phone and Internet usage of Americans. The programs have been plagued by compliance issues, and the legal arguments justifying the surveillance regime have been kept from view. Wyden has long been aware of the programs and of the agency’s appalling compliance record, and has tried everything short of disclosing classified information to warn the public. At the March panel, he looked down at Clapper as if he were about to eat a long-delayed meal.

more

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/12/16/131216fa_fact_lizza

[Blue_Tires]

1. Because there's no way to "rein it in" this late in the game...

and although Wyden's heart is in the right place, he's fooling himself if he honestly believes the NSA would take longer than 30 seconds to find "workarounds" for any reforms that eventually get passed...

The only way to END surveillance is to permanently dismantle the NSA, period (they need to kill DHS as well, but that's another discussion)...I don't understand why I'm the only person to see this...

[RC]

2. You are not the only person to see what needs to be done.

Most don't care because they think they won't be/aren't affected. Some do realize the danger, but don't want to stick their head up too far.
But a few do know the dangers and are not afraid to voice those concerns. You are not alone.

[Hestia]

5. You'd have to go a step further - every CIA & NSA operative (if they can be found) would have to be

gathered up and dropped onto an island with no way off or on and interview/debrief them to see if they can be allowed back into society. If not, drop food & supplies every year on the island, along with seeds, medicines, etc. No one lands physically on the island. Navy ships would have to patrol to make sure no one gets in. The Navy shipment would have to have a thorough background & financial check to make sure they aren't getting a payoff in order to get someone off the island.

The problem is that operatives think they are above and beyond the law and have absolutely no compunction in pulling off dirty deeds (done dirt cheap of course) that flies in the face of everything a gov't wants to do in dismantling their sacred home base - all in the name of security but who's has never been explained.

I'm sure this just got me on another list somewhere.

[Demeter]

12. We think alike

You are not alone.

Hell, it seems like half of the NSA thinks so, too.

[jsr]

3. You're talking about a highly secretive and insidious 4th branch of government.

[dougolat]

4. He can't be happy with them, since they made him look like a fool...

...with their faulty Syria information and their reassurance about the propriety and limits of the NSA, which proved to be smoke!

[bvar22]

6. Joe Biden on Government Spying on Americans:

President Obama has Circled the Wagons to protect Clapper:

"James Clapper: Obama stands by intelligence chief as criticism mounts"

The Obama team is expressing support for Clapper as criticism of him mounts. "The president has full faith in director Clapper and his leadership of the intelligence community," National Security Council spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden told the Guardian on Wednesday.

<snip>

"It now appears clear that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress and the American people," Amash posted on Wednesday morning. "Members of Congress can't make informed decisions on intelligence issues when the head of the intelligence community wilfully makes false statements. Perjury is a serious crime. Mr Clapper should resign immediately."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/12/james-clapper-intelligence-chief-criticism

What a waste of all that Dry Powder.

[ConcernedCanuk]

7. He remembers JFK?

.
.
.



CC

ps: - I believe Barack is pushing the envelope, but staying within it - he can't do squat if he's dead.

[yurbud]

13. You have to have a link to Bill Hicks bit on new president orientation for questions like this:

[bemildred]

8. Because it needs to be thoroughly discredited and then destroyed, not reined in.

If you rein it in, you got nothing in the end.

[TheKentuckian]

9. Most likely he has no such interest. What indicates to anyone he desires to? I'm not seeing it.

[markpkessinger]

10. This is the same President . . .

. . . who just last week gave a stirring speech on income inequality, even as behind the scenes he was working to fast-track the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement. So I really can't say I'm surprised by this.

[pscot]

11. Why I'm no longer stirred

by his speeches.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

the hollow men