Government Surveillance Needs More Transparency, Clapper Says

But Snowden is “not a whistleblower” and his disclosures were “egregious,” leaving Clapper “appalled” and leading to possible “impact directly on our national security … damage that has potentially been caused by the continuous stream of revelations,” Clapper said. “Unfortunately there is more of this to come.” Journalists have made “the most conspiratorial case” about what the intelligence community is doing, and from conversations with journalists in private, Clapper sees “a big gulf” about how they define what affects national security versus how he does, he said. These pressures, especially in a 24-hour news cycle, make it a challenge “to punch back and make the alternative case.” But he said the debate needed to happen and “perhaps it’s unfortunate it didn’t happen some time ago."

"The damage is growing by the day” as a result of the leaks, said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., at the conference. Both Rogers and ranking member Dutch Ruppersberger, D-Md., said the media had been too aggressive in publishing the material. The leaks “will cause death to Americans,” Ruppersberger said. The articles “give al-Qaeda the ability to dodge us.” Rogers said “this has been the most frustrating series of weeks. … There are certain things the newspapers have published that have nothing to do with privacy issues. Nothing. They're giving, they're providing our adversaries valuable, valuable information. We now have a gap in our ability to stop something bad from happening.”

Snowden’s revelations, moreover, showed that the NSA has been “too good” in its oversight of its own programs, Rogers said. He said Snowden’s leaks had counterintuitively demonstrated that the intelligence community at NSA, in Congress and on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) had been particularly “aggressive in our oversight” and in quickly and effectively fixing those problems. But the public and media interpreted the revelations as “'Oh my God, we caught them doing something very wrong,'” he said.

Clapper blamed the problems of the surveillance allegations on the complex, intermingled telecom systems of today’s world. He lamented for “that simple world” of the Cold War, which featured “two mutually exclusive telecommunications systems -- theirs and the West.” Now there’s one big system in which millions of people engaged in “innocent” conversations get swept up among the “nefarious” people engaged in “evil” activity, needles in the much bigger haystack of telecommunications. The surveillance, as dictated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act provisions, represents “a good faith effort” to sift through the data and separate the hay from the needles.

"What all this has shown is we have to be more transparent about how we do our business, what it takes to do our business, and also transparent about the output of what we do,” Clapper said. He described the release of 1,800 pages of FISC opinions, which “does refute the allegation that some have made that the FISA court is a rubber stamp.” He called the gestures of transparency “something we have to do” in the name of helping to “restore the trust and confidence of the people.” Transparency is “a double-edged sword” that’s great for citizens but not as good due to what it tells adversaries, but he wants to err on the side of more transparency, Clapper said. He praised the NSA as “an honorable institution” and said the revelations have made its employees’ important work more difficult. President Barack Obama announced his intentions to improve transparency and oversight in August.

U.S. intelligence efforts are now focused more on insider threat detection, clearance revamping and embracing a single information technology enterprise rather than what Clapper termed a confederation, he said. Clapper described the efforts since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and said 65 percent of staff had been hired since those attacks. The U.S. works better with foreign partners and can “reach into [adversaries'] sanctuaries” in a way that’s “all paid off.” Sequestration has taken its toll on the intelligence community, he said, worrying that its effects will remain another year. In the earlier panel, Ruppersberger said he and Rogers were working to reintroduce an amendment that would give intelligence agencies more flexibility in implementing the budget cuts.

The leaks could also slow efforts to advance the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (HR-3523), said Rogers, who sponsored the bill in February. Rogers said the Senate had not given up on the bill, and that perhaps with a few changes it could make its way to the president. Ruppersberger, for his part, had less optimism about the bill’s chances in the Senate, but also said he was trying to work on moving the bill. Echoing comments from Rogers, Ruppersberger said the U.S. has “a long way to go to deal with the cyber issue.”

"The Snowden thing is terribly unfortunate, because the misperception that it created on all of this is shocking. Just how wrong 98 percent of it is[, is] shocking to me, and that slowed down” our work on cyber, Rogers said. He raised concerns that Iran has already begun to wage cyberattacks on U.S. financial institutions. “The e-army is real. We believe it has more than just Iran providing advice and counsel on how a cyberattack against the United States might look. They're not going to be bashful about doing it.” The U.S. private sector infrastructure, not to mention its policies and legal framework, aren’t ready for that, he said. “This is the largest single threat we know exists and is happening today that we're doing nothing about. That’s troublesome.” (jhendel@warren-news.com),