McClatchy:
WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency is facing its worst crisis since the domestic spying scandals four decades ago led to the first formal oversight and overhaul of U.S. intelligence operations.
Thanks to former NSA systems analyst Edward Snowden’s flood of leaks to the media, and the Obama administration’s uneven response to them, morale at the spy agency responsible for intercepting communications of terrorists and foreign adversaries has plummeted, former officials say. Even sympathetic lawmakers are calling for new curbs on the NSA’s powers.
“This is a secret intelligence agency that’s now in the news every day,” said Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and later led the CIA. “Each day, the workforce wakes up and reads the daily indictment.”
President Barack Obama acknowledged Friday that many Americans have lost trust in the nation’s largest intelligence agency. “There’s no doubt that, for all the work that’s been done to protect the American people’s privacy, the capabilities of the NSA are scary to people,” he said in a CNN interview.
He added, “Between all the safeguards and checks that we put in place within the executive branch, and the federal court oversight that takes place on the program, and congressional oversight, people are still concerned as to whether their emails are being read or their phone calls are being listened to.”
Intelligence officials say those concerns are unwarranted and do not involve illegal operations. They say the latest revelations are largely technical glitches that the NSA, the director of national intelligence, and the Justice Department discovered and reported on their own to Congress and the secret court that oversees NSA surveillance.
As a result, they argue, the problems are fundamentally different than the deliberate spying on Americans that congressional committees uncovered in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
Still, the NSA’s current problems stem, in part, from its efforts to keep almost all aspects of its work secret. The NSA never publicly disclosed that it was collecting domestic telephone logs, for example, so it had little public support when the court-approved secret program hit the headlines.
“A lot of the current controversy would have been avoidable with a reasonable degree of transparency,” said Steven Aftergood, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists, a Washington-based advocacy and research group.
The government should have long ago explained the parameters of surveillance that touches Americans, Aftergood said.
Instead, “they have denied that records of U.S. persons are affected at all, which wasn’t true, and they have made assertions about the quality and performance of oversight that have been called into question.”
Arguably the most damaging disclosure so far came Wednesday when the Office of the Director of National Intelligence declassified and released three documents, including an 86-page ruling from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created as one of the reforms of the 1970s.
The ruling revealed for the first time that the NSA had improperly collected the emails of tens of thousands of Americans between 2008 and 2011 while it was siphoning foreigners’ data from Internet nodes based in the United States.
