Intelligence Chief Calls Leaks on U.S. Data Collection ‘Reprehensible’ | Hacker News Reader

Intelligence Chief Calls Leaks on U.S. Data Collection ‘Reprehensible’

nytimes.com

96 pointsmagoghm40 comments

I have to hand it to the whistleblower in this case, he leaked what he thought was objectionable, leaked nothing else, leaked it to a very few other reputable parties instead of INTERNET at-large, and what he did leak had an obvious public interest and little threat to national security otherwise. This is both because any foreign operatives worth their salt should already be assuming that their naive electronic comms are available to Ft Meade, and because the program is so similar to prior programs which have been known to posterity.

Thanks, "career intelligence community worker" for showing how it's done.

> leaked it to a very few other reputable parties instead of INTERNET at-large

What difference would it make if he leaked it to the internet at-large?

The theory is by risking complete classified documents, one could put others at considerable risk. Whereas the post / guardian would probably be smart enough to redact things that could risk lives.

Or just not release the stuff at all if that was their decision :)

Any whistle blower who has made the moral choice to make certain information public has a choice around whether to take responsible steps to ensure that the information is released to the public as they intended.

Releasing it only to the media companies is an odd decision, if you want to be sure the information will be made freely available.

> Releasing it only to the media companies is an odd decision, if you want to be sure the information will be made freely available.

Because journalists are known to sit on earth-shattering news. Journalists have the greatest incentives for making the information freely available.

It's about the same difference between leaking your banking PIN to the Internet vs. leaking your banking pin to your best friend from high school 10 years ago.

If all information were truly meant to be free we wouldn't demand corporations employ strict privacy policies...

I really don't understand your analogy. The whole point of releasing to the few reputable parties in the current case is so that they go on to release it to everyone else including the internet.

randall's comment makes more sense regarding the Guardian and the Post would be more responsible to only publish information that wouldn't risk lives although I don't think it's right to push the responsibility on to them.

> The whole point of releasing to the few reputable parties in the current case is so that they go on to release it to everyone else including the internet.

The media reports on the information they obtain, but they don't always release the raw information as it was received.

Consider this from the BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22811002

I'm of the view that life is too short to worry about whether the FBI is reading my emails

I sure as hell hope he didn't leak anything to the BBC as they have abandoned the notion of protecting their sources!

He's right. Let our kids worry about it... no. If you think stopping the inertia of post-9/11 is hard now, wait 50 years. It will get worse and it will not be stopped, except with extraordinary civil unrest.

Just to see if I understand the logic correctly, this person thinks the leak is reprehensible, but the collection of this data is just dandy?

So, the knowledge of this program existing is a huge danger to us, but the actual collection of this data in no way infringes on our rights? Or, are they saying they don't care about the latter b/c of the former?

I sometimes can't tell what is malice and what is incompetence in government. I'd obviously like to assume incompetence, though, to be honest, that really doesn't make me sleep better at night thinking the people making and overseeing policy are just plain stupid.

How does this surprise anyone? Bradley Manning released tapes of the US military murdering civilians after the military denied it happened. Dude went to jail, military continued to deny thing there is evidence of, and on we go. People literally see the guy who exposed heinous crimes as worse than the people who committed the heinous crimes. It's utterly depressing.

“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans,”

Said without an apparent hint of irony.

In time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell

The "legal" part is what's probably the most important question. Is it really legal? Or is it legal, so long as it has not been disclosed and made illegal by general public outcry?

Sounds too much like "not caught, not a criminal" philosophy.

I'm starting to question if morality and legality are considered the same by those in power? Honest question, although off topic and a bit esoteric.

Perhaps if one becomes comfortable with the idea that all illegal acts are immoral, it's possible to trick yourself into thinking that all legal acts are by definition moral.

Who cares if it's legal? They just change the laws when the laws get in the way. It is certainly unjust however.

This is what legal positivism ends up turning into: anything is legal as long as there is a "law" allowing it. The fact that said law may be -f.e.- unconstitutional has nothing to do with the 'legality' of the act. Only when -if- a superior entity (the SCOTUS in this case) deems the 'law' unconstitutional does the act become 'illegal.'

So always win-win for the NSA.

I really don't get it. I read the court order to Verizon. All it says is "you are to give us all your data". There are no individual cases, there are no NSA people identified. There is not a single bit of any identifying information anywhere to be found.

The nerve of some people. How you can defend classifying the mere fact that NSA was granted access to Verizon data from a court? What possible "damage to national security" could there be?

The only damage here is that the government looks like a bunch of lawless thugs, and to expose that we created transparency laws and classification systems in the first place. That is the one reason out there that is completely invalid for classifying something.

There are two ways to view this:

1. By letting them know how we collect intelligence, they will find ways to evade us.

2. By letting Americans know that we are spying on them, we risk a backlash and possible budget cuts.

I suspect that both of these were going through the heads of high-ranking decision makers at the NSA (and the FBI and the DEA).

I would have thought the IRS scandal enough to make the government look like a bunch of lawless thugs.

In truth they aren't lawless thugs, they are the thugs who write the laws necessary to allow their desires.

Quote from Clapper from the article:

“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans,” Mr. Clapper said.

If the program is "entirely legal", why all the effort to hide it?

For this very reason. The public outrage is there and they know it.

Lots of things are legal that should be hidden. When the Secretary of State writes a memo to the President about how much of a dick Vladimir Putin is, that's entirely legal... but it's not something that Putin needs to be reading.

That's not the case here, but "if it's legal it should be public" is not always a reasonable standard.

The idea is that it should be hidden because if the enemy knows the details then the enemy can adapt. There are (probably) instances where this is true; more likely those involving more specifics than this does, but in any case that's the issue at hand, whatever determinations you may make about it.

There's still the question of how we ought to negotiate such things. Over the past 70ish years we've made some cuts at it, with various outcomes...

The post-9/11 US administration is a post-traumatic patient, and should be treated as such: occasional delusions, paranoid thoughts, mood swings, self-harm...

It's not the leaks that are reprehensible.

http://blog.rongarret.info/2013/06/its-not-leaks-that-are-re...

How hilarious is this? They think that having every piece of information about you they can get their grubby little hands on is okay... but they don't think that you should be able to get your hands on all their information? Seems a touch hypocritical...

Their moral compass is slightly off, methinks.

Everything they are doing is legal. Americans are shocked that a spy agency was given powers and money by Congress and then proceeded to use them. What did they think would happen? What about holding the idiots who voted almost unanimously on the PATRIOT Act accountable?

It is legal, in the State of California, to drink alcohol as an adult. That does not mean I have to do it, as I follow a personal moral code rather than do whatever is allowed by the law.

Beside, I consider what they have done to be against the 4th amendment of the United States Constitution, and, in their shoes, I would have resigned my position rather than compromise my integrity and violate my oath of office to uphold the Constitution.

Come to think of it, this is one of the reasons I never sought a career in government.

How old do you have to be to be considered an "adult" in California?

Think about your statement and potentially revise.

ya, 21, but that's not relevant to the point I'm trying to make.

Are you talking about the 1947 act that created the CIA as a spy agency while also prohibiting them from spying domestically on our own citizens?

Why can't we have a spy agency that actually spies on foreign countries an doesn't act like the KGB?

It doesn't bother me that he feels like this. I kinda want the director of national intelligence to be a super-secretive, paranoid psycho. What's disturbing is that his elected handlers apparently feel the same way.

MIDDLE SCHOOL - The top bully in Washington Junior High has condemned as "reprehensible" snitching revealing a secret program to collect locker combinations from younger students and said a separate disclosure about an effort to gather lunch money threatens "irreversible harm" to the bully's financial security.

Breaking News:

HN user 'mindcrime' calls Intelligence Chief "Reprehensible"

Radical right wing groups like the Tea Party are a National Security threat and it is perfectly legal to spy on these extremist groups without consulting the Judicial Branch because some members of the Judicial Branch are known to sympathise with these extremist groups.

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