Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

Michael Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

The former head of the NSA asserted that one can't know whether spying is legitimate or not unless one knows all the details about it.

CONOR FRIEDERSDORF

Is state surveillance a legitimate defense of our freedoms? The question was put to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, during a debate Friday evening in Toronto. Alan Dershowitz joined him to argue the affirmative. Glenn Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian argued against the resolution.

Going in, I expected to disagree with Hayden, who presided over the NSA's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping in the years after the September 11 attacks. But I want to emphatically agree with the very first remarks he made in the debate.

"State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," he said, restating the resolution. "Well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts."

He quickly clarified:

It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of danger?
And that's why facts matter.
In having this debate, in trying to decide whether this surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms, we really need to know exactly what this surveillance is.

Hayden was trying to defend the NSA with those remarks. He argued that facts matter, and that the Washington Post got some facts wrong when reporting on slides leaked by Edward Snowden, making the NSA look more aggressive than is the case. But in doing so, he unwittingly echoed a core belief of the national-security state's critics. He's absolutely right: To judge whether a particular kind of surveillance is legitimate, one must know exactly what's being considered and its purpose.

Yet the NSA hid many types of surveillance from the American people. In fact, many members of Congress were unaware of exactly what was being done and why. By Hayden's own logic, neither American citizens nor those members of Congress could meaningfully decide whether the NSA's activities were legitimate! I've made the same claim repeatedly. The difference is that I find it alarming and he doesn't. It's that anti-democratic mindset I've warned about before.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/michael-haydens-unwitting-case-against-secret-surveillance/361689/