In the 10 days since the NSA surveillance story broke open, after listening to an array of arguments for and against the dragnet approach taken by the spy agency, I think the comment that makes the most sense to me came from Jeremy Bash.
Bash, who has considerable experience working with the intelligence community, said this:
“If you want to find a needle in a haystack, you need a haystack.”
In other words, the billions of bits of information that the NSA stores – phone numbers, locations and durations of calls – provide the starting point if the intelligence agencies get a tip about a suspicious phone call.
Bash, who served as chief counsel for the House Intelligence Committee, chief of staff to the CIA director, and chief of staff to the Defense Secretary, certainly has the credibility to boil this controversy down to the basics.
Here’s how he explained it: Suppose a foreign intelligence service alerts the NSA that a phone call from a terrorist group in Yemen will be coming in to a disposable phone in Texas at 2:45 p.m. today. That’s it – no names, no numbers. The haystack provides our spies with a starting point to investigate. Without that massive database, the tip provided from overseas has no value.
A similar argument came from a very different source – David Simon, creator of HBO’s “The Wire” and a former Baltimore newspaper reporter who covered the cop beat.
On his blog, Simon wrote a long, thoughtful piece in which he recalled a story he covered in the 1980s when the Baltimore cops collected thousands of numbers from pay phones and pagers and used that database to break up a major drug ring.
“When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a database that is being maintained as an investigative tool,” Simon wrote.
Liberals and libertarians who call the revelations about NSA surveillance a scandal fail to realize that the Bush and Obama administrations have gradually assembled “an American anti-terrorism effort that is effectively asked to find the needles before they are planted into haystacks, to prevent even such modest, grass-rooted conspiracies as the Boston Marathon bombing before they occur,” Simon noted.
Here’s his take on why concerns about potential violations of civil liberties must be trumped by a very real, ongoing terrorist threat:
“You would think that the government was listening in to the secrets of 200 million Americans from the reaction and the hyperbole being tossed about. And you would think that rather than a legal court order, which is an inevitable consequence of legislation that we drafted and passed, something illegal had been discovered to the government’s shame. Nope. ... The only thing new here, from a legal standpoint, is the scale on which the FBI and NSA are apparently attempting to cull anti-terrorism leads from that data. ... I know it’s big and scary that the government wants a database of all phone calls. And it’s scary that they’re paying attention to the Internet. And it’s scary that your cellphones have GPS installed. ... The question is not, ‘Should the resulting data exist?’ It does. ... The question is more fundamental: ‘Is government accessing the data for the legitimate public safety needs of the society, or are they accessing it in ways that abuse individual liberties and violate personal privacy — and in a manner that is unsupervised?’ And to that, The Guardian and those who are wailing jeremiads about this pretend-discovery of U.S. big data collection are noticeably silent. We don’t know of any actual abuse.”
As for all the noisy criticism displayed by Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Simon ponders this:
“… just imagine how much bloviating would be wafting across our political spectrum if, in the wake of an incident of domestic terrorism, an American president and his administration had failed to take full advantage of the existing telephonic data to do what is possible to find those needles in the haystacks.”
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