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NSA's defenders

By Zhao Jinglun: 0 Comment(s)Print E-mail China.org.cn, December 26, 2013

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[By Jiao Haiyang/China.org.cn]

Just as outrage grew in Europe over NSA spying on its citizens and public figures, U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN that France and Germany should be grateful that the National Security Agency is spying on them: "If the French citizens knew exactly what that was about, they would be applauding and popping champagne corks. It's a good thing. It keeps the French safe. It keeps the U.S. safe. It keeps our European allies safe."

Rogers was neither crazy, nor was he alone. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who never fails to carry an absurd argument to its extreme, also forcefully defended the NSA, arguing "the president should stop apologizing, stop being defensive. The reality is the NSA has saved thousands of lives not just in the United States but in France, Germany and throughout Europe."

Those claims are totally groundless.

To be sure, the chief defender of NSA spying is Barack Obama himself. His administration has maintained that the NSA program is fully lawful, and that it has been approved by all three branches of government. But the program was developed, approved, and applied in secret. It had never been subject to public scrutiny.

Recently, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled that the NSA program "almost certainly" violated the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, and issued a preliminary injunction against the program.

He said: "I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval."

Judge Lean also said that government officials were unable to cite "a single instance in which analysis of the NSA's bulk collection metadata collection actually stopped an imminent attack or otherwise aided the Government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature."

Judge Leon described the NSA's capabilities as "almost Orwellian". Snowden says it is worse than 1984.

That statement is in direct contradiction to Barack Obama's claim when he told reporters last June: "We know that at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved."

Be it noted that Judge Richard Lean is an appointee of George W. Bush.

Since Obama's claim, intelligence officials, media outlets and members of Congress have all repeated that assertion. Among them, Rep. Mike Rogers said in July: "Fifty-four times this and the other program stopped and thwarted terrorist tacks both here and in Europe, saving real lives."

When NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander spoke at a Las Vegas security conference in July, he also referred to "54 different terror related activities," 42 of which were plots and 12 of which were cases in which individuals provided "material support" to terrorism.

When in October, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) pressed Alexander on the issue at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, "Would you agree that the 54 cases that keep getting cited by the administration were not all plots, and of the 54, only 13 had some nexus to the U.S.?"

Alexander answered "Yes" without elaborating.

According to Geoffrey Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one of five members of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance, he was "absolutely" surprised when he discovered the agency's lack of evidence that the bulk of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.

Answering whether there is any evidence that NSA surveillance stopped any terror attack, Stone said: "We found none."

At the end of year news conference, President Obama was asked by Reuters's Mark Felsenthal if he was able to identify any specific examples when NSA's bulk metadata actually stopped an imminent attack, he never answered the question about a specific example. Instead he spoke broadly in defense of the program. So it looks the program will continue, perhaps with some minor modifications. Anyway, the NSA will probably be unable to "order one of everything off the menu".

The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit: http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/zhaojinglun.htm

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