From the article: In his press conference of August 9, President Obama said with respect to collection under FISA that he believes “there are steps we can take to give the American people additional confidence that there are additional safeguards against abuse. Transparency is an extremely important value in a democratic society. [The] lack of transparency in NSA programs prevented the government from garnering sustained public confidence, as these programs developed, though it generally followed the law and the guidance of both the courts and this body. In our society, transparency and legitimacy go hand in hand. Transparency, however, is not as simple a value with respect to intelligence collection as it is in other areas of government. Indeed, normally, with respect to covert intelligence gathering programs, we regard transparency as an evil—that is, fundamentally incompatible with operational security in intelligence gathering, just as it is with respect to troop movements and military planning. Some things have to be secret, and for those things, transparency is not a virtue, and sunlight is not a disinfectant. In those areas, we have traditionally sought accountability by other means. The task of oversight, instead of taking place by means of transparency, was delegated to institutions within the normally-transparent Congress and the normally-transparent judiciary that could operate with sufficient secrecy so as not to impair the community’s operational effectiveness. It is a system that presumes that oversight would not be transparent to the public, nor even transparent to the broader institutions of the judiciary or Congress. At its deepest level, the controversy over the Snowden leaks, the attendant anxiety over the non-public oversight mechanisms that provide accountability for these intelligence programs, and the calls for greater transparency for the FISA system reflect a loss of faith in the continued vitality of this post-Watergate system of intelligence oversight. When we speak of increasing transparency, we must decide as a threshold matter whether we mean increased transparency within the context of a system that presumes secrecy or whether we simply no longer believe in the system of delegated oversight at all. And if we have lost faith in that system, what oversight system might we imagine to replace it? Put another way, is there an oversight system that might enable effective intelligence collection but do so in a more transparent fashion?... brookings.edu/research/testimony/2013/09/26-legislative-changes-foreign-intelligence-surveillance-act-wittes
Posted on: Fri, 27 Sep 2013 06:25:37 +0000
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