Many people in the US have raised questions about Obama's actual power to impose control over the activities of the intelligence and security operations of the NSA and CIA. The issue is presently on the radar with the public battle between the Senate Intelligence Committee and the CIA. The suggestion that the POTUS is actually unable to act with authority in the matter definitely has an aura of conspiracy theory. I am generally inclined to look for explanations elsewhere. However, Glenn Greenwald has just published some new information that political leaders are being systematically kept in the dark about spying activities and cooperation of cross national agencies.
Foreign Officials In the Dark About Their Own Spy Agencies’ Cooperation with NSA
One of the more bizarre aspects of the last nine months of Snowden revelations is how top political officials in other nations have repeatedly demonstrated, or even explicitly claimed, wholesale ignorance about their nations’ cooperation with the National Security Agency, as well as their own spying activities. This has led to widespread speculation about the authenticity of these reactions: Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be, in order to distance themselves from surveillance operations that became highly controversial once disclosed?
A new NSA document published today by The Intercept sheds considerable light on these questions. The classified document contains an internal NSA interview with an official from the SIGINT Operations Group in NSA’s Foreign Affairs Directorate. Titled “What Are We After with Our Third Party Relationships? — And What Do They Want from Us, Generally Speaking?”, the discussion explores the NSA’s cooperative relationship with its surveillance partners. Upon being asked whether political shifts within those nations affect the NSA’s relationships, the SIGINT official explains why such changes generally have no effect: because only a handful of military officials in those countries are aware of the spying activities. Few, if any, elected leaders have any knowledge of the surveillance.
This I find believable. It doesn't suggest that heads of government are being blackmailed and intimidated by intelligence agencies. Rather it is a classic tale of bureaucracies institutional imperative for protection and survival. You don't have to go far to find examples of this happening in government agencies that deal with far more mundane activities.
A secret GCHQ memo, reported by the Guardian in October, demonstrates that the agency’s primary motive for concealing its surveillance activities is that disclosure could trigger what it called ”damaging public debate,” as well as legal challenges throughout Europe. Those fears became realized when, in the wake of Snowden revelations, privacy lawsuits against the agency were filed in Europe, GCHQ officials were forced to publicly testify for the first time before Parliament, and an EU Parliamentary inquiry earlier this year concluded NSA/GCHQ activities were likely illegal. The British agency was also concerned about “damage to partner relationships if sensitive information were accidentally released in open court,” given that such disclosures could make citizens in other countries aware, for the first time, of their government’s involvement in mass surveillance.
Political leaders do of course face very different challenges in trying to impose accountability on the security state than they do in something like highway construction. We can certainly see that with the NSA and CIA. The threat of terrorism is used as an all purpose justification for secrecy. Before there was terrorism there was Communism. The Snowden revelations have given us a picture of an agency engaged in a broad range of activities that have nothing to do with terrorism. Yet there are loud voices in both major parties who call him a traitor who has endangered the safety of the American public.
To the extent that Obama is not fully aware of the activities of the NSA and CIA he does have some political incentives for keeping it that way. If he were to come down solidly on the side of supporting the Senate Intelligence Committee in the demand for accountability there would be howls that he is soft on protecting national security. We can see from Greenwald's article that the problem is not unique to the US.