Former NSA worker Charles Seife has issued a call for current NSA analysts and consultants to expose wrongdoing at the agency.
This brief diary is to call attention to an article that might otherwise be overlooked. Charles Seife, who served at the National Security Agency as a summer student in the 1990s, has called on his colleagues to blow the whistle on wrongdoing.
Seife's voice is nowhere near as important as the voices of whistleblowers like William Binney, Thomas Drake, and Adrienne Kinne. He's just a guy who worked at the agency as a kid. But he conveys that important point that author James Bamford also expresses so well:
We all understand that real human beings can die because of a seemingly minor breach of secrets we've been entrusted with. We also realize that intelligence gathering sometimes means using underhanded tactics to try to protect the nation. But we all knew that those tactics were constrained by law, even if that law isn't always black and white. The agency insisted, over and over, that the weapons we were building—and weapons they are, even if they're weapons of information—would never be turned on our own people, but would only be used upon our enemies.
What do we do now that we have to face the fact that the Agency broke its word? (emphasis added)
This is such a central point that only people who have followed the NSA and intelligence for a very long period of time can really grasp. Many of the conversations on DK talk past one another. The Agency was born at a time that America was learning about the horrific things that can happen when intelligence gathering is turned inward. We learned about the NKVD, the Stasi, the Gestapo-- and were appropriately horrified. We resolved that we would never turn the intelligence gathering capabilities of our country against our own citizens.
That promise was never really fulfilled. The Church Committee hearings revealed numerous abuses, notably Operation Shamrock and the Huston Plan.
But following the Church Committee hearings, it seemed that almost everyone understood just how far down that slippery slope we had come. Americans had been targeted for their political beliefs by the intelligence state. Seife's article is worth reading if only to understand how far from those reforms we have drifted.
To close with Seife's message:
If this is really what the agency stands for, I am sorry to have helped in whatever small way that I did.
I can only guess how much more horrified the ex-NSAers I know—you, my former colleagues, my friends, my professors, and my mentors—must be. Unlike me, you have spent much of your working lives helping the NSA build its power, only to see your years of work used in a way it was never supposed to be used. You could speak out now in a way that violates neither your secrecy agreement nor your honor.
May those words go deep into the hearts of all people who love their country.
__
Apologies: I will not be able to answer comments until later today or tomorrow.