How Disconcerted Should We Feel About an Intel Chief Who Doesn’t Grasp Human Behavior?

Eli Lake has a
new piece up at the Daily Beast about Director of
Intelligence James Clapper, and it absolutely, positively will not
ease anybody’s mind that Clapper has a mental grasp at all why
people are upset at the scope of National Security Agency (NSA)
data collection.  The man still, after all this public outrage
over the NSA’s behavior, does not understand why Edward Snowden is
leaking information:

And maybe the worst part for Clapper is, he still doesn’t get
why Snowden did it. Clapper sees himself as the man who’s opened up
the intelligence community to public scrutiny, who keeps the
Constitution on his wall, and who’s endured the endless
congressional grillings—all while keeping Americans safe. How could
Snowden, a fellow intelligence analyst and contractor, not see
that? “Maybe if I had I’d understand him better because I have
trouble understanding what he did or what he’d do,” the director
said. “From my standpoint, the damage he’s done. I could almost
accept it or understand it if this were simply about his concerns
about so-called domestic surveillance programs. But what he did,
what he took, what he has exposed, goes way, way, way beyond the
so-called domestic surveillance programs.” 

At The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf looks at that paragraph,
along with Clapper’s acknowledgment that he can’t guarantee there
won’t be future leaks, and asks the important question:
Why should we trust the NSA with our information, then?

The NSA has collected information about the communications of
millions of Americans. Nefarious actors, given access to metadata
from the phone dragnet alone, could blackmail countless citizens
and quietly manipulate the political process. The NSA doesn’t deny
that. They just insist that they’re not nefarious actors, that
safeguards are in place, and that we should trust them as stewards
of this data. 

Well, here is Clapper telling the truth: Despite regarding
Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden as having done grave damage to
the United States with their data thefts, he can’t guarantee the
same thing won’t happen again. And if a future whistleblower could
gain access to the most sensitive data, so could a blackmailer.

So could a foreign spy.  

Though discussion of potential damage of data theft from the NSA
tends to drift over into blacks ops, it doesn’t have to be so sexy
to be something we need to concern ourselves about. In fact, I
think that argument we need to fear of information falling into the
hands of enemy spies or political opportunists tends to feed the
government’s line of defense. When the NSA or President Barack
Obama condescendingly declares they aren’t listening to our calls
or reading our e-mails, what they mean is that we don’t have any
information they’d find interesting anyway and we’re all just being
paranoid. Yes, there are plenty of examples of federal surveillance
tools being used against Americans for political purposes, but it
is probably true that most Americans will never be subject to such
abuses.

However, the more likely fear should not be a foreign spy or a
political opportunist, but for things like identity theft or more
conventional, less-cloak-and-dagger-oriented crimes. We’ve seen
police officers abuse databases to get access to information to
file
false tax returns. The more information about us more people
have access to, especially without our knowledge or control, the
more risks we face of any number of abuses.

Friedersdorf also notes that Snowden’s position about NSA
surveillance is obviously not an outlier, making Clapper’s
bafflement at Snowden rather baffling itself:

It isn’t as if no one else has felt this alarm. Snowden’s
revelations alarmed masses in multiple countries, including heads
of state, legislators in both American political parties,
professionals at some of the world’s leading IT companies. Clapper
can’t even imagine what might’ve inspired Snowden? The answer is
everywhere. Maybe he should get outside the SIGINT
bubble. 

Nick Gillespie analyzed Lake’s last piece on Clapper, where he
seems to think (probably incorrectly) that Americans would have
been fine with mass domestic surveillance collection had they been
told,
here.