Domestic Spying Requires a New Probe, Say Former Church Committee Members

When America’s spooks got out
of hand with sock drawer rummaging at home and whacking foreign
dignitaries overseas in the 1970s, the U.S. Senate set up a
committee
under Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) to investigate the
shenanigans. In the course of the probe, Sen. Church warned: “If
this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took
charge in this country, the technological capacity that the
intelligence community has given the government could enable it to
impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” He
and fellow committee members recommended reforms for reining the
spy agencies in. Now that the country’s spooks are back to sticking
their noses into Americans’ private business, former members of the
Church Committee want Congress to launch a new investigation, with
renewed limits on the snoops.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation
published a letter from the counsel, advisers, and staff
members of the Church Committee, which remarks in reference to
their original effort:

In 1975, the public learned that the National Security Agency
(NSA) had been collecting and analyzing international telegrams of
American citizens since the 1940s under secret agreements with all
the major telegram companies. Years later, the NSA instituted
another “Watch List” program to intercept the international
communications of key figures in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam
War movements among other prominent citizens. Innocent Americans
were targeted by their government…

Our findings were startling. Broadly speaking, we determined that
sweeping domestic surveillance programs, conducted under the guise
of foreign intelligence collection, had repeatedly undermined the
privacy rights of US citizens. A number of reforms were implemented
as a result, including the creation of permanent intelligence
oversight committees in Congress and the passage of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Now, in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations:

The scale of domestic communications surveillance the NSA
engages in today dwarfs the programs revealed by the Church
Committee…As former members and staff of the Church Committee we
can authoritatively say: the erosion of public trust currently
facing our intelligence community is not novel, nor is its
solution. A Church Committee for the 21st Century—a special
congressional investigatory committee that undertakes a significant
and public reexamination of intelligence community practices that
affect the rights of Americansand the laws governing those
actions—is urgently needed. Nothing less than the confidence of the
American public in our intelligence agencies and, indeed, the
federal government, is at stake.

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, some of the reforms
implemented by the original Church Committee were turned back on
themselves once the committee went away and the snoops went back to
work. Modified by the security state, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act passed to rein spies in during the 1970s now
serves as an enabler to them. The
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that law created
as an oversight body has become little more than a
rubber stamp.

Which doesn’t mean that Congress shouldn’t follow up on the
letter and make an effort to investigate and once again rein in the
NSA and company. But we shouldn’t assume that this will be any more
permanent a fix than the last effort, or that we’ll do more than
buy ourselves a little time until new reforms are subverted.

Reformist committees come and go, but the eavesdropping
bureaucracy seems to live on, always posing a danger to the people
it supposedly protects.