Admiral Michael Rogers, New NSA Director Really Doesn’t Get Why Americans Don’t Want to Be Spied On

As reported earlier this week, the National
Security Agency is now collecting photos from online to create a

massive facial recognition database. Americans shouldn’t worry
their pretty little heads about that, says new National Security
Agency director Admiral Michael Rogers, according to Washington
Post article today headlined, “New
NSA chief seeks to reassure public on surveillance.” How does
the admiral hope to reassure us? The Post reports:

The new director of the National Security Agency on Tuesday
acknowledged that the agency uses facial-recognition tools but said
the intent is primarily to identify terrorists and help prevent
attacks — adding that such technologies are not broadly directed
against Americans.

“We do not do this on some unilateral basis against U.S.
citizens,” said Adm.
Michael S. Rogers, in some of his first public
remarks since taking the helm of the embattled spy agency two
months ago.

A year after the first leaks emerged about the scope of NSA
surveillance programs, Rogers is seeking to reframe the public
debate that has damaged the reputation and morale of the NSA,
saying the public needs to understand not just what the
organization does but also why it does it and under what
limits.

Here’s what the admiral needs to understand: Many Americans do
not count on the permanent good will of the minions of the domestic
surveillance state. As President Obama’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight
Board warned in their January
report on the domestic spying abuses implicated by the bulk
collection of essentially every American’s telephone records:

Beyond such individual privacy intrusions, permitting the
government to routinely collect the calling records of the entire
nation fundamentally shifts the balance of power between
the state and its citizens (emphasis added). With its
powers of compulsion and criminal prosecution, the government poses
unique threats to privacy when it collects data on its own
citizens. Government collection of personal information on such a
massive scale also courts the ever-present danger of “mission
creep.” An even more compelling danger is that personal
information collected by the government will be misused to harass,
blackmail, or intimidate, or to single out for scrutiny particular
individuals or groups (emphasis added). To be clear, the
Board has seen no evidence suggesting that anything of the sort is
occurring at the NSA and the agency’s incidents of non-compliance
with the rules approved by the FISC have generally involved
unintentional misuse. Yet, while the danger of abuse may
seem remote, given historical abuse of personal information by the
government during the twentieth century, the risk is more than
merely theoretical (emphasis added).

Perhaps government spies will always and everywhere be
punctilious in their respect for the liberties guaranteed Americans
under the Constitution, but it’s better to make sure that they
never have access to tools that might tempt them not to be.