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After Paris Attacks, C.I.A. Director Rekindles Debate Over Surveillance After Paris Attacks, C.I.A. Director Rekindles Debate Over Surveillance
(about 5 hours later)
WASHINGTON — In response to the Paris attacks, a top American intelligence official on Monday renewed a debate on government surveillance and privacy, denouncing “hand-wringing” over intrusive spying and saying that leaks of classified information had made it harder to identify terrorists. WASHINGTON — A diabolical range of recent attacks claimed by the Islamic State — a Russian airliner blown up in Egypt, a double suicide bombing in Beirut and Friday’s ghastly assaults on Paris — has rekindled a debate over the proper limits of government surveillance in an age of terrorist mayhem.
John O. Brennan, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, appeared to be speaking in part about the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications that were disclosed by Edward J. Snowden in 2013. Those disclosures prompted sharp criticism and new restrictions on electronic spying both in the United States and in Europe. On Monday, in unusually raw language, John Brennan, the C.I.A. director, denounced what he called “hand-wringing” over intrusive government spying and said leaks about intelligence programs had made it harder to identify the “murderous sociopaths” of the Islamic State.
Mr. Brennan also seemed to be pushing back against complaints from privacy advocates in light of a growing threat from the Islamic State against Western countries, exemplified by the gun and bomb assaults in Paris that killed 129 people on Friday night. Mr. Brennan appeared to be speaking mainly of the disclosures since 2013 of the National Security Agency’s mass surveillance of phone and Internet communications by Edward J. Snowden, which prompted sharp criticism, lawsuits and new restrictions on electronic spying in the United States and in Europe.
“In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures, and a lot of hand-wringing over the government’s role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that have been taken that make our ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more challenging,” Mr. Brennan said after a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research organization. In the wake of the 129 deaths in Paris, Mr. Brennan and some other officials sounded eager to reopen a clamorous argument over surveillance in which critics of the spy agencies had seemed to hold an advantage in recent years.
The C.I.A. director, who was responding to questions about the Paris attacks, also suggested that the classified documents on N.S.A. programs given to journalists by Mr. Snowden, a former N.S.A. contractor now living in Russia, had taught terrorists how to hide from the authorities. Civil libertarians warned that at just such moments of fear, the government would reach for new, and unjustified, authorities.
“There has been an increase in the operational security of a number of operatives of these terrorist networks as they have gone to school on what it is that they need to do in order to keep their activities concealed from the authorities,” an apparent reference to both the use of encryption and the avoidance of electronic communications altogether by plotters. He spoke of “intentional” gaps in surveillance and complained about what he called the “misrepresentation” of intelligence programs.
Mr. Brennan’s remarks, and the emotional public response to the massacre in France, reignited a debate that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks over just how far the government should go in invading individuals’ privacy in the hunt for terrorist plots. Civil libertarians expressed concern that the Paris attacks might prompt a rush to more intrusive spying, on phone calls and Internet messages generally or possibly on Muslims specifically.
“As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”“As far as I know, there’s no evidence the French lacked some kind of surveillance authority that would have made a difference,” said Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “When we’ve invested new powers in the government in response to events like the Paris attacks, they have often been abused.”
While most counterterrorism experts believe the United States is safer from jihadist attacks than Europe, Mr. Brennan was one of a number of officials and commentators who have cited the Paris attacks as a reason to step up surveillance and other security measures in the United States and Europe. On Sunday, Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, who serves on the House Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, called for increased surveillance specifically of Muslims, which Mr. Brennan did not. The debate over the proper limits on government dates to the origins of the United States, with periodic overreaching in the name of security being curtailed in the interest of liberty. This era of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in some ways resembles battles American and European authorities fought in the late 1800s with anarchists who carried out a wave of assassinations and bombings, provoking a huge increase in police powers, according to Audrey Kurth Cronin, a historian of terrorism at George Mason University.
“This shows the absolute need to have top surveillance, to stop criticizing the N.S.A.,” Mr. King said on Fox News Sunday. “We have to put political correctness aside,” he added. “We have to have surveillance in the Muslim communities. That’s where the threat is coming from.” Since then, there were the excesses of McCarthyism exploiting fears of Communist infiltration in the 1950s, the exposure of domestic spying and C.I.A. assassination plots in the 1970s, and the battles over torture, secret detention and drone strikes since Sept. 11, 2001.
Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal and civil rights group, said it made no sense to target all Muslims. Europe has its own complicated history. In Germany, the history of Nazi and Communist repression made the public and some politicians especially receptive to Mr. Snowden’s assertions that the N.S.A. was out of control. In France and Britain, the reaction to the leaks was far more muted.
“I think all Americans want to be kept safe from violence of any kind,” she said. “But we know that blanket surveillance of people based on religion and race doesn’t work.” On Monday, Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain suggested that he might fast-track aggressive surveillance proposals dubbed by critics the Snoopers’ Charter, while President François Hollande of France called for a package of tough measures, stepping up surveillance and permitting raids without warrants.
Based on arrests of Islamic State supporters in the United States in recent years, Ms. Khera said “the common thread is not that they are Muslims but that they are lonely, vulnerable young people.” In some cases, she said, they are not from Muslim families but “have become Muslim online” after exposure to propaganda from the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. In the United States today, surveillance is the core issue for the security agencies combating the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and for the watchdog groups that monitor those agencies. In addition to the basic question of how much government snooping should be allowed, there is the particular concern of Muslims that they are being unfairly targeted.
Many security experts believe that the United States is at far lesser risk than Europe for a large-scale jihadist attack directed from Syria for two reasons. First, flights into the United States and controls at the Mexican and Canadian borders make it much harder for would-be attackers to reach American soil. Second, the Muslim community in the United States is smaller proportionally and is widely seen as better integrated and more prosperous than in France and some other European countries. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of Long Island, who serves on the House Intelligence and Homeland Security Committees, said on Fox News Sunday that “we have to put political correctness aside.”
“We have to have surveillance in the Muslim communities,” he said. “That’s where the threat is coming from.”
Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, a legal and civil rights group, said it made no sense to target all Muslims. “I think all Americans want to be kept safe from violence of any kind,” she said. “But we know that blanket surveillance of people based on religion and race doesn’t work.”
Many security experts believe that compared with Europe, the United States is at far less risk of a large-scale jihadist attack, especially those directed from Syria. Flights into the United States and controls at the Mexican and Canadian borders make it difficult for assailants to reach American soil. And the Muslim community in the United States is proportionally smaller and is seen as far better integrated and more prosperous than in France and some other European countries.
Whether because of such factors, or because of government surveillance and other measures, the toll of jihadist terrorism in the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks has been very small, less than three dozen killed. After Paris, “It’s possible that now, everything has changed — a phrase you heard after 9/11,” said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University and co-author of “Chasing Ghosts: The Policing of Terrorism. “But I doubt it.”
For some intelligence officials, however, the toll in Paris is proof that they need all the powers they have, and perhaps more. A major consequence of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures was the Obama administration’s decision to drop the mass collection of the phone call logs of millions of Americans, so-called metadata. The N.S.A. was directed to use more selective measures in part because there was no evidence that the phone log program, part of the Patriot Act, had actually thwarted any terrorist plots.
Michael V. Hayden, the former director of both the N.S.A. and the C.I.A., said that collecting phone logs did no harm and might, in the rare event of a major plot, have done good. It was designed, he said, to foil a Paris-style plot — “unknown people inside the homeland who are communicating with terrorists abroad.”
“In the wake of Paris, a big stack of metadata doesn’t seem to be the scariest thing in the room,” Mr. Hayden said. Of Mr. Brennan’s complaints about the damage of leaks and worries about invasion of privacy, he said of current and former intelligence officials, “We all feel that way.”
Timothy H. Edgar, a scholar at Brown University who has worked for intelligence agencies and for the A.C.L.U., said the debate over surveillance had become too polarized. The rush to extreme measures after Sept. 11 was counterproductive, he said. But in recent years, the sweeping condemnation of all surveillance by some critics was an overreaction, too, he said.
“There are lessons to be learned,” Mr. Edgar said, speaking of Paris. “But we don’t know what they are yet.”