EDITORIAL. Mass Surveillance Isn't the Answer. By THE EDITORIAL BOARD. It's
a wretched yet predictable ritual after each new terrorist attack: Certain
politicians and government officials waste no time exploiting the tragedy
for their own ends. The remarks on Monday by John Brennan, the director of
the Central Intelligence Agency, took that to a new and disgraceful low.
Speaking less than three days after coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris
killed 129 and injured hundreds more, Mr. Brennan complained about 'a lot of
hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover
these terrorists. What he calls 'hand-wringing' was the sustained national
outrage following the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National
Security Agency contractor, that the agency was using provisions of the
Patriot Act to secretly collect information on millions of Americans' phone
records. In June, President Obama signed the USA Freedom Act, which ends
bulk collection of domestic phone data by the government (but not the
collection of other data, like emails and the content of Americans'
international phone calls) and requires the secretive Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court to make its most significant rulings available to the
public. These reforms are only a modest improvement on the Patriot Act, but
the intelligence community saw them as a grave impediment to antiterror
efforts. In his comments Monday, Mr. Brennan called the attacks in Paris a
'wake-up call,' and claimed that recent 'policy and legal' actions 'make our
ability collectively, internationally, to find these terrorists much more
challenging. It is hard to believe anything Mr. Brennan says. Last year, he
bluntly denied that the C.I.A. had illegally hacked into the computers of
Senate staff members conducting an investigation into the agency's detention
and torture programs when, in fact, it did. In 2011, when he was President
Obama's top counterterrorism adviser, he claimed that American drone strikes
had not killed any civilians, despite clear evidence that they had. And his
boss, James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has admitted
lying to the Senate on the N.S.A.'s bulk collection of data. Even putting
this lack of credibility aside, it's not clear what extra powers Mr. Brennan
is seeking. Most of the men who carried out the Paris attacks were already
on the radar of intelligence officials in France and Belgium, where several
of the attackers lived only hundreds of yards from the main police station,
in a neighborhood known as a haven for extremists. As one French
counterterrorism expert and former defense official said, this shows that
'our intelligence is actually pretty good, but our ability to act on it is
limited by the sheer numbers. In other words, the problem in this case was
not a lack of data, but a failure to act on information authorities already
had. In fact, indiscriminate bulk data sweeps have not been useful. In the
more than two years since the N.S.A.'s data collection programs became known
to the public, the intelligence community has failed to show that the phone
program has thwarted a terrorist attack. Yet for years intelligence
officials and members of Congress repeatedly misled the public by claiming
that it was effective. The intelligence agencies' inability to tell the
truth about surveillance practices is just one part of the problem. The
bigger issue is their willingness to circumvent the laws, however they are
written. The Snowden revelations laid bare how easy it is to abuse
national-security powers, which are vaguely defined and generally exercised
in secret. Listening to Mr. Brennan and other officials, like James Comey,
the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, one might believe that the
government has been rendered helpless to defend Americans against the threat
of future terror attacks. Mr. Comey, for example, has said technology
companies like Apple and Google should make it possible for law enforcement
to decode encrypted messages the companies' customers send and receive. But
requiring that companies build such back doors into their devices and
software could make those systems much more vulnerable to hacking by
criminals and spies. Technology experts say that government could just as
easily establish links between suspects, without the use of back doors, by
examining who they call or message, how often and for how long. In truth,
intelligence authorities are still able to do most of what they did before
-- only now with a little more oversight by the courts and the public. There
is no dispute that they and law enforcement agencies should have the
necessary powers to detect and stop attacks before they happen. But that
does not mean unquestioning acceptance of ineffective and very likely
unconstitutional tactics that reduce civil liberties without making the
public safer..
