You can't spell "PRIVACY" without "PR," and it's the latter, not the former, that the National Security Administration has handled poorly, according to its deputy director, Richard Ledgett.
Speaking via video link at the TED conference in Vancouver -- two days after the agency's arch-nemesis, Edward Snowden, did the same -- Ledgett acknowledged that the NSA deserves criticism for shocking the world with the extent of its data collection programs, but insisted the programs themselves are necessary and operate under adequate controls.
Basically, he said, if the NSA had done a better job of explaining itself earlier, Snowden's revelations wouldn't have been nearly so problematic.
"There are things that we need to be transparent about, our authorities, our oversight," he said. "We at NSA have not done a good enough job at that, and I think that's why this has been so sensational in the media.
Ledgett even went so far as to assert that "President Madison would be proud" of the way Constitutional checks and balances have governed the NSA's operations. "I think there's an amazing arrogance to the idea that [Snowden] knows better than the framers of the Constitution how the government should be designed to work in terms of separation of powers," he said. "That's extremely arrogant on his part."
NSA deputy director Richard Ledgett speaking via teleconference at the TED conference. Photo credit:... [+]
Ledgett repeatedly challenged assertions made by Snowden in his Tuesday appearance, saying he didn't consider the former NSA contractor a true whistleblower and accusing him of peddling "half-truths and distortions."
Snowden insisted that he filtered his leaks through journalists specifically because he hoped their discretion would screen out any information that might harm national security or put specific American or allied intelligence operatives in danger. Ledgett said that safeguard failed.
"The actions that he took were inappropriate because of the fact that he put people's lives at risk in the long run," he said. "The capabilities [of the NSA] are applied in very discreet, measured, controlled ways. Unconstrained disclosure of those capabilities means that as adversaries see them, they move away and say, 'Hey, I might be vulnerable to that.' We've seen that. The net effect is our people who are overseas...are at greater risk because we don't see the threats that are coming their way."
Ledgett also accused Snowden of misrepresenting the character of the NSA's programs and falsely suggesting that they compromise the private communications of law-abiding citizens. (In his own talk, Snowden raised the specter of the agency trawling Amazon book purchases to identify possible suspects.)
"We don't sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people," Ledgett said. "If you're not connected to one of those intelligence targets, you're not of interest to us."
If the NSA has tapped into the data streams of Google, Yahoo and other big internet companies, its because terrorists and cybercriminals use those services just as avidly as everyone else -- including NSA employees.
"We eat our own dogfood," he said. "If we could make it so that all the bad guys used one corner of the internet, we'd have a domain, badguy.com. That would be awesome and we could just concentrate all our efforts there."
