Paragraph 40, below, is about as bald a statement as an NSA director could make, saying he needs help to decide what he should be allowed to wiretap about US persons. We, the privacy community, did not respond. We were a bit surprised, but that was about the extent of the support we offered. Of course, we were living in a time where being anti-paranoia or anti-war or anti-president was considered treasonous by the president, and by most of the people who elected him, and many who worked for him. And we were living in the lost time when we expected the government to follow clearly written laws, until such time as they were rewritten. And nobody had ever gotten NSA to stop doing ANYTHING corrupt, without either suing them, beating them in the legislature, or shining some bright sunlight on one of their secrets -- in some cases it took all three. The door of the NSA Director's office has never been open for privacy activists to come in and review their secret programs for sanity and constitutionality, though it should be. His challenge to the NSA work force -- "to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again" -- is as bogus as TSA's "We're upholding the right to travel by making travel feel safe, even while we keep innocent YOU off the plane". It begs the question -- who do we need to feel safe FROM? Governments are historically thousands of times as likely to injure you than 'terrorists'. Do you feel safe from Bush and NSA and TSA today? Are you really sure your government isn't tapping and tracing you, building databases about who you call and who you travel with, with or without a warrant from some rubber stamp court? Indeed, what good would it have done if the whole privacy and crypto community had risen up to say, "You should follow the law!"? Bush was intent on breaking it in secret ANYWAY, and rather than exposing his treason, NSA followed his orders. Mr. Hayden did not pose the question as, "We are now wiretapping the foreign communications of US persons without warrants, in violation of the FISA; do you think this is OK?", though he was doing so at the time he made this speech. But that's the question that he and his successor will have to face civil and criminal charges over. http://www.nsa.gov/releases/relea00072.html "Statement for the record by Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, USAF, Director, National Security Agency... 17 October 2002" ... 2. We know our responsibilities for American freedom and security at NSA. Our workforce takes the events of September 11, 2001 very personally. By the very nature of their work, our people deeply internalize their mission. This is personal. ... 25. The final issue - what have we done in response - will allow me to give some specifics although I may be somewhat limited by the demands of classification. I will use some of the terms that Congress has used with us over the past year. 26. It was heartening, for example, to hear Congress echo the phrase of our SIGINT Director, Maureen Baginski, in the belief that we need to be "hunters rather than gatherers." She believed and implemented this strategy well before September 11th, and then she applied it with a vengeance to al-Qa'ida after the attacks. ... 36. There is a certain irony here. This is one of the few times in the history of my Agency that the Director has testified in open session about operational matters. The first was in the mid 1970s when one of my predecessors sat here nearly mute while being grilled by members of Congress for intruding upon the privacy rights of the American people. Largely as a result of those hearings, NSA is governed today by various executive orders and laws and these legal restrictions are drilled into NSA employees and enforced through oversight by all three branches of government. 37. The second open session was a little over two years ago and I was the Director at that time. During that session the House intelligence committee asked me a series of questions with a single unifying theme: How could I assure them that I was safeguarding the privacy rights of those protected by the U.S. constitution and U.S. law? During that session I even said - without exaggeration on my part or complaint on yours - that if Usama bin Laden crossed the bridge from Niagara Falls, Ontario to Niagara Falls, New York, U.S. law would give him certain protections that I would have to accommodate in the conduct of my mission. And now the third open session for the Director of NSA: I am here explaining what my Agency did or did not know with regard to 19 hijackers who were in this country legally. 38. When I spoke with our workforce shortly after the September 11th attacks, I told them that free people always had to decide where to draw the line between their liberty and their security, and I noted that the attacks would almost certainly push us as a nation more toward security. I then gave the NSA workforce a challenge: We were going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again. 39. Let me close by telling you what I hope to get out of the national dialogue that these committees are fostering. I am not really helped by being reminded that I need more Arabic linguists or by someone second-guessing an obscure intercept sitting in our files that may make more sense today than it did two years ago. What I really need you to do is to talk to your constituents and find out where the American people want that line between security and liberty to be. 40. In the context of NSA's mission, where do we draw the line between the government's need for CT information about people in the United States and the privacy interests of people located in the United States? Practically speaking, this line-drawing affects the focus of NSA's activities (foreign versus domestic), the standard under which surveillances are conducted (probable cause versus reasonable suspicion, for example), the type of data NSA is permitted to collect and how, and the rules under which NSA retains and disseminates information about U.S. persons. 41. These are serious issues that the country addressed, and resolved to its satisfaction, once before in the mid-1970's. In light of the events of September 11th, it is appropriate that we, as a country, readdress them. We need to get it right. We have to find the right balance between protecting our security and protecting our liberty. If we fail in this effort by drawing the line in the wrong place, that is, overly favoring liberty or security, then the terrorists win and liberty loses in either case. 42. Thank you. I look forward to the committees' questions. --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo@metzdowd.com ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]