Tomorrow, President Bush will likely announce that General Michael V. Hayden will replace Porter Goss as head of the C.I.A. This has been controversial, particularly amongst Republicans, who fear that the nomination will effectively subordinate the C.I.A. to the Pentagon. Certainly suggesting that an active-duty military officer should head a civilian agency raises a few eyebrows, particularly at a time when the Secretary of Defense has come under fire.
On Friday, I pointed out that somebody blew the call before the war about the WMD’s, resulting in our being in Iraq and in a quasi-permanent state of quasi-war. This is not the sort of call that gets blown by a single person. Assuming good faith on the part of our leaders, this blown call was the result of incompetence in, at minimum, the intelligence sphere. When there is incompetence, the appropriate thing for executive leaders to do is attempt to remedy the incompetence — by changing personnel if need be. Now, Porter Goss is no longer head of the C.I.A. because of a political struggle with John Negroponte, but the fact of the matter is that the bulk of our intelligence comes from the C.I.A. and we know something went wrong there. Those in the know are better-positioned than the public to understand what and why that was.
The C.I.A. has been run, in the past, by military officers; its first four directors were all active-duty general officers. These officers were, like General Hayden is now, officers who have substantial intelligence backgrounds as well as the personal confidence of the President. The situation today isn’t much different from that, as far as I can see. So there is precedent for an appointment of this nature.
It appears, furthermore, that General Hayden’s political loyalty runs to John Negroponte, not Donald Rumsfeld. Since Negroponte is the National Intelligence Director, the “spy czar,” if you will, that does not strike me as a bad thing. Future Presidents will name new CIA directors and new National Intelligence Directors, and they will do so for their own political reasons — just as the current President is.
So politically, I think Hayden is well within the realm of acceptable choices to lead the C.I.A. Politically, it is an acceptable choice; I see nothing wrong with consolidating the power of the National Intelligence Director over intelligence-gathering operations and I am not terribly concerned that an active-duty military officer at the helm of the C.I.A. will somehow make that agency subordinate to the defense department or otherwise alter its civilian character. These concerns by Congressional Republicans are all inconsequential, and to that extent, I will suggest that the President gets to pick who he wants to run agencies because he’s the President and that is that.
Now, with that said, General Hayden has at best a poor understanding of the Fourth Amendment, and appears to have been a strong proponent of the warrantless wiretapping program of which I have been such a critic. This is the issue worthy of Congressional inquiry. It is not the only issue with which Congress should be concerned, to be sure. There are administrative matters, there is the question of how data analysis can be improved and what assets are needed, comparing “human intelligence” to the clean data we get from satellites and wiretaps, and a myriad of other intelligence and administrative issues.
But I do think it is important for Congress to challenge General Hayden on what role he sees for the C.I.A. in detecting terrorist activity that may be occuring in whole or in part within the borders of the U.S.A., and if so, what the role of the judicial branch of government may or may not be. At minimum, I would expect Congress to demand that General Hayden indicate that he intends to use the FISA process to provide for minimal judicial review of intelligence-gathering activities that may affect U.S. citizens or take place within the borders of the country. I’ve said it before, and I still mean it: it’s just not too much to ask.
==Narus ST-6400 and NarusInsight by Narus Ltd.==Under Gen. Michael V. Hayden the NSA has forced tecom companies to implement massive domestic spying hardware. Even though Gen. Hayden has said at the National Press Club that “As the director, I was the one responsible to ensure that this program was limited in its scope and disciplined in its application.” The NarusInsight is one type of domestic spaying hardware. Capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second in real-time. This means the NarusInsight can monitor an OC-192 in realtime. For reference 10 billion bits is 10 million Kbts, divide that by the average DSL user witch is 256 Kbts (10000000/256) you get monitoring of 39062.5 DSL lines in realtime for every piece of hardware. After data capture Narus softeware can replay data. What does this mean well acrodding too Narus website “Capabilities include playback of streaming media (for example, VoIP), rendering of Web pages, examination of e-mails and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols.” Think of it as Tivo for the internet able to replay 39000 US DSL users activity in realtime for every piece of hardware.References: Narus Ltd http://narus.com, NATIONAL PRESS CLUB Transcript: http://www.globalsecurity.org/intell/library/news/2006/intell-060123-dni01.htm http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1564046/postsHoover's company factsheet: http://www.hoovers.com/narus/–ID__60701–/free-co-factsheet.xhtmlReport by bewert: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/8/14724/28476EFF case against AT&T http://www.eff.org/legal/cases/att/att_complaint_amended.pdfAll websits have been saved to preserve history.
While most readers — and I — are not familiar with a lot of this jargon, it’s safe to assume that the technology produced under Gen. Hayden’s tenure at the NSA is pretty sophisticated stuff.Good.I want the NSA to have sophisticated equipment to monitor electronic communications. I want the government to have the best, most sophisticated tools in existence to gather intelligence. It is how these tools are used, and when they are used on U.S. citizens without warrants, that causes me concern. I’ve no qualms whatsoever about monitoring the electronic communications of people who are not protected by the U.S. Constitution.As for “forcing” telecom companies to produce this stuff, I am pretty confident that they were well-compensated for their efforts. There are conditions for their use of public resources like NASA’s satellite-launching capability and the public’s airwaves, and cooperation with intelligence services is one of those things.So I’m not particularly bothered by this news.