NSA is wrong, not evil

My twitter feed has gotten this one-sided view of the NSA. Soon, they’ll be claiming the NSA practices witchcraft and eats babies, because, as everyone knows, the NSA is evil. In truth, the NSA is not evil, just wrong. I point this out because there are two sides to every story. The better we understand the NSA’s point of view, the better we can fight them. Power corrupts: understanding this from their point of view will teach us how this happens.

In this post, I describe my first hand experiences dealing with the NSA, and what I understand from their point of view. I don't like the NSA, as you can tell from my other posts, but at the same time, I hate this "us vs. them" attitude that just because we oppose them, that we can impute all sorts of evil untrue attributes onto them.

The highest priority at the NSA is avoiding infringing on citizen’s rights. I know none of you will believe me, but it’s true. I’m regularly astonished by the degree to which they bend over backwards to protect American’s privacy. The more you delve in the phone metadata and PRISM details, the more you’ll find these extreme measures the NSA takes to avoid infringing on the privacy of Americans.

Many claim the NSA is just another agency, and thus will share the same faults found in agencies like the IRS, which recently targeted people based on their political beliefs. This is a terribly wrong comparison. The IRS hires people with high-school diplomas, the NSA hires Ph.D.s with military service. If anybody at the NSA used their position to further their political party, their fellow employees would be the first to point that out, and stop them.

The testimony given by NSA leaders, such as Keith Alexander and James Clapper, is not really a lie. Consider this famous testimony from Clapper during a hearing on March 12, 2013:

Senator Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
James Clapper: “No, sir.”

Yet, as the June 5 story from the Guardian revealed, the NSA is collecting everybody’s phone records. Isn’t that obvious that Clapper is lying?

Maybe. The problem is more self-deception than lying before congress. Consider the hypothetical case where somebody goes to the NSA and asks for all records associated with person by name, such as “Robert Clayton Dean”. Sure, the NSA has the phone records, but they aren’t associated with a name. The NSA has the data in theory, but they can't get it in practice. Moreover, that database is largely inaccessible, controlled by the courts rather than the NSA. Even if the head of the NSA or the President himself demanded it, they would not be able to get those records without permission from the courts.

Clapper knows he’s being evasive, but he believes it’s the sort of evasion that is acceptable in politics. Because the NSA doesn’t have access to the data the way people imagine, he believes he’s telling the “truth” when answering that question. He deceives himself about the extent to which that surveillance endangers Americans. He's absolutely wrong, but I'm not sure how evil he is.

The lesson here is how power corrupts. Instead of arguing how Clapper lies and replacing him with yet-another-politicians, we should understand how this power corrupts all politicians in his position.

The rank and file of the NSA is not your enemy. They carry out the mission that politicians give them, and do not cross the line with an almost religious fervor. It’s the politicians who have moved that line. It’s every politician who voted to extend the Patriot Act and empower the FISA court that you have to fight. That doesn’t mean the NSA people are the good guys, it’s just that they aren’t the bad guys that you think they are.