#Snowden: Last Word For Today, and It's For You, DU...

[jmowreader]

148. I can deal with two things at once

Having actually been a part of the national security state, my perspective is a bit different from yours.

From 1982 through 1994 I was in Army Intelligence. My first job was Signal Security Specialist. You would know it better as a wiretapper; we monitored DoD-owned phones and radios listening for security leaks. Then I became a Signals Intelligence Analyst and did...well, analysis. In regards to this Prism stuff, let's say that but for the grace of god go I.

There is a regulation called United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18. It was written right after Watergate, when they found out the Army Security Agency was spying on Americans.(The Army discharged everyone involved, pulled their clearances so they couldn't work in the intelligence apparatus again, and rolled all its MI forces into a new organization called the Intelligence and Security Command, led by the people who uncovered this in the first place) It's classified SECRET Handle Via COMINT Channels Only (yes, that is an actual classification--the paragraph marking is S-HVCCO) but you can feed "USSID 18" into your search bar and read it right now. It is the very first thing they teach you in MI school, and there is an annual requirement for every SIGINTer to receive no less than one hour's training on this directive. What USSID 18 says, is the United States SIGINT System is not allowed to spy on Americans.

When we learned Bush was spying on Americans I said they needed to stop doing this shit right now. There were other indications the US was spying on Americans and every time I said they needed to stop doing this shit right now. And when this came out I said the same thing. Not only is it totally invasive to Americans' privacy, it doesn't even work. The Dick can run around all day talking about how this coulda prevented 9/11 and Fort Meade can talk about how they stopped 30 plots with this, and I say you could have gotten just as far, or farther, with non-USSID 18-violating collection methods. For instance, where the hell was the government when FlightSafety International reported there were foreign nationals who wanted to learn to fly airliners but not to land them?

Furthermore, I would hazard a guess that every old-school USSID 18-believing SIGINTer is aghast at this, just as we were when the warrantless wiretapping news hit. Simply put, You Don't Do This. And it needs to stop. There is no reason for Americans to spy on Americans.

While we're at it, we need to end the drug war and we need to amend the Constitution to put the words "All persons covered by this Constitution have the right to privacy" because your modern conservative, who can't read, can't figure out that "secure in your papers and personal effects" is a grant of the right to privacy.

At the same time, I wonder what else Snowden walked out of the SCIFs he worked for. It is thoroughly possible that he took this data and released it to a journalist (we'll be charitable) in hopes that the resulting damage control will cause NSA's Special Security Office not to notice Snowden also walked out with information useful (and salable) to the Chinese, the North Koreans or a terror group. He fled to a communist country for a reason; if he wanted to go somewhere that values free speech he picked a curious place.

Having said all these things, I must wonder if Americans truly care about privacy anymore. Some of the people who are loudest on the anti-NSA thing are very prolific Facebook posters. Yes, I know you choose to put things on Facebook but some of the things people choose to post! Any decent foreign agent could piece together a very revealing portrait of this country simply by tapping into Zuckerberg's ad-serving routine or into Google AdSense.

Set that aside for now and return to my assertions:

Assertion One: America needs to stop spying on Americans.
Assertion Two: America's intelligence apparatus needs to quit letting secrets walk out the door in its agents' pockets. We won the Cold War with computers that used removable storage you couldn't conceal in a pocket; at the very least go back to PS/2 keyboards and mice, seal the USB ports with hotmelt glue to preclude the use of thumb drives, and prohibit carrying CDs into secure areas...remember, Bradley Manning got his data out by writing Lady Gaga's name on a blank CD and carrying it into the SCIF.