Eavesdropping, Confirmations, and the War on Terror

The Washington Post reports that a federal judge rejected the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF)request to release documents it claims show AT&T helped the NSA obtain information on phone calls made within US borders.

documents may contain AT&T trade secrets. The judge also ruled against an AT&T request to have the privacy group, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, return the documents to the company on the grounds that they were stolen.

The case has helped put AT&T, the largest U.S. telephone company, at the center of the controversy over the NSA domestic surveillance program. Even if the documents remain secret and the suit is thrown out, the case ties AT&T to a program that has troubled politicians and privacy groups, said Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy.

This article says that this is a victory for the EFF because the documents may be released at a later date. The documents will remain sealed as AT&T and the EFF "work out the terms of a protective order concerning the documents." It might be a victory for the EFF, but releasing details of classified information on intel gathering programs is certainly not in the interests of the nation as a whole.

Meanwhile, General Michael Hayden has begun confirmation hearings. Some of his comments can be found here. On leaks, he notes:

I mean, you can actually see this -- and now I'm speaking globally, about disclosures of our tactics, techniques, procedures, sources and methods.

It's almost Darwinian. The more we put out there, the more we're going to kill and capture dumb terrorists... [not the smart ones, who will know how to avoid it.]

He also denounces the media coverage of the agency.

"Respectfully, senators, I believe that the American intelligence business has too much become the football in American political discourse," Hayden told the committee in his opening statement. He said the intelligence community and the CIA in recent years "have taken an inordinate number of hits -- some of them fair, many of them not."

While there have been failures, there have also been "many great successes," he said, and he pledged to keep Congress informed of lessons learned.

"But I also believe it's time to move past what seems to me to be an endless picking apart of the archaeology of every past intelligence success or failure," Hayden said. "CIA officers . . . deserve recognition of their efforts and they also deserve not to have every action analyzed, second-guessed and criticized on the front pages of the morning paper."

Although accountability is important, he said, the "CIA needs to get out of the news as source or subject and focus on protecting the American people by acquiring secrets and providing high-quality all-source analysis."