Reporting on Government Surveillance: Q&A - Barton Gellman '82

Both Princeton alums — Robert Deitz *72 and Michael Mantyla ’93, both from the intelligence community — who claim that Edward Snowden had legal channels he could have pursued to report wrongdoing in the National Security Agency (Inbox, March 5) are right. There are channels. But this system is rigged to the hilt to ensure no whistle-blower ever gets a fair trial.

To cite just one example, former NSA executive Thomas Drake disclosed massive fraud, waste, and abuse in NSA surveillance programs. He was charged with espionage. 1) He was not allowed to defend himself in open court before a jury. 2) He had to spend $100,000 on legal fees even before pretrial proceedings began. He had to take out a second mortgage on his house and emptied his retirement account to pay for subsequent fees. 3) The government files things in secret, under seal that the defendant is not allowed access to. 4) The law precluded Drake from arguing that any information was classified improperly. 5) During response filings, his attorney was not allowed a laptop or phone and was not even allowed to take notes. 

Anyone who’s had the experience of trying to fight city hall at any level, much less at this high government level, knows that these repeated choruses of “Snowden should have gone through channels” are utter nonsense.

The system does not tolerate whistle-blowers. It chews them up, spits them out, and ruins their lives. Snowden obviously knew this. He knew that unless he did something, no one would say anything, and the abuses would continue and grow.

Reading the recent letters excoriating Bart Gellman ’82 (Q&A, Jan. 8), I am reminded of the wisdom of James Madison 1771 (Federalist 51): “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

I am sure the American security officials believe their measures are necessary to protect us from terrorists, even though to keep us safe they cannot tell us how or why. But Gellman and his source, Edward Snowden, show us that we suffer a secret surveillance network answering to secret (lax) protocols nominally enforced by secret (complacent) courts that moreover are secretly ignored (spying on love interests, etc.). Secret internal controls on government do not work; they have never worked. The maligned eavesdroppers of the East German Stasi kept their country safe from terrorists and insurrectionists, but I choose to live in the United States, and I would like open, published, enforced limits on government’s right to snoop on my phone calls without a warrant.

Robert L. Deitz and Michael Mantyla say Edward Snowden should have gone to his agency’s inspector general. Have inspectors general ever taken the whistle-blowers’ side against the agencies that pay their salaries?

Both writers believe we are menaced by sinister forces that would do us ill. But we have learned again and again that people everywhere are most hurt by their leaders, ours included. Driven by vanity and corrupted by power, they scheme with and against each other in secret until wars result. Perhaps by publishing their plans, present and future Snowdens may stop the progression from planning to war.

As a federal government employee with almost 20 years of service in both the law-enforcement and intelligence communities, I would note that within government, there are multiple mechanisms to report abuses of power, from each agency’s office of inspector general to reporting directly to the congressional oversight committees. Edward Snowden very easily could have availed himself of these mechanisms, but made the choice to violate federal law and illegally disclose classified material.

All federal employees take an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Post 9/11, this oath has become especially salient for those who have the job of protecting the United States from future attacks in the homeland and elsewhere. Analysts work around the clock using any and all tools to prevent this from happening. The analysts I know would never use the extensive intelligence-collection tools at their disposal for personal or political gain. Any organization occasionally will have individuals who violate the oath, and federal agencies must develop the safeguards to identify these individuals and take swift and immediate action when warranted.

The intelligence community, by its nature, must remain clandestine to effectively provide U.S. policy makers with the information they need to protect us. Our government was founded on checks and balances, and all three branches of government currently play an active part in intelligence oversight. Contrary to Professor Edward Felten’s prerogative that “we” should make choices about the appropriateness of government surveillance programs, I believe that spreading sunshine in the black world of intelligence collection would do nothing more than give our adversaries the upper hand in future terrorist operational planning.

As I read the features on privacy in the Jan. 8 edition, all I could think about was my late roommate, Bob Capuano ’73, working diligently on his junior paper for his fall Woodrow Wilson School conference on “The Boundaries of Privacy in American Society.” Bob’s paper, along with those of classmates Steve Glauberman, Eric Vinson, Marilyn Green, Rich Nenno, Alex Hartnett, Betsy Freeman, Michael Theodore, Bob Wolf, and Mark Stevens, became the basis for the Alito Princeton Privacy Report.

This report was named after the senior, Sam Alito ’72, who chaired the conference and later became a Supreme Court justice. I am very proud of my classmates for being way ahead of their time in analyzing issues such as “Federal Agencies Involved in Domestic Surveillance” and “Technology and the Control of Stored Data.” Pretty heady work for a bunch of 20-year-olds in 1971.

With respect to your interview with Bart Gellman ’82 on the Edward Snowden leaks (Q&A, Jan. 8), a couple of points:

First, Gellman seems to have had little concern about publishing information that is classified at the highest level. Why? He claims that he thought through “what the public interest is ... .” Fair enough. But in our political system, the president, who is elected by the people, is charged with determining how and if government information is classified. Bart was not elected by anybody. Moreover, he has few, if any, qualifications for determining what the public interest is. His notional “public” well might conclude that keeping the nation safe is more important than revealing information that is certainly of great interest — to our enemies.

Second, Gellman claims to have “st[uck] to the letter and the spirit of the law ... .” Puhleeze! By his own admission, Snowden committed a number of felonies. Under at least some theories of the law, Gellman was an aider and abettor.

Third, Gellman tries to turn Snowden into a folk hero because he “believed he was witnessing an out-of-control surveillance state.” Had Snowden really felt that way, there were numerous outlets, wholly legal, that would have given his views a full and sympathetic airing: the National Security Agency and Defense Department inspectors general, the Department of Justice, the Hill intel committees, and the U.S. attorney’s office. But they would not have afforded him what he apparently desperately wants: the ego stroke that going public provides. It is worth at least asking the question whether an honorable person would violate an oath of office to keep secrets that have been entrusted to him.

Finally, to be sure, “transparency serves the public good” in many contexts. But transparency with respect to the conduct of intelligence may be incredibly costly. It might have been worthwhile for your interviewer to ask Gellman what price he is willing to pay for telling our adversaries the sources and methods we employ for obtaining intelligence.