The Snowden affair is indeed a story of secrecy and deception—but not on the side of the intelligence agencies. Far too little attention has been paid to the political agendas of the Snowdenistas. They cloak their beliefs in the language of privacy rights, civil liberties and digital freedoms. But the ardent Snowdenistas part company with most of their fellow citizens over the issue of whether an elected, law-governed government has the right to keep and defend its secrets. Some of them dislike all intelligence and security agencies on principle. By international standards, American scrutiny of its intelligence and security agencies is unusually detailed and robust. Yet anti-Americanism seems to blind the Snowdenistas to this vital point.
The NSA, GCHQ and other agencies, their political masters and their judicial and legislative overseers have undoubtedly made mistakes. Far too much is classified, at far too high a level. Far too many people have security clearances. The administration of these clearances has become an industry, rife with cronyism, bureaucracy and incompetence. If one proceeds on the basis that anything remotely useful to the enemy should be a secret, then everything ends up classified and nothing is really secure. It is far better to classify selectively and effectively. ‘Contractorisation’, as Americans term it, may save money and increase flexibility, but it also invites abuse, carelessness and leaks. It is better to have a small, lean and secure intelligence organisation, entirely in the public sector, than a large public-private hybrid that leaks.
The single biggest lesson of the whole Snowden fiasco is that America’s own sloppiness made it vulnerable: whether to misguided whistleblowers, saboteurs or foreign spies is secondary. The intelligence agencies and their political and judicial overseers also need to do a much better job of explaining what they do and why. The best defence against a Snowden-style leak is a broad national consensus that the agencies are to be trusted and that the measures they take are necessary. Sweden is exemplary in this respect.
It is important not to concentrate the defence case too narrowly on terrorism. That is a grave threat, but not the only one. Invoking the attacks of September 11th 2001 as justification for everything the NSA does can be a powerful defence, but it wears out with over-use. It invites pointed questions, like how many terrorists did you catch by trawling meta-data? The answers may be elusive. It is much better to justify intelligence operations on a broad, prudential basis. A country like America faces a lot of threats and they are constantly changing. Good intelligence capabilities provide a well-stocked tool-kit for dealing with them. The traditional reluctance to discuss sources and methods, for fear of rendering them useless in future, is well founded. But in an atmosphere of suspicion, it is not wholly sustainable. Grim silence is not going to restore public trust. It may be necessary to sacrifice some degree of secrecy about past operations in order to win the backing needed for future ones.
Dissent within the espionage world needs to be better managed. Intelligence agencies are meant to be good at handling people. If your internal culture is strong and expert enough to recruit and run agents, it should be capable of managing your own staff too. If problems cannot be dealt with, the individual concerned must be smoothly eased into other employment. Former intelligence officers who express their discontent publicly do not automatically deserve to be hounded. To be sure, some self-proclaimed whistleblowers have ended their careers with well-deserved disciplinary sanctions. Others seem to have gone slightly mad. But the literal-minded and sometimes vindictive-seeming approach of prosecutors and investigators stokes the mistaken impression that the intelligence agencies are out of control and persecute dissidents.
The oversight of the intelligence agencies needs to change. FISA court judges should be appointed by the whole Supreme Court, not just by the chief justice. The court’s work is necessarily secret, so it must have the broadest possible political support. It also needs a public defender or privacy advocate, with a high security clearance, to challenge the agencies’ contentions in individual cases, in the adversarial tradition of American justice. Senior officials must be seen to take responsibility for their mistakes. General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, should have resigned as soon as the scale of the breach became apparent. The organisation in which this happened—too big, too commercial, too secretive, too vulnerable—was his creation. If this is indeed, as officials plausibly maintain, the worst intelligence disaster in American history, someone must be seen to take personal responsibility. General Clapper too should resign, for having misled Congress, however inadvertently. The strongest argument in rebutting Snowden’s claims is that the existing system already works and that its shortcomings are not so grave that they require huge breaches of secrecy to galvanise reform. That contention will be more widely accepted if individuals who break the rules then visibly take the consequences.
Finally, it is tempting to see intelligence failures in a tidy, narrow context: a failure of procedure here, a flawed personality there. But they usually reflect broader problems: an agency or a country which cannot attract the necessary loyalty. From this point of view, the Snowden fiasco exemplifies not only problems inside America, but also in its relations with the rest of the world. Spying on allies is a mere irritant when those alliances are strong. When they are weak, it becomes a source of incendiary rows. In Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Germany and many other countries, America no longer enjoys the image it once had. Relationships have decayed; trust has ebbed. This is not a new problem. George W Bush’s administration made a bonfire of American soft power with its botched war in Iraq. In different ways, the Obama administration’s remote, chilly and arrogant style has compounded the damage.
The rush of secret material into the public realm has distracted opinion from the real issues: motives, benefits and damage. In the best case, Snowden is a misguided whistleblower and his allies are merely reckless and naïve. By whatever mixture of luck and skill they have successfully safeguarded the most damaging and sensitive material and it will never reach our enemies. The public debate is better informed. He has delivered, perhaps, some salutary shocks.
If so, all that comes at a great cost. We have lost capabilities built up with great expenditure of time, money and skill. Our alliances are strained and our standing in the world has suffered. The price is too high.
The nightmare is that the truth is far worse: Snowden is a pawn in a hostile and continuing intelligence and information-warfare operation, with allthe extra damage which that implies. Either way, Snowden’s actions are no cause for comfort, let alone celebration.
About the Author
Edward Lucas is a senior editor at the Economist. A former foreign correspondent with 30 years’ experience in Russian and east European affairs, he is the author of, among other publications, Deception (2011), which deals with east-west espionage, and The New Cold War (2008), which gave warning of the threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He is a non-resident fellow at CEPA, a think-tank in Washington, DC. He lives in London and is married to the writer Cristina Odone. He tweets as @edwardlucas.
The views expressed in this book are his alone.