The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Thursday, May 18, 2006

A Listening Government

The Bush administration's nominee for head of the awesome CIA has informatised a congressional committee that wiretaps on American citizens are perfectly legal, even when a warrant has not been obtained. Well, there's a surprise.

The nominee in question is Michael Hayden, who is a former director of the National Security Agency. "No one has said there has been a targeting decision made that hasn't been well-founded," Hayden said. Given that the NSA is so accountable that almost nobody had heard of it until about ten years ago, it seems likely that no one has said a lot of things. "We have a very strong oversight regime," Hayden said. I'm sure the KGB were strict employers, too.

The NSA, under Michael Hayden, has amassed a database of call records of tens of millions of people. "There is a probable cause standard," Hayden said. "Every targeting is documented." Obviously, this enhances the legality of the process no end. "Clearly the privacy of American citizens is a concern constantly," Hayden said. "We always balance privacy and security." This is certainly reassuring.

Since leaving the NSA, Hayden has served as deputy to the director of intelligence, John Negroponte, whose commitment to democracy and human rights helped make Honduras the paradise it was during the 1980s. Hayden has promised that he will "speak truth to power", doubtless with total and selfless disregard for the wishes of the power that appointed him.

His appointment appears to have come about through some kind of mathematical determinism: "The math was pretty straightforward. I could not not do this," he said. He noted that, in the process of balancing privacy and security, "Targeting decisions are made by people in the US government most knowledgeable about al-Qaida, al-Qaida communications, tactics and procedures." As in the United Kingdom, the useless red tape that results from involving an independent judiciary in the government-citizen interface experience has been efficiently dispensed with.

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