Terrorism is a bigger problem than government overreach, the former head of the National Security Agency said on Tuesday.
“The problem we have is that our security structures and our security law and policies are all designed to protect us against a malevolent state power,” retired Gen. Michael Hayden said at a luncheon hosted by the American Bar Association. “Most of the things that can go bump in the night and affect your safety and mine are not the product of a malevolent state power. They are more or less the byproduct of state failure.”
Hayden, a retired four-star Air Force general, is also former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, serving primarily under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
Hayden cited presidential contender Carly Fiorina, who he appointed in 2007 to chair the External Advisory Board for the CIA. He said he asked her to look at whether America would be able to “conduct espionage” in the future “inside a broader political culture that every day demands more transparency and more public accountability.”
“Carly looked me in the eye and said, ‘Close call,'” Hayden reported. “In essence, what she was suggesting was that we may have difficulty creating sufficient legitimacy within the American political culture for an activity that I believe to be essential to democracy … but which relies on secrecy for its very success. And Carly’s team came back shrugging their shoulders.”
Hayden suggested that the NSA and other federal agencies were mainly trying to target foreign entities, and that data collection included Americans incidentally. “I have yet to meet a civil libertarian who gave a damn about NSA intercepting the high frequency communications from Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces Headquarters in Moscow going out to [missile] fields,” Hayden said. “We were on those networks trying to pick up keywords of interest, words like ‘launch.'”
Today, Hayden said, the federal government must focus on cellular communication metadata on a widespread basis in order to monitor similar information.
Communications, Hayden said, “co-exist on a single, global, integrated, telecommunications grid with your Gmail. There is no way around that. If you wanted the NSA to do for you what it did in the last century in this century, it had to be on paths in which your protected communications were co-mingled with the communications of legitimate, foreign intelligence targets.”
Hayden, who retired as director of the CIA in 2009, oversaw many of the American surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden in 2013. One of the most controversial was the surveillance of telephone metadata authorized by the Patriot Act, also known as Section 215 authority. That program was reauthorized by the USA Freedom Act in June, but is set to expire permanently in November.
Such data will be preserved by telephone companies, which must provide it at the request of the government. The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act, which the Senate is due to consider within the next couple of months, would provide liability protection to companies for engaging in such sharing. As such, the merits of such data collection, and related privacy provisions, have been elevated to a higher level of scrutiny.
