Over the weekend, a conference on surveillance was held by the Chicago chapter of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC). 

The conference examined surveillance, traditional and high-tech, how it intersected amongst federal, state and local levels of government and what had been exposed by former National Security Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden. Restore the Fourth had a representative there to talk about what groups are doing to respond to the surveillance that has been exposed by Snowden. Domestic drones and surveillance cameras in Chicago were addressed as well. 

Kade Crockford of ACLU Massachusetts, Amie Stepanovich of EPIC, Mike German of the ACLU, Adam Schwartz of the ACLU Illinois and others gave presentations. And I delivered a presentation on threats to press freedom posed by surveillance and also produced a video interview with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for the conference. 

Drake recently visited Russia with Justice Department whistleblower Jesselyn Radack, FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley and former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who has been outspoken against the US intelligence community and served under seven US presidents.

We discussed what it was like to meet Snowden, what he considered to be the most glaring dangerous revelations on the surveillance state so far and whether he thought there would be more NSA whistleblowers that would come forward in the future. Some of what we discussed related to James Risen’s recent interview with Snowden.

Below is a video of the interview. There also is a transcript of our discussion.

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KEVIN GOSZTOLA, Firedoglake: What was it like to meet Edward Snowden?

THOMAS DRAKE, NSA Whistleblower:Well, meeting Edward Snowden was quite remarkable. It’s not every day that you get to meet a US whistleblower who has been granted political asylum in another country; in this case, Russia. We spent a number of hours with him talking about a whole range of subjects. He’s truly a remarkable person, very centered, very engaging, has a wicked sense of humor, very up on world events—following everything he can in the United States, the response to all the disclosures.

I think he was concerned early on that the disclosures would not cause much of a ripple let alone a discussion. We assured him based upon what has been going on that is certainly not the case, and he’s certainly quite gratified that we were there to award the Sam Adams Associates Integrity and Intelligence Award.

GOSZTOLA: Based off of what people are getting to read from him because of the excellent James Risen story put out in the past twenty-four hours detailing the way he’s been maligned, accused of being compromised by Russian agents and the sort of allegations made against him about being a bad person when he was at the CIA and violating his authority and then talking about some of what inspired him—Is there anything you would have to say about the content of that? That tracks pretty well with what he was possibly telling you?

DRAKE: No, it tracks with the wide-ranging conversations we had even on a quite personal level. The thing that I’m struck by in terms of those who would malign him is it’s the classic attack on the person. It’s the traditional on the character of a person, particularly a whistleblower, which avoids the substance of what they actually disclosed. But I recognize that’s a classic technique when you don’t want to have to deal with the substance of the disclosures and his are quite extraordinary.

He recognized what had been occurring over the past number of years. He saw what happened to me and others and he knew with what he was what he was witness to it was clearly in the public interest but, how do you get it out in a way that can actually be made available to the public so they can actually make up their own minds about what their government’s been doing in secret behind their backs without their consent? And in this particular case, with all that’s happened and transpired since 9/11, he had to escape the United States to have any hope ensuring that the material could actually get in the right hands for disclosure, through reporters and journalists—and that was in the persons of Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras—and also have any chance of securing or ensuring his own freedom, recognizing that the United States would throw everything to go after him and bring him back.

GOSZTOLA: And, do you have flashbacks? I guess, for people who aren’t terribly familiar with your story, I am not going to rehash it here. There are ways people can go online and read the full story, but, in meeting him, did you have flashbacks to aspects of what happened to you?

DRAKE: The first thing I was very present to is he’s standing on my shoulders and others and also extraordinarily grateful because it had been my hope for the last number of years that other people within the system would also come forward like I did and he certainly did so in rather dramatic fashion with the information and the evidence about how far the United States has gone in violating any number of statutes and laws, even those that are currently on their books and fundamentally as well in the Constitution, the Fourth Amendment—But not just the United States but also the rights of citizens in other countries as well.

One of the challenges that I thought I had seen was would we be able to have the real conversation, debate, that we had never had since 9/11. That certainly has been triggered and then some by his disclosures starting in June.

One of the unique things is he had the courage to actually—and it is unique—to actually disclose himself as the whistleblower. Historically, that’s usually not done. Usually the whistleblower remains anonymous, but I think given the circumstances—

Let me put it this way: I’ve relived the past twelve years as a result of the last four months and I was eye witness to the very beginning stages of the surveillance state as it metastasized shortly after 9/11. And that was during a period in which those secret surveillance programs were started and constructed in the deepest secrecy and then to see they grew from there in leaps and bounds. No one had any public knowledge about these secret surveillance programs and how far they had gone until the Risen/Lichtblau article in 2005 and so seeing James Risen’s name on the masthead underneath the title of his article—You know, I did smile when I read it. I mean, who better to have interviewed Edward Snowden than James Risen especially given his own circumstances in his own case involving Jeffrey Sterling in the Fourth Circuit but also going back to the blockbuster articles that the New York Times published in 2005?

So it’s been quite a period of time for me and yet here we are now having that debate and we’re really having a debate about what kind of country are we, who we are as people, and how do we allow the government to go without our consent in conducting the kind of activities that Edward Snowden has so courageously revealed.

Senator Dianne Feinstein defending the NSA during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing

The disclosures from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden have had the effect of spurring a much-needed debate while at the same time shifting Americans’ views of surveillance programs being operated by the United States government.

Polling has shown—as a result of revelations from documents Snowden handed over to journalists like Glenn Greenwald or Laura Poitras or The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman—Americans decreasingly believe the government is doing a good enough job protecting Americans’ rights and freedoms and is doing a “poor job protecting the right to privacy.”

At the forefront of efforts to limit the political effects of this shift in public opinion is Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California. She has used her status in the Senate as the chair of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee to help the NSA defend programs that have come under scrutiny.

Feinstein had The Wall Street Journal publish an op-ed from her on October 13. In particular, she defended a call records program (which she deceptively maintains is not a surveillance program so she does not have to address concerns about privacy).

The program was revealed in June through a released top secret court order to Verizon demanding the company hand over call detail records on all Americans for collection and storage for up to five years. The collection order is apparently renewed about every three months so the NSA can have the data to search for “relevant” terrorism investigations. However, the collection is not targeted. Little of the data collected relates to illegal activities or behavior, which amounts to a violation of the law that is supposed to govern such collection.

She emphasized the threat of terrorism if the program was discontinued, and, in the spirit of former vice president Dick Cheney, she declared, “If we end this vital program, we only make our nation more vulnerable to another devastating terrorist attack.”

One week later, on October 20, The USA Today has published another op-ed that echoes much of what she said in her WSJ op-ed and furthers her insidious agenda to shield the NSA from having to give up its surveillance powers.

She emphasizes how the program has allegedly helped the NSA “connect the dots,” which she again misleadingly contends was a main failure of intelligence before the September 11th attacks.

Feinstein suggests, “The NSA must be able to conduct these queries quickly, without regard to which phone carrier a terrorist or conspirator uses. And the records must be available for a few years — longer than phone companies need them for billing purposes.”

Only a “strictly limited number of NSA analysts (among the thousands of professionals at the agency) may search the phone records database and only after articulating a specific reason that must be approved by a senior official,” she adds. “Those decisions are reviewed regularly by the Justice Department, Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, which imposes strict privacy protections.”

Notably, a change in her defense of the NSA can be detected. She claims, “Since its inception, this program has played a role in stopping roughly a dozen terror plots and identifying terrorism supporters in the US.” However, in her prior op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, she wrote:

…[T]he call-records database and other NSA programs have aided efforts by US intelligence agencies to disrupt terrorism in the US approximately a dozen times in recent years, according to the NSA. This summer, the agency disclosed that 54 terrorist events have been interrupted—including plots stopped and arrests made for support to terrorism. Thirteen events were in the US homeland and nine involved US persons or facilities overseas. Twenty-five were in Europe, five in Africa and 11 in Asia… [emphasis added]

Feinstein did not mention “54 terrorist events” in her USA Today op-ed. Instead, she suggested a “dozen terror plots” have been stopped because of the call records program.

At a glance, that would be consistent with what she said in her Wall Street Journal op-ed but notice she attributes the disruption of these “dozen” plots to the “call-records database and other NSA programs.”

It does not really matter if these unnamed programs did help or not. NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander himself admitted in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that only one to two plots had been disrupted specifically because the NSA was able to search collected call records.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy said during this hearing, “The American people are getting left with an inaccurate impression of the effectiveness of the NSA programs.” He added, “We’re talking about massive, massive collection. We’re told we have to do that to protect us.” But, if statistics are “not accurate,” the numbers are not credible to the committee’s chairman, Congress or the country.

A recent post on my blog, Forbes: State Department Number Three Dream Employer, about how popular working for the State Department is among people who have never actually worked for the State Department, merited a follow-on. Here it is.

Daniel Garrett was a political officer at the U.S. Embassy in Japan 2008-2010. The State Department decided he just wasn’t their kind of fellow, and let him go. I have never met Dan, but his farewell to the Department of State and his advice to Japan bear quoting at length. People considering a career in government service should also consider the soul-based price they’ll pay.

Dan, if you’re out there, look me up. I want to shake your hand and buy you a beer. You dodged a bullet, and you should be proud that State pushed you out. Here’s what Dan said:

I used to walk from the US Embassy over to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If the message I was to deliver was one I didn’t agree with, I used to walk a little slower, wondering if I was selling my soul for a diplomatic passport. Once, for example, I was asked to deliver a demarche about the US position on cluster munitions (basically that the new generation of these weapons was much safer). Japan, of course, has signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and the US has not. These horribly indiscriminate weapons (new generation or not) are rightfully banned. For Japan’s signature though to have any real meaning, it cannot allow its major defense ally to store them in Japan: to do so is to be complicit. The US position (as it is with landmines) is wrong and I apologize to the people of Japan for pretending otherwise.

Once I was asked to deliver a demarche asking that Japan not support a UN resolution calling for research into the health effects of depleted uranium. As the children stillborn, or born deformed in Fallujah and elsewhere testify, depleted uranium weapons pose a horrible health risk even after their initial explosive destructiveness. The US position is wrong and I apologize to the people of Japan for pretending otherwise.

Once I was asked to deliver a demarche to the government of Japan asking them not to vote in the U.N. Human Rights Council to accept the Goldstone report from the UN fact-finding mission to the Gaza conflict. Had this report been written by a US State Department Human Rights Officer (as I was) about a country that wasn’t a US ally, it would have been widely praised by the Secretary of State. The US position was wrong and I apologize to the people of Japan for pretending otherwise.

Once, as a Human Rights Officer, I was approached by a Japanese group, the Victims of the Red Purge, asking that I deliver a letter to President Obama, asking for an official apology for this US occupation-instigated action that cost so many innocent Japanese their jobs and dignity. I wrote a cable which included their letter, to be delivered to Washington with the recommendation that the US move past this mistaken cold war overreaction and issue a formal apology. The Embassy however overruled my recommendation. In fact, US intervention in the domestic affairs of Japan to insure it had a loyal anti-communist ally, driven largely by a hysteric level of anti-communist demagoguery in US domestic politics, resulted in a profound warping of Japanese democracy, a warping which has persisted for a very long time. The US position is wrong and I apologize to the people of Japan for not being successful in obtaining both an apology and a formal statement that during the Cold War, while the US posed as a champion of freedom, and in some cases may have actually been so, in far, far too many countries and locales, it was deeply and criminally complicit in the suppression of many peoples who wanted that freedom, but were so unfortunate as to be under regimes that touted their anti-communist credentials.

In my own defense, I did try to raise my concerns in various venues. I sent two Dissent Channel cables on climate change, and still recall with a smile the day in the Ambassador’s mahogany-paneled conference room sitting at his magnificently long table across from a solid line of sparkling medal-bedecked military officers when, following a presentation on anti-missile defense, I pointed out that numerous studies (including from our own Congressional Budget Office) have determined that anti-missile defenses don’t work and it seemed to me that we were doing little more than making Raytheon and other corporations and consultants, rich. Ah, the wonderful awkwardness of that moment as if one could almost palpably hear the air escaping from so many punctured pompous balloons.

And this is where I now ask the people of Japan for help. My country is no longer the country I once knew, a country moving at least in the direction of providing opportunity for all, regardless of income. The tendency to paranoia and international law-breaking was always there, at a low fever, in clandestine and semi-clandestine actions around the world, driven by visions of American exceptionalism pandered onto an all too naïve public. Though I like to believe that there was the intention at least to make the world a better place, in fact these actions were frankly not just frequently amateurish and inept, they resulted in the suffering and death of many. Nor it seems, have any of the lessons been learnt.

Since 9/11, the United States has adopted a national security policy that can most charitably be described as one of anaphylactic shock. Terrorism ranks with shark attacks in terms of real risk. We have, however, so over-reacted, and misreacted to the tragedy that we have become a danger both to ourselves and to others. We have squandered our treasure in the sands of hubris and misunderstanding, and I often wonder now if the real good that we do has become just a fig leaf to cover our obscenely over-muscled shadowhand-tattooed as it is with empty slogans- that wields death and destruction at the press of a button, but doesn’t know how to build, and doesn’t seem to have the slightest grasp of history. Out of the excesses of our fears, we have perverted our own Constitution, and become a surveillance state in which the government itself moreover has become, in the words of Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, a “government of the 1% by the 1 % and for the 1%.” With a populace mired in debt, befuddled by vapid corporate media-tainment, and worshiping mindlessly at the rat-race temple of empty consumerism, America is now essentially run by the type of military-industrial-political-banker cabal that President Eisenhower warned about.

Japan please think twice, thrice about the things America asks you to do. Please be a good friend and send as much of our military home as possible. We cannot afford it anymore. Our poor are getting poorer, our education systems are falling behind, and our infrastructure is crumbling. Say that you are happy to work with us, but only if we find a way to either harness or rein in our greed so as to conserve and restore the earth’s natural systems which are all now rapidly being destroyed. Say that you would be happy to be our friend and ally in the greatest battle ever fought, the battle to preserve humanity and the earth from the now rapidly advancing onslaught of climate change. But do not get caught in the misguided adventurism of a decaying empire that is flailing about at phantoms, while the real dangers that haunts it, -climate change, environmental degradation, and the rapidly growing level of inequality of its own people- have essentially been sacrificed on the altar of a military-industrial-political-financial machine that is its own worst enemy.


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Peter Van Buren blew the whistle on State Department waste and mismanagement during Iraqi reconstruction in his first book, We Meant Well, and writes about current events at his blog. Van Buren’s next book, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, will be available April 2014 from Luminis Books.