Former Nsa Official: Secret Phone Records Grab A Mistake
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The decision to keep secret the National Security Agency's collection of American calling records was a strategic blunder that set the stage for Edward Snowden's unauthorized disclosures and ultimately harmed U.S. national security, the agency's former inspector general told NSA employees in blunt remarks Friday.
"You now live in a glass house," Joel Brenner, NSA inspector general from 2002 to 2006, said in a speech marking the 40th anniversary of the congressional hearings into the intelligence scandals of the Watergate era. "How could anyone think the bulk collection program would remain secret?"
It's not that there no longer can be national security secrets, said Brenner, a lawyer who retired in 2009 after serving as the top U.S. counterintelligence official. But "the idea that the broad rules governing your activities -not specific operations, but the broad rules-can be kept secret is a delusion. And they should not be kept secret."
Snowden, a former NSA systems administrator, has said he decided to leak thousands of top secret documents to journalists because of what he viewed as deception by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, when he denied to Congress in 2013 that the U.S. was collecting records on millions of Americans. But Snowden went on to reveal programs that had nothing to do with domestic surveillance, but rather involved NSA's foreign intelligence gathering operations.
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