Salon.com > James Clapper

James Clapper is still lying to America

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 16:02:00 +0000

"James Clapper Is Still Lying": That would be a more honest headline for yesterday's big Washington Post article about the director of national intelligence's letter to the U.S. Senate.

Clapper, you may recall, unequivocally said "no, sir" in response to Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asking him: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Clapper's response was shown to be a lie by Snowden's disclosures, as well as by reports from the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News (among others). This is particularly significant, considering lying before Congress prevents the legislative branch from performing oversight and is therefore a felony.

Why shouldn’t David Gregory be charged with a crime?

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 11:45:00 +0000

Two weeks into the hullabaloo surrounding whistle-blower Edward Snowden and Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, one thing is clear: They did not just reveal potentially serious crimes perpetrated by the government -- including possible perjury, unlawful spying and unconstitutional surveillance. They also laid bare in historic fashion the powerful double standards that now define most U.S. media coverage of the American government -- the kind that portray those who challenge power as criminals, and those who worship it as heroes deserving legal immunity. Indeed, after "Meet the Press" host David Gregory's instantly notorious performance yesterday, it is clear Snowden's revelations so brazenly exposed these double standards that it will be difficult for the Washington press corps to ever successfully hide them again.

The best way to see these double standards is to ponder 10 simple questions.

Does the government actually understand the 4th Amendment?

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 14:50:00 +0000

Let's say for argument's sake that you for some reason do not believe an executive branch official blatantly perjuring himself before Congress is a serious crime, even though that same executive branch aggressively prosecutes allegations of perjury in similarly high profile cases.

Let's also say that you simply accept at face value the Government's unverified assertion that it has halted "systemic" illegal/unconstitutional surveillance by the National Security Administration. And let's say that you still believe such an assertion even though a few years after it was aired 1) the Director of National Intelligence admitted illegal surveillance was still taking place and 2) Mother Jones reports that an 86-page court ruling "determined that the government had violated the spirit of federal surveillance laws and engaged in unconstitutional spying."

Most senators reportedly skipped NSA briefing to catch flights home

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:22:00 +0000

Fifty-three senators reportedly skipped a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, and other top intelligence officials, on the NSA's phone surveillance program, so they could catch flights home for the weekend, according to The Hill.

The Hill reports:

The Senate held its last vote of the week a little after noon on Thursday, and many lawmakers were eager to take advantage of the short day and head back to their home states for Father’s Day weekend.

Only 47 of 100 senators attended the 2:30 briefing, leaving dozens of chairs in the secure meeting room empty as Clapper, Alexander and other senior officials told lawmakers about classified programs to monitor millions of telephone calls and broad swaths of Internet activity. The room on the lower level of the Capitol Visitor Center is large enough to fit the entire Senate membership, according to a Senate aide.

How James Clapper will get away with perjury

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:45:00 +0000

Did National Director of Intelligence James Clapper commit perjury when he testified before the Senate in March? The answer to this question isn’t as straightforward as it appears to be. As a practical matter, however, it’s the wrong question to be asking about Clapper’s behavior.

Clapper was asked by Sen. Ron Wyden, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper responded, “No, sir … not wittingly.”

Now this is what an ordinary person would call a “lie.” Ordinary people also believe that perjury is lying under oath. But lawyers are not ordinary people, and, as a technical legal matter, the situation is more complicated.

If the question of whether Clapper committed perjury is understood to mean, “Would the government (if it were inclined to prosecute Clapper, which it won’t) be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Clapper’s response violated the federal perjury statutes?” the answer is, “Maybe, maybe not.”

James Clapper must go

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:31:00 +0000

When introducing James Clapper as his director of national intelligence in 2010, President Obama specifically justified the appointment by saying Clapper is someone who "understands the importance of working with our partners in Congress (and) not merely to appear when summoned, but to keep Congress informed." At the time, it seemed like a wholly uncontroversial statement; it was simply a president making a sacrosanct promise to keep the legislative branch informed, with the insinuation that previous administrations hadn't.

Three years later, of course, James Clapper is now the embodiment of perjury before Congress. Indeed, when you couple Edward Snowden's disclosures with this video of Clapper's Senate testimony denying that the National Security Administration collects "any type of data on millions (of Americans)," Clapper has become American history's most explicit and verifiable example of an executive branch deliberately lying to the legislative branch that is supposed to be overseeing it.

ACLU sues over NSA phone surveillance

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:21:00 +0000

The ACLU is suing Obama Administration and intelligence officials over the NSA's phone surveillance program, arguing that the widespread collection of data violates the group's rights to privacy and free speech.

In an unusual move, the ACLU is suing on behalf of itself as customers of Verizon, arguing that the program " infringes upon the ACLU's First Amendment rights, including the twin liberties of free expression and free association," according to a statement on the website. The suit also argues that the program constitutes a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as Section 215 of the Patriot Act:

The statute requires that records seized under its authority be "relevant" to an authorized foreign-intelligence or terrorism investigation. But while that language imposes a real limitation on when the government can use Section 215, the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] order covering all [Verizon Business Network Services] customers demonstrates that this "relevance" restraint is shockingly inadequate. Similarly, the FISC order shows that the government—with the FISC's secret approval—is acquiring future records of telephone subscribers based on the same "relevance" requirement, even though the statute uses words that clearly show it was only meant to cover "tangible things" already in existence.

Clapper on NSA Congress comments: “I gave the least untruth”

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 13:08:00 +0000

It has certainly become hackneyed to call the government Orwellian, but in this case it's unavoidable. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that he had given the "least untruthful" answer possible in March when he told a congressional hearing that the NSA does not collect information on millions of Americans, which it does, daily.

Appearing on NBC News with Andrea Mitchell, Clapper scrambled on the defensive with barely plausible excuses for his comments to Congress, which stand at direct odds with recent revelations about the NSA's vast dragnets. Via HuffPo:

Put the NSA on trial

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:48:00 +0000

"When the president does it that means it is not illegal." These infamous words from Richard Nixon appear to summarize the public legal justification for the Obama administration's unprecedented mass surveillance operation. Perhaps worse, Permanent Washington would have us believe that this rationale is unquestionably accurate and that therefore the National Security Administration's surveillance is perfectly legal.

For example, Richard Haas of the Council on Foreign Relations said of Edward Snowden: "'Whistleblower' is person who reveals wrongdoing, corruption, illegal activity. none of this applies here even if you oppose U.S. government policy." Likewise, the Boston Globe's Bryan Bender insists, "I wish media would stop calling Snowden a whistleblower -- it maligns those who truly reveal corrupt or illegal activity." And the New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin definitively states: "These were legally authorized programs."

What spying apologists don’t tell you about “thwarted plots”

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 17:10:00 +0000

Listen to defenders of the U.S. government’s recently revealed data collection practices, and you’re likely to hear claims about terrorist plots these sweeping activities have purportedly stopped.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., explained on ABC’s "This Week" Sunday that in one of the signature uses of the dragnet collection of every American’s phone records, the NSA managed to track one of our own informants, David Headley, as he helped Islamic terrorists plan attacks. She did not mention that it did nothing to prevent the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, which killed 166 -- and in which Headley had a role in planning.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the effort to track Headley – which did manage to thwart Headley’s 2009 plans to attack a Danish newspaper – a success, in an interview with Andrea Mitchell. Such is the value of these programs, it appears, that top proponents of the program celebrate the tracking of a DEA informant gone bad as their main talking point.

Intelligence chief: Internet spying program is strictly supervised

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 11:32:00 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — Eager to quell a domestic furor over U.S. spying, the nation's top intelligence official stressed Saturday that a previously undisclosed program for tapping into Internet usage is authorized by Congress, falls under strict supervision of a secret court and cannot intentionally target a U.S. citizen. He decried the revelation of that and another intelligence-gathering program as reckless.

For the second time in three days, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper took the rare step of declassifying some details of an intelligence program to respond to media reports about counterterrorism techniques employed by the government.

"Disclosing information about the specific methods the government uses to collect communications can obviously give our enemies a 'playbook' of how to avoid detection," he said in a statement.

Clapper said the data collection under the program, first unveiled by the newspapers The Washington Post and The Guardian, was with the approval of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court and with the knowledge of Internet service providers. He emphasized that the government does not act unilaterally to obtain that data from the servers of those providers.

No “cyber Pearl Harbor” on the horizon

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:19:00 +0000

Contrary to former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's ominous warning last year that the U.S. could be vulnerable to a "cyber Pearl Harbor," director of national intelligence James Clapper said there were no current cyberthreats of this scale to U.S. infrastructure.

As Wired's Kim Zetter reported on Clapper's comments to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday, he said "that lack of skills on the part of most attackers and the ability to override attacks on critical infrastructure with manual controls would make such attacks unfeasible in the near future. He also said that nation states that might have the skills to pull off such an attack lack the motive at this point."

Clapper stated (via Wired):