Counter-NSA Recommendations Will Hurt US Intel Gathering

“I’m very worried about the degradation overall of our intelligence gathering capabilities,” says John Bolton, former US Ambassador to the UN, in response to new proposals for severely curtailing the NSA’s ability to monitor the communications of potential terrorists.

On Wednesday, the White House released a report entitled “Liberty and Security in a Changing World.” Written by The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology, it came in response to the public uproar over revelations that the NSA was collecting call data of American citizens.

Ambassador Bolton and former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz joined host Frank Gaffney on Secure Freedom Radio on Thursday to discuss the problems that will arise should the review group’s recommendations be followed. Both maintained that the NSA program is vital to US national security, and that a fundamental misunderstanding of the NSA’s intent was behind the severity of the backlash.

“This is not the 1920s or 1930s. Technology has made a huge revolution and our intelligence gathering techniques need to keep up with that,” said Bolton. “The notion that the gathering of this so-called metadata about phone calls or pursuit of patterns of communication through the internet, the idea that munchkins at the NSA are reviewing your emails to see what you say to your girlfriend, is just crazy.”

Fleitz argued that judicial rulings mean the legality of the NSA program should not be in question.

“Fifteen separate judges in thirty-five separate court decisions had looked at this and said that it’s legal. It’s legal according to a Supreme Court decision, Smith versus Maryland, that when you make a phone call, the phone records are not considered protected. You don’t need a court warrant to go after that,” according to Fleitz.

Expressing criticism for President Obama’s decision to appoint a review group in the first place, Bolton said “the idea that you appoint an independent review panel is a classic way for a president to duck responsibility. This president happens to be particularly good at it, and he may well simply adopt these recommendations en bulk.”

Fleitz detailed the problems with the final product itself, pointing out the absurdity of the report’s recommendations, which would mean “we [would] have to have some type of agreement with our allies on how or whether to spy on them.”

Even worse though, Fleitz told Gaffney, was that “on a report of this complexity and of this much controversy, if it was a fair report there should have been disagreement and some dissenting views. The fact that these five guys supported such outrageous recommendations suggests to me that this was not a fair evaluation.”

“This sounds like a panel that was almost stacked, and this is just too important to be playing politics with,” finished Fleitz.