Experts Explain Why the NSA Program Is Necessary

Edward Snowden’s leak of NSA secrets to the media is reprehensible and as the program stands now the American public has no need for privacy concerns, agree Bill Harlow, former CIA head spokesman, and Marc Thiessen, former speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

On Frank Gaffney’s Secure Freedom Radio show Wednesday, Harlow strongly condemned Snowden’s actions, though he stopped short of calling him a traitor, saying that at the very least Snowden is “clearly a criminal, because he had obligations to protect sensitive information and he decided on his own that he was smarter than everyone in the Executive Branch, all 535 members of Congress, and members of the Judicial Branch in deciding what he could pass on and what he couldn’t.”

Thiessen explained that the leaks will cause significant damage to US anti-terror efforts, because “it gives the terrorists information about how we track them, which we don’t want them to posses, and it assists them in their ability to avoid detection…At the same time, you’re discouraging companies from cooperating with the US government…We depend a lot on voluntary cooperation of private businesses in the War on Terror. When their participation is exposed in this way and their international reputations are put at risk and they have outraged calls from stockholders and from customers about this sort of thing, it makes them less likely that they’re going to help us.” The overall effect, Thiessen says, is that “sources and liason partners across the world look at this and say ‘America can’t keep a freakin’ secret.’”

Thiessen also stressed how vital the PRISM program and the phone-data collection programs are to national security.

“I think we should be celebrating the fact that the NSA is doing this…The fact is we are still facing a terrorist enemy who is trying to attack us. They don’t have armies, navies, and air forces that we can track with satellites. They send 19 men with box cutters to hijack planes and fly them into buildings. So there are only three ways we can find out what their plans are, and in each case they have to tell us. The first case is interrogation. Getting them to tell us their plans. Thanks to Barack Obama we don’t do that any more. Second way to do it is penetration–which is incredibly hard to do–by infiltrating Al Qaeda, either just recruiting double agents or getting someone placed in there….When we have done it we’ve been fooled….So that leaves signaled intelligence. The only way that we have to find out what the terrorists are planning and disrupt their plans is to listen to their communications, monitor their e-mails, monitor them electronically. So if we get rid of this program, if this were to disappear, we would be flying blind.

On the initial outcry over the programs made public by the leaks, Harlow says that  “Just six weeks ago when the Boston bombings happened many people were saying ‘Why were we let down by the intelligence community? Why didn’t they collect the information that would allow us to stop incidences like that?’ And now just six weeks later we have people crying ‘Why are you trying to connect so many dots? Why are you trying to get information?’ I think people can be genuinely concerned about the potential invasion of privacy, but you have to also understand that the only way to collect much of this potential information about threats from overseas is to have access to information which may pass through US servers.”

Harlow’s ultimate advice is that “to tie our own hands and to destroy a very important collection program on the suspicion that some day somebody might abuse it seem to me a bad way of approaching good government.”