When I worked in Congress, I had an opportunity to apply for a security clearance.
I worked for the Speaker of the House, I was around a lot of sensitive conversations, and if I had my security clearance, I could have joined the Speaker in a lot more of them.
I declined to get it, mostly because I knew that I couldn’t keep a secret. I was the press secretary to the Speaker, and I don’t like secrets. I think the American people have a right to know what their paid employees are up to and I think that too many secrets sows distrust of the political process. And I am not smart enough to keep my mouth shut and I am not all that good at remembering what is supposed to stay secret and what is fine with share my friends in the 4th estate.
I also have a healthy distrust of our intelligence community. This stretches back to my college days, when one of my professors, Dr. Athan Theoharis, taught me about J. Edgar Hoover, his secret files, his campaigns to destroy civil liberties in this country (there were more than one), and his ability to blackmail political leaders in this country to force them to do his will. There is more than a little evidence that the whole Watergate affair was an FBI campaign to get rid of Dick Nixon, who wouldn't kowtow to Hoover.
Theoharis also taught about the excesses of the CIA, whose foreign adventurism got us into the Vietnam war, the failed Bay of Pigs imbroglio, and a spate of assassinations of foreign leaders who we didn’t like. The CIA may or may not have been involved in the assassination of Jack Kennedy. Dr. Theoharis didn’t have a point of view on that front, but Bobby Kennedy certainly does. And he still doesn’t have protection from the Secret Service, which at this point seems to be pretty malevolent to me.
Despite having this history in mind, I still understand why Mike Johnson voted the way he did on the FISA bill last week and why the Senate will most likely vote to extend the program for 2 more years without any notable reforms.
From a risk perspective, the American people care more about their safety than their freedom and they frankly don’t care who our intelligence agencies are spying on, as long as the terrorists don’t win. That was proven true during the Covid lockdowns, when the vast majority of the voting public complied in the face of virus that killed almost nobody under the age of 65.
This is not my preference. I would prefer that our intelligence community be more transparent with the American people and with the Congress. I would prefer that the intelligence community do almost no surveillance of the American people, unless it is specifically authorized by an impartial judge (not the FISA court, which is a complete joke). I would prefer that we take the American Constitution more seriously and that we punish bad actors in the FBI and CIA who entrap citizens and do extralegal things in the name of American security. I would prefer that the CIA release all of its files on the Kennedy assassination.
On Section 702 authority, I am generally of the opinion that it would be far better to mend it than to end it. I think it makes sense for the NSA to collect data to pinpoint the malevolent actions of terrorists and hostile foreign actors, but the Intelligence Community usually doesn’t stop there, despite their protestations to the contrary. Many of these conversations included American citizens, and it is highly unlikely that the spooks just close their eyes and ears when Americans are involved.
That is why other voices need to be included in the approval of these sweeping intelligence community investigations. I personally think that the FISA court needs to be completely reformed to allow for people outside the IC to present relevant facts to the contrary, just to keep the spooks honest. I also think that giving John Roberts the complete opportunity to stack the FISA Court with his own picks, with nobody else on the Supreme Court being consulted smacks of too much insider trading. And there is plenty of evidence to indicate that under the Biden Administration, there is a political agenda at work to go after conservatives who don’t buy-in to John Brennan’s woke agenda. There is also evidence that the IC writ large doesn’t like Trump’s nationalist appeal and undermined him at every stop of his presidency, from his campaign to his reelection, and every step in the way.
I am reflexively with Rand Paul and Ron Wyden on the security state. But I know that my opinion is as popular with the American people as I think it ought to be. At the end of the day, I think it is far better to mend Section 702 than it is to end it.