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On Monday at the Center for Strategic & International Studies' Global Security Forum, John Brennan, Director of the US' Central Intelligence Agency, spoke about the recent bombings in Paris. In what many commentators took as a reference to Edward Snowden, but could instead refer to the Church Committee, Brennan predicted that finding the attackers will be more difficult than it would have been, had intelligence services been left unchecked:
In the past several years, because of a number of unauthorized disclosures and a lot of hand-wringing over the government's role in the effort to try to uncover these terrorists, there have been some policy and legal and other actions that are taken that make our ability collectively, internationally to find these terrorists much more challenging.
I do hope that this is going to be a wake-up call particularly in areas of Europe where I think there has been a misrepresentation of what the intelligence security services are doing by some quarters that are designed to undercut those capabilities.
[...]
There are a lot of technological capabilities that are available right now that make it exceptionally difficult both technically as well as legally for intelligence security services to have insight that they need to uncover it.
Brennan's complete remarks are available in video via C-SPAN.
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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:28PM
The CIA has to make excuses for their failures. It's not THEIR fault that they can't catch bad guys. It's OUR FAULT, because we demand that human rights be respected. If Mary and Florence have organized a secret society club at their high school, the CIA doesn't have some inherent right to read the girl's messages. Reforms? No, you can't lock twenty little girls up for life, if they don't give you their encryption keys.
Just when does "draconian" go over the top, and become something else?
Oh - leaks? Maybe if you conduct yourself like respectable people, there won't be anything to leak. Or, paraphrased, "If you've done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to hide."
Just cry us a river.
(Score: 1) by saltycraig on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:16PM
Last week it came out that Germany has joined the party as well, spying on Oxfam, Care International, and the Red Cross:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-bnd-intelligence-spied-on-friends-and-vatican-a-1061588.html [spiegel.de]
Never can be too careful, right?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:19PM
Good post, kinda funny though, I normally make fun of the apologizers for using "think of the children". Guess it cuts both ways, but I have no problem when it meets my criteria of reasonable... hmmm..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Wednesday November 18 2015, @08:59PM
Even were the CIA to be behaving in a legal and ethical manner, they would have reason to hide some things.
The problem is they have so abused that need so often that I no longer believe them when they claim a need for secrecy. Actually, I do believe them. I believe they need to hide something so illegal or so flagrantly immoral that even their bosses couldn't accept it.
We'd be much better off disbanding the whole organization and starting over with a different structure and a totally different personnel. There is a valid function that they were created to serve, but they've essentially stopped serving it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by redneckmother on Thursday November 19 2015, @03:18AM
And yet, we (as individuals, and citizens) are continually reminded / reprimanded that "if you're innocent, then you have nothing to hide".
What a bunch of hypocrites. I say, if the gov is innocent, then THEY have nothing to hide. So, let's hear all the gory details of the gov's dealings / transgressions!
Mas cerveza por favor.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Thursday November 19 2015, @05:21AM
AFAIK the CIA became an independent power during Kennedy.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek