There was an opinion piece on CNN yesterday by former NSA chief, Ret. General Michael v. Hayden. In it he bristles with outrage over Edward Snowden, comparing him to Benedict Arnold.
Before we go further, let's remember and be clear who Hayden was. Hayden was director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005. In 2006, President George W. Bush nominated and got him confirmed to the post of Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. He served there from 2006 until February 2009. After that, he went to work for the private Chertoff Group, Michael Chertoff's revolving door lobbying business.
I point all that out just so we can stay clear about who Hayden is. Hayden was there in the most sensitive key positions through all the worst years of George W. Bush's crimes against humanity. I use that phrase, crimes against humanity, not as hyperbole, but because that's what it is called when states methodically torture prisoners in their custody. There are international treaties that define these things, whether or not we choose to prosecute them ourselves.
So Michael Hayden is a man for whom keeping government secrets isn't just a professional thing. He almost certainly has some personal skin in the game.
Much more below...
In this CNN opinion piece, he makes the comparisons of Snowden being like Benedict Arnold and Aldrich Aames. Hayden, however, claims that what Snowden has leaked or is leaking is far more damaging to America's security than even Julius and Ethel Rosenberg passing the detail plans of the atomic bomb to the Soviets.
That's pretty far-fetched. Atom bombs. That's all of my time I'll waste on that.
But then he gets to the FAR more interesting complaint he has against Snowden.
But there is other damage, such as the undeniable economic punishment that will be inflicted on American businesses for simply complying with American law.
Others, most notably in Europe, will rend their garments in faux shock and outrage that these firms have done this, all the while ignoring that these very same companies, along with their European counterparts, behave the same way when confronted with the lawful demands of European states.
I think we know what he's talking about there, and I've been trying to emphasize this lately. He's talking about the punishment that American based businesses like Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, and Google will have to endure because they played along with the NSA. Who is going to punish them? Hayden is saying they will be punished by their customers around the world.
Well, yeah! Other people, other businesses, other countries all have secrets and privacy issues of their own. Snowden's revelations have told the world something that they might have suspected before, but it is now clear as day: the US government spies on everybody, including its friends, including the businesses located in allied countries, businesses that need to COMPETE with American firms and thus have serious issues about industrial espionage.
I make the analogy, for instance, of some theoretical firm in Germany that makes something of interest to the NSA. Like, oh, say, parts for drone aircraft. That business would just love to get a contract selling those parts to the US, or any other nice people that want to buy them. However, such a business depends on the security of its own designs and production processes against industrial espionage. The NSA could try to brazen it out and try to reassure them by saying, "Oh, but we're not an INDUSTRY, we're just ESPIONAGE." Snowden's revelations show us that the distinction between those two things is very blurred in the USA. Thus, that hypothetical business concern, if it's concerned about its business secrets, MUST protect itself from any American-made tech products, because we now know that no American tech company can be relied upon to not pose a serious security risk and threat to their business.
So where do they go, then, for their software and hardware and communications needs if they can't trust big name American businesses? There's a nice answer to this: local (i.e., in the same country, like, in the E.U.) businesses. It stands to the benefit of the E.U. and to the benefit of our hypothetical German business to shop locally. And if there are no comparable products, well, some stimulus to the private sector might just do the trick. Thus they throw some euros at start-up companies locally that compete with American businesses. It's good for the EU. Not so good for those Americans that have jobs that depend on selling dual function surveillance software to our trading partners.
So no wonder Michael Hayden is so freaked out. We have tainted America's biggest export: The Internet, our cellular telecom system, our software and hardware tech products, and all the consulting expertise for using those things that our country peddles around the world.
Continuing with Hayden's piece:
The real purpose of those complaints [by our global business partners] is competitive economic advantage, putting added burdens on or even disqualifying American firms competing in Europe for the big data and cloud services that are at the cutting edge of the global IT industry. Or, in the case of France, to slow negotiations on a trans- Atlantic trade agreement that threatens the privileged position of French agriculture, outrage more based on protecting the production of cheese than preventing any alleged violation of privacy.
Now, I'm just a dumbass blogger. I don't have billions of dollars to spend analyzing what is wrong with this brilliant plan of theirs the way they did. But either General Hayden and all of his staff are spectacularly stupid, or he's just fucking with us.
The French are only worried about cheese? They don't have any real privacy concerns? Does General Hayden live in such a small insulated world that he can't imagine that?
No, more likely, he just wants to push the "All French people suck" button.
It takes a minute to realize just how badly we've fucked ourselves. We poisoned our own products. Hayden may blame Snowden all he likes for informing us about this, and he can even blame the French for being so icky icky French, but it seems to me that the real blame belongs closer to home. We did this to ourselves. And people like General Hayden were there overseeing it.
If it is such a terrible blow to America's security for our corporations to lose trademark reputation by this coming out, then why the fuck did they do this in the first place? They honestly couldn't figure out the negative consequences of what would happen when it came out?
And the same goes for those businesses like Microsoft that have cooperated with this happy horseshit. Did they really think that people wouldn't find out about this? That this might not pose a competitive risk for them when it did? Why didn't they fight back harder?
Continuing with Hayden's piece...
The third great harm of Snowden's efforts to date is the erosion of confidence in the ability of the United States to do anything discreetly or keep anything secret.
Manning's torrent of disclosures certainly caused great harm, but there was at least the plausible defense that this was a one-off phenomenon, a regrettable error we're aggressively correcting.
Snowden shows that we have fallen short and that the issue may be more systemic rather than isolated. At least that's what I would fear if I were a foreign intelligence chief approached by the Americans to do anything of import...
Trying not to laugh so hard while I type this diary...
Those are Hayden's own italics. Can't we keep anything secret???? I almost expect him to say next, "This is why we can't have nice things in America." Because we're so shitty at spying on our own people and our business customers and doing it discreetly.
By acknowledging, as he does, that "the issue may be more systemic," Hayden practically admits that Snowden was not the real problem here. There is something more basically wrong here and he just can't figure out what it is.
And how can anybody ever trust America's secret organizations to keep a secret now? I.e., how can the NSA sweet talk another business into contaminating its hardware or software with new backdoors when the odds are it will come out eventually and cause irreparable harm to their reputation?
Also, since the NSA is such a clusterfuck, how can they keep the trust of the other arms of the US government? Like the Navy, which is developing its own separate encrypted G4 telecom system. Surely we can all understand why the US Navy might not trust the bozos at the NSA to keep secret anything Navy personnel tell each other on conventional landlines or cell phones. From the Navy's own security point of view, it makes more sense to just opt out of the conventional telecom system that we've built in this country.
And if they feel that way, how many others will feel that way? I don't mean other branches of our government. I mean other countries. We have had a very good thing going here for a while. Until the NSA got too big for its britches and spoiled it all.
This is why we can't have nice things in the USA -- people like Michael Hayden, and all the other sick codependents of the surveillance state.