Dirty Dishes

On the transparency of intelligence agencies in the United States.

It hasn’t even been a week since Barack Obama tried to educate his kitchen cabinet on the explosive subject of intelligence service transparency — every so often, one just has to show the lady of the house the dishes she just finished washing to prove to her that they’re really clean. That’s about it regarding the globally criticized National Security Agency and its snooping activities: Come clean to prove they have nothing to hide, which Obama tried to do in a press conference where he soberly assured us the American monitoring programs weren’t being abused. Is the president really that clueless?

The most recent revelations to come forth from whistle-blower Edward Snowden’s fertile fields show that U.S. foreign intelligence services routinely exceeded congressional and secret court legal mandates — thereby grossly violating the data privacy of American citizens — and, in so doing, deceived the political and legal oversight bodies charged with regulating them. An NSA spokesperson tried to downplay the scandal by claiming that any organization made up of human beings operating in such an atmosphere of complex and diverse regulations is bound to find itself occasionally on the wrong side of the boundary lines.

But the truth is the entire operation appears to have been routinely flouting the law for a long time already.