When someone attacks your democracy, it tends to stick in your craw. I don’t know that democracy is the last, best way to arrange human affairs, but if we’re going to have a democracy, participants in it should stick to the rules. If they don’t, the tradition of tit for tat in politics suggests a rapid downward slide. A dozen years ago, Americans’ privacy was just the canary in the proverbial coal mine.
The attack on democracy to which I refer, of course, was the lie James Clapper told to Congress when asked on March 12, 2013, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” His answer, “No, sir,” was false; he knew it was false, and he gave it intending to deceive Congress and the American people. There are sophistic arguments that it was not a “lie,” but no matter. The US Code makes false statements to Congress illegal, not only lies—and whether or not made under oath. A few months later, the truth was revealed (producing a silver lining, my favorite TV appearance ever).
How is a lie like that an attack on democracy? Our constitutional system allocates power in a very important and specific way. It is delegated by the people to their representatives. When their representatives conduct the people’s business—oversight, say, through public hearings—misstatements and lies deny and deflect that exercise of power, and the power goes elsewhere. Clapper’s lie to Congress sought to preserve power in the Directorate of National Intelligence and the National Security Agency to perform unconstitutional surveillance on all Americans. It was a usurpation, pure and simple.
Intelligence agents continue to go beyond their role in similar, if more subtle and common, ways. A recent Washington Post article features their efforts to undercut officials once removed from elected power—in this case, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, a former member of Congress. Comments to the press from “current and former U.S. officials” relitigate a recent Gabbard declassification decision.
Does the newly declassified House Intelligence Committee review of an “intelligence community assessment” win the day and show that political aims produced rushed and inaccurate conclusions about Russian interest in the 2016 election? I have no dog in the fight or real capacity to assess that. But I support having the debate.
It is well known that classification is overused. Declassification can be good. There are trade-offs between security—including the safety of intelligence sources—and democratic oversight. It ain’t patty-cake. But at times, democratic oversight wins the day. The public servants who resist that are usurpers. True public service in our system is not a career path in which you get to run things from behind the scenes, deep within the state.
My preferred solution, based on my study of terrorism and counterterrorism, is to reduce the global provocations that require all this. There isn’t a near future where contestants against the United States and the free world set aside their plans and lay down their arms, but there are foreign policies that can reduce the number and intensity of threats to the United States so that our intelligence apparatus can be right-sized and our secret government minimized.
But there is some comic relief on offer. I can’t tell if it was nth-level trolling or not, but I came across an X post replying to a Gabbard post about a declassified document. A famous youth football coach I’d never heard of, replied, “You have just violated almost every privacy law on the books by releasing this without their consent. . . . I can name at least 5 statues [sic] you’ve violated.” To a privacy law person, these are statements of soaring, resplendent inaccuracy.
Another highly reliable X account—this one with four (literally four!)—followers, then asked X’s resident AI thing, Grok, about whether the declassification violated privacy laws. Grok produced good summaries of privacy statutes and their nonapplication. “After early indifference, I’m getting closer and closer to really liking AI,” I chimed in.
I’ll never stand down from hating “artificial intelligence” as a meaningless term, but there is a net positive when people can quickly call on a source that is often going to be generally accurate.
The declassified document? It was an email thread in which Clapper responded to a colleague who had raised concerns about the process for producing the above-referenced report, which was later criticized as rushed and inaccurate. “[M]ore time is not negotiable,” wrote Clapper. “We may have to compromise on our ‘normal’ modalities, since we must do this on such a compressed schedule.”
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