Forty Years After Church- Pike: What’s Different Now?

[Winehole23]

Address at the National Security Agency on May 15, 2015 by Joel F. Brenner, former NSA Inspector General, 2002-2006.


About ten years ago, when I was the inspector general here, I found myself one day in Hawaii, under the Pineapples, and by coincidence there was at the same time a conference nearby of the agency’s training staff from all over the Pacific region. And one of them came to me and said, We do all this training about the legal restrictions on our activities -- USSID 18 and Executive Order 12333 and all that

–and we know it’s a big deal, but none of the people we’re training know why we’re doing it. And then after a pause she said: And frankly, we’re not sure either.



http://www.scribd.com/doc/265449621/NSA-Speech-May-15#download

[Winehole23]

We Americans don’t take instructions well if we don’t understand the reasons for them. And so I decided it was incumbent on us to tell and re-tell the story of how and why the United States became the first nation on earth to turn intelligence into a regulated industry. But the story isn’t entirely behind us. It continues. And so this morning I’m not only going to recount what happened in the ’seventies; I’m also going to address the Agency’s position in the wake of the Snowden leaks, and how we got here. Because insofar as NSA has again been in the public’s doghouse (It is certainly not in the policymakers’ dog house), it is for very different reasons from those in 1976, and that difference is worth reflecting on.