That’s the term for secret budgets of the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, including the NSA and CIA. Last year, The Washington Post used documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the nation’s black budget to be $53 billion. The Post reported the CIA had received a 56 percent increase in its budget over the past decade, while the NSA got a 54 percent hike. The black budget also revealed the NSA is paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to telephone and Internet companies for secret access to their communications networks.
Congressman Peter Welch talking:
pretty basic information—how much of taxpayer money is being spent on intelligence-gathering activities, the top line number. You know, there’s not just the NSA and the CIA; we have like 17 different intelligence-gathering agencies. And those budgets have exploded. They’re up over 50 percent, even as, as pointed out, the National Institute of Health, that budget is down 22 percent. And if you are going to have any oversight whatsoever, you have to know what the budget is. And in fact, the 9/11 Commission advocated this. You know, somebody with solid credentials on national security, Lee Hamilton, is a strong proponent of letting the taxpayers know how much is being spent. You know, think about it. If you had 16 different government agencies administering the food stamp program on a secret budget, how would you know where they were stumbling into each other, where they were coordinating or not coordinating, where they were duplicating? So this is basic information that’s the beginning of congressional oversight and accountability in the intelligence community.
these telephone companies, through the FISA court, have been being required to turn over information that their customers think was private. And they’re under a gag order, so they can’t disclose what the government is seeking. So what you have, essentially, with the expansion of the FISA court definition of what is acceptable for the intelligence agencies to do, is private companies with private information on you and me being required to turn that over in secret. So, what we want to do is end the gag order. If AT&T or Verizon is requested to turn over information, they should be able to disclose that, so then there’s an open and public debate about the limits on intelligence gathering.
deputy director of the NSA, Richard Ledgett, talking about Congress authorizing what the NSA has done.
it’s idiotic, what he just said. It’s extraordinarily disrespectful of the Constitution and extraordinarily disrespectful of the privacy rights of the American citizens. Here’s why. Jim Sensenbrenner was a conservative Republican who helped write the law. In what he—and he’s appalled by the overreach of the intelligence-gathering agencies and the NSA. And here’s why. There was, in the law, the right to go to the FISA court on the basis of reasonable suspicion to examine, let’s say, my phone records; there was some articulable suspicion that passed the judgment test of the judge in FISA, and you could get my records. What NSA has done is said that they can get everybody’s, all Americans’ emails, texts and telephone messages—all of them—just on the basis of the law in this authorization. That is like so overbroad and so disrespectful that there’s no end to what they can do.
The second point is that it may be that some of the Intelligence Committee members had access to this information, but the American people didn’t have access to this information, that there was this new NSA policy, which was essentially authorizing a dragnet of all of our emails and telephone records. So, that’s just, I think, an incredible self-serving stretch that shows an appalling disrespect to the Constitution and the reasonable limits that have to be part of a balance of security and privacy.
We’re not going to get important things done here unless there’s people on both sides. And what this reflects—Cynthia Lummis is a solid person who’s got a lot of pretty hard tea party credentials. She cares about the Constitution. She cares about privacy rights. She cares about security. And in our coalition, you’re seeing left to right, who all say there’s got to be security, but we’ve got to protect the constitutional rights of the American citizens.
The second thing is that all of us know you just can’t give a blank check to any agency. You know, the intelligence-gathering agencies obviously had an opportunity, and a necessary, to get more money after 9/11. But at a certain point, you’ve got to step back and kick the tires. Are they doing a good job? Are they duplicating? Are they getting value for the money that the taxpayers are giving them? They are not immune to oversight just because they’re doing something that’s important, any more than any other governmental agency is, has been. By the way, you know, the intelligence-gathering agencies have blown it on a lot of occasions. It’s not as though the fact that they do important work means that they always do it well. They got it wrong on weapons of mass destruction. They were involved in toppling democratically elected leaders, like in Guatemala and even in Iran. I mean, this is not an organization that has 20/20 vision most of the time.
A lot of the information that Mr. Snowden revealed is information I believe that we should have had, like, for instance, on this dragnet surveillance. The American people, that should have been disclosed to us, because that’s a policy debate. So, in that sense, getting that information out, I am glad that we know that. On the other hand, the indications are that there was an enormous data dump by Mr. Snowden that may include things that we have no business knowing. And I just don’t know what the story is on the full picture, so I’m undecided on that.
the definition of whistleblower is you’re disclosing some information that the public has a right to know. So, my view on the aspect of it where there was this wholesale dragnet of our information, that sort of fits into that category. Some of the other information that he’s disclosed may be state secrets. That, I don’t know, and that could be in a different category. So I’m not sure it’s a one-size-fits-all with Mr. Snowden.
it is almost Orwellian. I mean, there’s two things about it. Number one, the getting all of our information in the hands of a governmental agency, where we have no idea how it’s going to be used, history suggests that absolute power corrupts. And we can anticipate that somewhere, sometime, some president—a Nixon or whoever—is going to use, abuse that information. So, I do have a real objection to it. Secondly, I think it really interferes with good intelligence gathering, because it becomes like an agency that is getting so much information, in effect, it’s creating haystacks in order to search for needles. The hard work of intelligence has to be to follow the leads, to develop them, and not just to have access to all information on everybody in the world when you don’t have an identifiable target that you’re following, a trail that you’re—or leads that you’re following.
— source democracynow.org
Peter Welch, Democratic congressman from Vermont.