Hundreds of students gathered in Shriver Hall on Tuesday night for this year’s Presidential Event, a debate between General Michael Hayden, former director of the CIA and NSA, and David Cole, Georgetown professor of constitutional law. The debate was presented by the Foreign Affairs Symposium (FAS) and moderated by Chief White House Correspondent for CBS News Major Garrett.
During the event, which was titled “The Price of Privacy: Re-Evaluating the NSA,” Hayden and Cole debated the constitutionality of the NSA and the role of privacy in national security.
The Hopkins Second Decade Society hosted the event’s reception. The organization’s representative, alumna Yara Cheikh, of the Class of 1995, introduced Garrett to kick off the debate.
Following Garrett’s introduction, Hayden outlined the purpose of the debate in his opening statement.
“[Cole and I] come from the same political culture, and we’re actually pretty good friends. We as a people are not trying to decide between good and evil. We as a people are trying to balance values,” Hayden said.
Throughout the debate, Hayden defended the NSA’s surveillance practices while Cole called for stronger regulations in the name of preserving privacy.
The NSA’s collection of foreign metadata has come under fire from critics on both sides of the aisle. The NSA collects the metadata by surveying its targets’ cell phone activities and locations. Cole was outraged by the government’s ability to conduct this surveillance even though it is not primarily on U.S. citizens.
“The NSA is collecting mass amounts of information, contact books, locations, the contents of literally every phone call from a foreign country. Those people have privacy rights too. If we say we only want to protect our own privacy rights, what’s to stop foreign intelligence from gathering from us all of the exact same stuff? I think we really need as a world to agree upon some limits on spy agencies around the world using the new technology to spy not on the bad guys, the leaders, the foreign agents, but on you and me,” Cole said.
Hayden responded directly to Cole’s concern and went so far as to suggest that it was naïve.
“This is an R-rated movie. It’s for adults. Nations conduct espionage against other nations. Guilt and suspicion are law enforcement terms, not intelligence terms. We don’t just listen to bad guys, we listen to interesting guys,” Hayden said.
Hayden agreed that metadata is powerful. According to him, the NSA has made only 288 queries into the foreign metadata system based on suspicions of terrorism, but over 6,000 U.S. numbers were linked to those 288 “seed numbers,” as Hayden called them, for investigation. He emphasized, however, that these data are only available to the NSA under stringent regulation.
“We kill people with metadata, but that’s not what we do with this metadata program. It’s really important to understand this program in its entirety. Not the potentiality of the program but how it’s actually conducted. The NSA under very strict limitations can access the lockbox of surveillance data,” Hayden said.
Both Hayden and Cole commented on the effects of Edward Snowden’s leaks of classified NSA documents last June when he was an employee of the agency. The document that influenced the most public debate was the order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) for Verizon, the wireless service provider, to surrender its metadata to the FBI.
“Edward Snowden precipitated debate that was inevitable, and he misshaped it. But I don’t understand what civil liberties quotient the U.S. government might have violated against foreign powers. That has nothing to do with your privacy,” Hayden said.
Cole disagreed.
“Edward Snowden is a criminal and a hero. [He] clearly committed a crime. He had access to this info on the condition that he would not disclose it. Lots of whistleblowers commit crimes. But at the same time they commit a crime, they can do an awful lot of good,” he said.
Following the Snowden leaks, President Obama enforced regulations on the NSA’s metadata program. They require the data to ultimately return to the possession of the phone companies that originally provided them. Hayden argued that these regulations were put in place only to assuage the fears of the American public.
“The president in his proposal isn’t trying to fix any abuses,” he said. “This is done just the way he wanted it to be done. He has been explicit. He wanted to change the program to make you more comfortable about it. The tradeoff is keeping the phone records in the hands of the phone companies to make the public more comfortable.”
Cole countered that the changes to NSA policy were meant to fix the program’s abuses to American privacy.
“Obama has called for ending the program. It was that on a single court order the NSA could collect all of our phone records and troll through the data when they have only a low level of reasonable suspicion. They didn’t need to go back to a court at all. The basic difference [between the old and new NSA policies] is the difference between dragnet surveillance and targeted surveillance. That’s the difference that our Constitution has long drawn. That’s what Obama’s new program will do,” Cole said.
Hayden noted balancing privacy and security has been a long-standing challenge for the U.S. government.
“Through most of our history surveillance was the province of the executive [branch]. Our first spymaster was George Washington. When he became president he asked Congress for a budget for covert action,” Hayden said.
Cole, on the other hand, pointed out that while privacy is not a new issue to the U.S., the government cannot handle it the same way it did before the digital age.
“Back in the day the Supreme Court adopted a rule that said if you share information with a third party, you voluntarily assume the risk that they will turn around and tell the government. But that logic no longer makes sense, because everything we do shares information with a third party. When I search the web, I am sharing with Google my interests. Should the government be able to get all of that data without any showing that there’s any basis for suspecting that you’re doing wrong? I don’t think so,” Cole said.
Cole’s greatest criticism of the NSA, however, was that it conducts surveillance in secret and violates Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.
“You can set up all the checks and balances possible [to regulate espionage], but it’s not going to work if at the end of the day the American people literally have no idea what is being done,” Cole said.
Hayden argued in his closing statements that this secrecy is necessary to optimize security.
“Transparency shaves points off of operational efficiency. In order for you to be a bit more comfortable, you are going to be a bit less safe,” Hayden said.
FAS sees the subject of privacy as particularly important to the Hopkins community.
“We all felt that this topic is one that is incredibly important, not just to our generation, but to our campus. Our Applied Physics Lab does a lot of work in national security analysis, and we’re rumored to have begun (or are shortly beginning) a drone-related program. We receive a lot of funding from the government for initiatives that may or may not infringe on privacy,” sophomore Rosellen Grant, co-executive director of FAS, wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
This is the first year that FAS has hosted its Presidential Event in the form of a debate rather than a one-speaker talk.
“FAS is constantly looking for new ways to prompt discourse and discussion, and so we’ve wanted to introduce a debate for years. While we do always strive to bring a variety of perspectives to campus, individual speakers will naturally represent their own views on stage. By bringing two experts who fall on different ends of the ideological spectrum, we were able to see those perspectives interact in a really productive way,” junior Nikhil Gupta, co-executive director of FAS, wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
During the debate’s Q & A, FAS members took questions for all the speakers from selected Twitter users who tagged their posts with #jhufas.
Members of FAS were highly pleased with the outcome of the debate.
“[The event] was truly a success. Seeing the debate so unscripted seemed to really spark discussion after the event,” junior William Szymanski, co-executive director of FAS, wrote in an email to The News-Letter.
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