By Tom Rogan
Wednesday, April 06, 2016
‘If the French citizens knew exactly what that was about,
they would be applauding and popping champagne corks.”
That was how former House Intelligence Committee chairman
Mike Rogers responded to the 2013 French outrage over leaked National Security
Agency (NSA) operations in Europe. Rogers spoke to a world of darkness hidden
below the surface of Western civil society. Three years later, that hidden
world is becoming public. And in the Brussels attacks and the “Panama Papers”
on global corruption, the NSA is finding new vindication.
First off, consider counterterrorism. Warning of ISIS
attacks in Belgium in January 2015, I offered a concluding aside on how the NSA
supports European counterterrorism. But that was before the Bataclan attack in
Paris; back then, the Western consensus was all but certain of NSA malevolence.
In those days of cozy delusion, the NSA narrative was in large measure set by public
guardian Vladimir Putin’s new poodle Edward Snowden. Ignoring his education
of terrorists in divulging hundreds of NSA techniques and technologies,
many in the West chose instead to believe Snowden had saved democracy. A key
consequence followed: Technology companies altered their encryption protocols
to appease public paranoia. As a result, while Snowden now spends his days
delivering Skype speeches to sycophants, terrorists use the same means to
deliver murder instructions to their global operatives. After Snowden, digital
communications platforms and apps are useful telephone alternatives for us — and
digital toolkits for terrorists seeking innocent blood.
The Paris attackers used encrypted communications to
evade detection, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. In 2016, terrorists
around the world are using encryption to hide their physical identities — often
known to authorities — in a digital haystack of nameless and contentless
conversations (Google “end-to-end encryption”). Consider how, in April 2016,
the vocal anti-NSA sentiments of EU leaders such as Angela Merkel and François
Hollande suddenly went mute. They know they need the NSA now more than ever.
They are aware that only the NSA (and the UK’s GCHQ) can efficiently process
vast amounts of data, assess what is relevant, collate that information against
other intelligence materials, and then pass on the relevant details. The moral
potential of this capability is exemplified by NSA assistance in the 2006–10
U.S. war on al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). Thanks to creative signal-intelligence
hooks to identify and disrupt AQI networks, many innocent Iraqi lives were
saved.
The NSA is recovering validation in another area, thanks
to the “Panama Papers” reports on vast corruption in business and political
elites around the world. Those reports have shown in public what U.S.
policymakers — via the NSA — have long known: that many politicians around the
world — elected and autocratic alike — are deeply corrupt. And as
I’ve explained here, our insight into this corruption is especially
important in Europe. Whether penetrating Putin’s global slush/hush funds, or
identifying sanctions-busting deals with dictators or Chinese payoffs for
patronage (think the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank), the NSA is the
dirty-laundry collector for the world’s most unpleasant actors. Moreover, the
NSA’s anti-corruption vigilance is understood by corrupt leaders abroad. And
because they are aware that we know what they’re up to, our diplomatic requests
to support U.S. policy have a little more salience (think realpolitik without
guns). Former NSA officer John Schindler put it to me this way: “NSA is all
over the corruption problem, of which the Panama Papers scandal is merely a
subset. See the collapse of Brazil’s government — the very government that got
so angry about the NSA listening in on them once Snowden went public.” Today,
Brazil’s deepening Petrobras corruption crisis threatens to bring down the
government. Thanks to the NSA, U.S. policymakers probably knew it was coming.
Ultimately, of course, the NSA is just one element of
U.S. national power. As with any agency of government in democracy, it requires
supervision. But because international relations are the product of variable
actors — the good, the bad, and those somewhere in between — we need the NSA.
That’s because, pursuing the cause of good, we must also illuminate
the bad — and occasionally the ugly.
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