What is the solution to the problem of the NSA and the CIA? We know that the two organizations are not limited by their original charters, namely, to monitor the activities only of foreigners who might be a threat to the security of the United States, and never Americans.
Every organization in the government wants to get bigger: more power, more money, more employees. There is a process known as bureaucratic creep. Why is this? Because career promotions in a bureaucracy are based on the number of people who are under your authority. The more people your department hires, the more likely you will rise in the pyramid of power and pay. This is part of what is known as Parkinson's law. The famous version is this: "Work expands so as to fill the time allotted for its completion." But the more important aspect of this law is the law of bureaucratic growth. He published this in 1955, and it is still worth reading. Note: the context of the discussion was the growth of the military. This is basic to my suggested reform.
It is officially assumed by the NSA and the CIA that terrorists outside the United States who may be plotting against the United States will inevitably get into communication with people who are inside the United States. This assumes that terrorists have not figured this out, and they therefore still use digital communications. It assumes that they are not imitating Osama bin Laden, who was never caught transmitting digitally. The moment that the NSA and the CIA persuade the President and Congress that the terrorists will communicate with people inside the USA, they justify their practice of subjecting the entire population of the United States to total monitoring. This justification is sometimes called "six degrees of separation." It is more commonly known as the Kevin Bacon game.
Edward Snowden has proven that the counter-spies have been playing the Kevin Bacon game with everyone in the USA. Just about everybody in the government suspected this beforehand, but nobody had the documentation. Now they do. That is his real crime in the eyes of the government. He turned the spokesmen of the NSA and the CIA into retroactive liars. They denied that any of this was going on. The government can live with this. Spies lie. So what? But Snowden also revealed that Congress was suckered by these lying spokesmen. Congress now looks like a collection of naive dolts. For this, he is hated.
The government's right to collect telephone information is defended by the Obama Administration in a 22-page paper. Despite all of the President's denials, the reality is this: there is no real challenge to the NSA's surveillance of citizens on the part of the U.S. government.
I think there is an institutional way to reverse this bureaucratic creed. It is consistent with the Constitution. Here is my plan: All of the spying activities of the United States government should be transferred to the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense is officially the agency that is required to defend the United States from attack. Attack would include domestic terrorism.
LET THE MILITARY DO IT
The moment the assignment of monitoring potential terrorists is transferred to the Department of Defense, the spies' budget becomes subjected to intense scrutiny from inside the Department of Defense. By transferring all spying activities to the Department of Defense, the agencies assigned to do the spying would have to defend their budgets to all the other bureaucrats inside the Department of Defense.
I have no illusion that Congress has any ability to monitor budgets. Nobody in Congress knows what the Department of Defense spends the money on. Their accounting systems are well known to be completely opaque. Nobody can figure them out. These accountants are utterly incompetent from the point of view of the public. They are supremely competent from the point of view of the Department of Defense.
The Department of Defense is the proper authority over the task of spying. Do I think the Department of Defense could stop the spies from spying on Americans? Of course not. But the DoD would put real limitations on the ability of the spies to do their spying. The spies would have to justify their budgets to all the other services. The spies would be a relatively small part of the gigantic sinkhole that the Department of Defense's budget is. But it would place the spies under limits. That's the whole point.
I have no illusion that we can ever convince the voters that spies are a bad idea. But I do think we could convince the voters to accept the fact that the Department of Defense is supposedly the agency best equipped to defend the country, and therefore the spies ought to be inside the military, preferably in separate bureaucratic operations in each branch. The American public trusts the military more than it trusts any other institution in the United States. Every time pollsters check this, this is the result. So, why not transfer spying to the Department of Defense, where supposedly trustworthy people would monitor the spies?
There is no way to control the spies directly. There is no way that Congress can find out what the spies are doing. There is no way for the President to find out what the spies are doing. Congress writes the checks, and the President pretends to be able to monitor what goes on. Everybody in Washington knows it's sheer nonsense. Everybody there knows that there is no way to track the spies. Everybody knows that there are secret budgets. Nobody knows how to stop it. Nobody can get a handle on it. It grows and grows and grows.
Snowden blew the whistle, but everybody in Congress knew what was going on to one degree or other, and have known this at least since the passage of the Patriot Act. Most people with any knowledge of Washington have known it since the late 1940s. Yet nothing was done to put a lid on it. Nothing was done to control it. Finally, without warning, Snowden blew the whistle, and everybody pretends to be surprised. It's all kabuki theater. Everybody knew. What they didn't have was the evidence that Snowden got by stealing it and releasing it to the public. He is public enemy number-one inside the Washington Beltway, precisely because he released the evidence to the American public. The information was irrelevant to actual spies. The spies already knew. They are connected by a network involving a degree of secrecy comparable to, and perhaps even greater than, that possessed by the spying agencies. They don't communicate by digital communications.
What we have here is what Mad magazine has featured in "Spy vs. Spy" cartoons for over five decades. It is one group of spies versus another group of spies. The decentralized spies are in a position of advantage, because they are not government-funded, and because they are not part of a gigantic bureaucracy. They have mobility. They don't answer to anybody. They are not time-servers. They do not receive pensions. They are defenders of "the cause." They have the advantage. They will never surrender the advantage. As the technologies of mass destruction get less expensive, they will have an even greater advantage.
So, the correct goal should be to turn the defense of the country over to the Department of Defense. The Department of Defense has inside bureaucratic pressures to make certain that the spies would not get too much funding. There would be all kinds of institutional restraints placed on the spies, because nobody inside the Department of Defense wants to give up any turf. Nobody wants bureaucratic creep to invade his turf. The spies would be put on short leashes, not by Congress, and not by the President, but by the other bureaucrats who want their share of the money, plus a little more.
BUREAUCRACY VS. BUREAUCRACY
There are only two ways to stop the spread of bureaucracy. The first way is to cut the funding. This is never done. The second way is to transfer the monitoring of the bureaucracies over to other bureaucracies, and then promise the other bureaucracies that they will be rewarded if they find that a rival bureaucracy has broken the rules.
You would get maximum results by imposing a budget cut on the offending bureaucracy, and then transferring the money saved to the bureaucracy that reported the offense. The best way for a bureaucracy to increase its budget would then be to spy on another bureaucracy and to prove that it had violated some rule. This way, I would expect at least a third of the budget of every bureaucracy would be spent on spying on other bureaucracies. If the payoff is larger, the percentage will go up. This is what I want bureaucrats to do. You should, too. You don't want government bureaucrats to interfere with you. You want government bureaucrats to interfere with each other. You want each expanding bureaucracy to invade the turf of another bureaucracy, and always at the expense of the other bureaucracy. You want most of the funding of each bureaucracy to depend more on exposing the illegal activities of rival bureaucracies.
This may sound utopian, but it is better than the system we now have. There is an old story, probably apocryphal, which I hope is true. Gen. Curtis LeMay was the head of the Strategic Air Command from 1948 to 1957. He was a curmudgeon's curmudgeon. He was a curmudgeon who had control over nuclear weapons. He was a dangerous curmudgeon. Here is the story, or at least one version of it.
General LeMay was being briefed by a young officer who kept referring to the USSR as the "enemy." "Young man," said an exasperated LeMay, "the USSR is our adversary. Our enemy is the Navy."
CONCLUSION
Abolish the NSA and the CIA. Transfer their responsibilities to the Department of Defense. If a branch of the military wants to contract out services to formerly employed NSA and CIA staffers, fine. That is a matter of the military budgets. But make it clear to the ex-CIA and ex-NSA employees that they answer to the Army, Navy, or Air Force. "Yes, sir. Aye, aye, sir."
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