Transcripts For CSPAN3 Congressional Oversight Of Intelligence Activities 20140706

Minutes. Our attention today will be on capitol hill itself, on our own neighborhood. But with an eye, of course, toward the global implications. In 1973, a leading member of the Senate Subcommittee responsible for overseeing intelligence activities, told director of intelligence james schlesinger, and i quote im not going to try the accent here, it was thick no, no my boy, dont tell me. Just go ahead and do it but i dont want to know. Well, since then, members of congress have on and off wanted to know. And congressional oversight of intelligence is a recurring flash point in executive congressional relations. Our guests, professor Laura Donohue of Georgetown Law School and mark low enthaul, the director of the Intelligence Community is going to explore the dustup between the senate and the c. I. A. About not only reminding us about past struggles between congress and the intelligence communities, such as Church Hearings but helping us understand why this context matters. Everything has a history. Until the 1975 Church Committee, there was virtually no congressional oversight and despite the sensationalism of the committees revelations, the mandated reforms were surprisingly moderate. Now, once again, we have sensational revelations, demand for more intensive oversight. Nobody, least of all a good historian, will simply say history repeats itself and thats how we learn from it. But we do know that it is impossible to understand change without context and before we decide where to go, it would behoove us to understand how we got there and why we are where we are, rather than any one of a number of possible other places where we could be. So i think we should probably start with laura. Laura donohue is professor of law at Georgetown Law School and the director of Georgetown Center on National Security and the law. Professor donohue has held fellowships for several organizations. She was a fellow in the interNational Security program and the executive session for domestic preparedness. In 2001, the carnegie corporati corporation, were still uncertain as to how he pronounced his name. The Carnegie Corporation named her to a scholars program. Her most recent book is the cost of counterterrorism, power, politics and liberty, but she is now actually working on a book on quarantines, which is very different from what were talking about today. So she has to put that work aside while we come back to this, or are you going to figure out how to marry these two things . No. No, not today . He served as an adjunct professor also at Johns Hopkins university. His book is a reminder about the importance of context. Because if i were in a completely different place and i were to introduce him and say hes the author of the Standard College textbook on intelligence, people would think hes an entirely different person. So context matters. So well start with laura and move on to mark and each will speak for 15 minutes and then well open the floor to questions. Great. Thanks very much, jim. Id like to thank professor jim grossman and professor dane kennedy for inviting me here to speak and to thank Mark Lowenthal for what promises to be an engaging conversation. This is what led to the Church Committee hearings. If you take first an existential threat, at this point the cold war. Historians dont agree on the years of the cold war but most people would say 1947 to 1991, roughly. So if we take an existential threat like that, rapid bureaucratic growth, we have very little Intelligence Community presence before the cold war and rapid expansion in the bureaucracy and then theres access to new and emerging technologies thats played a central role in what happened during the cold war and the abuses that came to public attention with the Church Committee. You have that fueled by private industry taking part of this. You have increasing secrecy and rivalry between intelligence agencies themselves. You add to that little or no oversight from congress and you really have the recipe for disaster. Which is what happened. You had illegal investigative techniques and improper investigative targets and it was all put to not all, but part of it was put to improper political purposes. So today what id like to speak to is exactly what happened here. Im going to address the rapid growth of the Intelligence Community, post world war ii. Were going to talk about the investigations that were found and the Reform Efforts that were put in place. The story begins in 1947 with the National Security act. This is a legislation that attend the mme, which i always thought it was quite funny, it was the department of defense before it was called the dod, the National Military establishment and established the National Security council and for our purposes today, it created the c. I. A. The c. I. A. Itself for the next 30 years, it developed with little or no oversight. There are two key points to take away from this time frame as an historian. First is science and technology had an enormous impact on the collection and analysis of intelligence at the time. So two reports had identified which led to the creation of the c. I. A. Im sorry which followed the creation had identified scientific expertise as a weakness. In january of 1949, a Small Division of the agency was merged with a larger group, osi, and was given a number of resources, significant money, personnel and the ability to take advantage of these new technologies. This led to some of the most important spy satellites, which came from the c. I. A. Itself. Lockheed, all of this came from the agency. There are various other programs underway. The second key point about this is lacking oversight and keen to take advantage of these new technologies, the c. I. A. Rapidly expanded into a number of programs that later caused significant concerns. So weve heard, for instance, about the special interrogation methods they developed. Just to give you an example of what these were like, in 1953, at a semi annual biological weapons meeting between the c. I. A. And the military, a c. I. A. Official laced the Army Scientists drinks with lsd. They were doing experiments on lsd at the time. 20 minutes later the c. I. A. Said, surprise, we just laced your drinks with lsd and frank olson, one of the military members there became agitated and depressed. He sought medical treatment and later jumped out of the window of his hotel room to his death. No c. I. A. Is officials were ever punished for the incident and the Program Actually continued. Similar programs were done on federal prisoners addicted to drugs and so on. In 1952, the department of defense created the National Security agency. From 1958, they were in charge of events, the National Security agency was in charge of electronic intelligence. In 1985, the public found out the nro existed. The department of defense did not declassify the existence of the nro until 1992, which when i teach this, by 1996, they had a childrens page on their website where kids could go on and learn all about the nro, four years after it was formally declassified. In 1961, the intelligence Defense Agency stood up and various other intelligence agencies followed. A point to make about these intel agencies, there were divisions and frictions between them, very strong frictions. Its not clear whether this was good or bad, historians come down on different sides of this. What is clear, a pattern of abuse emerged, pointing to the primary drivers, first the existential threat, the National Security became a trump card with the existential threat. There was rapid bureaucratic growth. All the different agencies were trying to use the technologies. There was an industrial engine behind this, secrecy, a rivalry and lack of oversight that went on. I mentioned m. K. Ultra. The military orchestrated data exchanges between 350 military posts on domestic soil. The n. S. A. Had a number of operations underway. Operation shamrock had the largest surveillance program. The program was particularly concerning because it put the Telecommunication Companies in the position of breaking the law itself. The administration placed individuals or organizations involved in civil disturbances under investigation and surveillance. One thing to note about many of these programs is they gradually expanded. This is one of the lessons of history. The programs started out very limited and targeted certain individuals and expanded over time to include others. Initially a program was focused on american citizens traveling to and from cuba. Then it was extended to people believed to threaten the president. So the office of president ial personnel and wanted to include people. The f. B. I. Added domestic and foreign entities, saying they were extremist individual and groups. It was basically the antiwar movement. The bureau of narcotics and dangerous drugs included the abuse of narcotics and dangerous drugs, so anybody who was taking drugs or dealing in drugs. In 1971, the executive branch asked the n. S. A. To monitor International Terrorism and by the end of 1971, the program had extended to include all criminal activity, as well as foreign support for or facing of subversive activity. The program did not end until after 1973 after the n. S. A. Placed really hundreds of thousands of americans under surveillance. Whats interesting is we hear from the hearings these were relatively ineffective despite the massive accumulation and gathering of intelligence. And ideology became a driving force in the programs execution. These werent the only programs. The f. B. I. Ran a famous one from 1936 to 1976, focusing on leftleaning organizations. This is about spreading misinformation about the members so they would lose their job. The Church Committee later wrote they caused antiwar activists to be evicted from homes, disabled their cars, intercepted their mail, wiretapped and bugged their conversations, in cited others to harass them and disrupted peaceful demonstrations. The surveillance of Library Records was another program between the f. B. I. And treasury. Some of the programs ranged on the absurd. The c. I. A. Used side kicks called remote viewing. When they could check with their satellites, they werent very accurate so they closed the program down and acoustic kitty being how many people have heard of acoustic kitty . So some people. This is where the c. I. A. Took a cat and tried to train the cat to go into the Russian Embassy and they surgically altered the cat, put listening devices in the cat, and when they drove up outside the Russian Embassy, as the cat crossed the street it got hit by a taxi. I have a final report, partly redacted. Anyway, the conclusion is its very difficult to train cats and perhaps a better system could be devised to place these under surveillance. These are some of the examples of the abuses that came up in this. In the early 1970s, there was few restrictions on these agencies. The Supreme Court in a case called u. S. Versus u. S. District court said this is kind of up to the political branches to decide this particular issue. And there are strong constitutional reasons for them doing this at the time. Political sam irving started his investigations at the time, chipping away at the military. You have the hughes ryan act of 1974 which put limitations on c. I. A. Funds and watergate. What happened with watergate is we had a severely weakened executive branch and so congress has an opportunity now to step in to this i dont want to say abyss, too depressing but to this general context. They have an opportunity now to do something about this. Theres also the Murphy Commission report saying the Intelligence Committee is broken from the nsc perspective. So we started have a number of inquiries. There is a match that lights the fire and the match is a newspaper article. It is a release in the new york times, a story about the c. I. A. , talking about the family jewels. Seymour hirsch starts detailing in 1974 a list of abuses that go on in the c. I. A. This is the match that lights the bonfire which suddenly explodes and everybody starts getting in and subjecting the practices to greater scrutiny. You have the Rockefeller Commission, appointed just after that. Thats led by Vice President nelson rockefeller, a direct response to the family jewels. It was also an effort to get ahead of any congressional response and to kind of take away the political steam for that. This commission looked at the c. I. A. Mail openings, the domestic surveillance and very other aspects of it and then the Pike Commission is the house effort to really look at these processes in more details and see whats happening. The Pike Committee, there was significant tension from the beginning. The records are really just colorful accounts, shall we say, of the Committee Chairman who was seen as stalling and stonewalling. He gets removed in june of 1975 and he was replaced with pike and pike turned out to be a difficult character. So theres a lot of tension between the executive branch and the Pike Committee and, of course, the Church Committee. With the Church Committee, we have a bipartisan effort, chaired by frank children with senator tower from Vice President as the vice chair. The n. S. A. , the f. B. I. , the c. I. A. , other federal agencies, all submitted files to the hearings. In 1975 and 1976, the Church Committee went on to issue seven reports and six supplemental volumes. Fabulous reading. For those of you would are interested, i assign much of this to my students, to their chagrin. I frequently reread them because there was so much in the hearings and much to learn about the process and how it worked and what went wrong. What was found was there was a broad spread there were broad spread surveillance programs underway and there have been a number of abuses. Now, the impact of the Church Committee as well as the Rockefeller Commission and the Pike Committee, even the Murphy Commission, you say it led to executive order. Id like to highlight four outcomes from the committees when they discovered all of this information. And then ill turn it over to my colleague. First, id like to talk about executive order 11905. This was issued by president ford which banned political assassination. That was one of the most important things it did. It greeted a new command structure for foreign intelligence organizations and upgraded the c. I. A. Inspector general and the legal office. We can talk about this in the contemporary context. You might want to do that, one thing they did at the time, they also required the c. I. A. Inspector general to be involved in internal oversight. The order 11905 created an intelligence Oversight Board for the Intelligence Committee. The Church Committee had been executed in january of 1975. They felt this did not go far enough. February 1976 is when 11905 came out and the Church Committee said they didnt go far enough, though the Church Committee was established in january of 1975. The second thing that happened was the establishment of congressional committees that were formed at the time which came directly out of the Church Committee. The concern was there was not enough oversight going on at the time. So they would be a blend of Standing Committees and select committees. So the membership is rotating in terms of the members. But they also have the authority to introduce legislation into the chambers which is indicative of a Standing Committee and not a select committee itself. And then we have the leading guidelines issued by the executive branch of setting new limits for the executive branch with regard to investigations. And then we have the foreign Intelligence Surveillance act. And those discussions id be happy to talk about that later. Ive written extensively on what happened in the aftermath, particularly sections 215 and 702. Id be happy to talk about that more on the panel. The final thing i would like to just point out is that covert activities have been the discussion on covert activities was intimately wrapped up in the intelligence revelations that came out at the time. So prior to the Church Committee you had the gang of four that was done informally to whatever relevant committees might have been there. Following the Church Committee and the changes in the law in 1980 and the iranian hostage crisis in 1979, in 1980 you have the gang of 8 put into a statutory basis for notification for covert action at the time. At the same time, however, you have language that requires the Intelligence Community to, a, Keep Congressional committees as fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities, and, b, Keep Congress furnished with any information or material concerning such intelligence activities. These were put into place at the same time the covert action requirements were adopted in 1980. So congress basically conditioned the two reporting requirements on the need to protect classified information and sources and methods at the time. By 1991, congress added a new or similar language for the reporting of intelligence activities still based on sources and methods and added other exceptionally sensitive matters. There were other steps taken. We have other administrative initiatives undertaken, but i would say these are the most important ones, the ones i highlighted to come out of the Church Committee, the rockefeller as well as the Pike Committee as well. Thank you very much. [applause] when youre writing intelligence estimates, something you do for a living, there will be a paragraph that says now with an alternative point of view. Yes, all of those things happened. Theyre all reprehensible. At the same time the Intelligence Community is doing serious and good work. It wasnt just a bunch of frat boys that were not doing important things. The c. I. A. Was not to have any subpoena powers. No. 3, they didnt want a military officer commanding the c. I. A. Who could still be in command of troops. Other than that, congress didnt care. In fact, theres nothing in the act that even mentions covert action. It just mentions other duties as requested. Theres a nice large hole to drive something through. And congress was fine. A senator from massachusetts was on the Senate Armed Services committee. He said there are certain things my government does that id just as soon not know about. You cant imagine a member of congress in this day and age saying that. That was the view of oversight. Gentlemen, we all know what were doing, dont tell me, its fine. That allowed a certain amount of license. I was sitting in our apartment in cambridge massachusetts where i was a history grad student and i would go out and buy the sunday times every sunday. Im sitting there in our living room reading this article not realizing your son is about to begin, son, and so the family jewels came about. Jim schlesinger became the head of the c. I. A. And he turned to his executive director and says, have we always done things on the up and up here in the building . He doesnt say anything. He says i want you to go out, every office, and i want a list of all the things weve done that wouldnt bear scrutiny today or might be illegal. If you actually read the hearings, the committee is a much more substantive hearing. Theyre holding up guns and accusing them of being rogue elephants which later church took back. The Pike Committee was a much Better Committee in terms of the substance of what intelligence does. It fell apart because the hearing leaked. The final report leaked to daniel shore, then working for cbs news and it leaked into the Village Voice and he got fired. So the Pike Committee fell apart. It doesnt work out. Anyway, the net result, one of the things that congress realized in one of those odd moments of selfrealization on the hill, we havent been good with oversight. The members got very cozy with the agencies they were overseeing. Its a select committee. Its a rule. They were created first in may of 1976. They decided to make it a Bipartisan Committee. The ranking minority member, right now, Saxby Chambliss of georgia, is the vice chairman. The republican leader on the house floor said, tip, as far as we can tell you, youre going to run the house but lets make this a Bipartisan Committee. He says you Flash Forward to 1994 and the republicans actually won and controlled the house. The ranking democratic chairman of the senate said to the incoming new chairman, we shouldnt have a partisan committee. This should be a Bipartisan Committee like in the senate. And the chairman stared and said, why is this only a good idea when youre in the minority . So we have once again hit the right balance. Theres advantages to both. In a Bipartisan Committee, you have to shave a lot of edges. In a partisan committee, things can get out of hand. So thats the structure weve ended up with. One of the major findings is this issue of getting too cozy. The idea was to only serve on the Intel Committee for x number of years. On the house its eight years if youre a regular member and 10 years which youre the chairman ranking. I will tell you our Budget System has to do with english civil war and im just going to move on. No, it does. It does. If you understand what the english civil war is about, you understand the Budget System. But thats the key control. You control the money and, trust me, when you have people by their budget, their hearts and minds will follow. Ive been on both sides of the debate and having the money side is so much more fun. Congress approved the budget of the c. I. A. And the nro and all the other agencies that basically gave them passive legal authority. Congress gave the c. I. A. Money to do covert actions. They must approve covert actions. The Congress Becomes responsible to some degree. Congre they become responsible for how many analysts you have and which sidelines you put up and whether or not you can do covert actions. Beyond that, once they have the money, theres not a lot you can do about what they can do. You may not have activities in. This is what happened in nicaragua, there was a series of amendments, the bow Land Commission the you really have to understand that congress basically gives legitimacy to the Intelligence Committee. The director of the c. I. A. And n. S. A. Likes to point out the Intelligence Committee does what it does by licensed information. We do extraordinary things that you wouldnt want ordinary people to be doing and they break the law overseas. Theres not a country in the world where thats a legal transaction. Trust me on this one. They do this with the American People because the Congress Says you may go do that. And the boundaries get a little strange. The patriot act says the briefing business is a really big deal, a huge deal. It says Congress Shall be fully and currently informed of any significant activity. Okay. What does that mean . Even an anticipated activity. So whats the significant threshold . How do you figure that out . Nobody has an answer to that one. The briefings will get you into all sorts of interesting arguments. You may remember formally Speaker Pelosi claimed she never ran a brief on the intelligence program. I will assure you she had and she just, for whatever reason, said she hadnt been. When the democrats took control of the congress at the beginning of the Obama Administration, they passed rules. President obama said you can do that but im going to veto the bill. Theyre like its not george bush. Its barack obama. It may be your guy in the white house but hes the c. I. A. The president can basically write a permission slip. How does congress do this . Theres going to be a new congress in january. This woman never voted no clearance for you. At the same time, there are things theyve done that tick her off. Oversight is essential to the system. Last point. Why does congress have the power of oversight . They have the power to create things. They said there will be a c. I. A. Therefore, they have the right to say what are you guys doing . Congress funds the nro. So they have the right to say what did you do with the money . I know the oversight systems of most of the democracies in the world, theres no country in the world that subjects its Intelligence System to much scrutiny that we do. The system works. Its just not pretty. Let me stop there and take questions. So given the time, im going to dispense with whatever questions i have and open the floor. Thank you. I was wondering why if you ask what they do what they do, they say its to protect the National Security interests. And you talked about the historical oversight in congress. I was wondering, because the term is really so broad, at least now, how do you think its changed from the time period youre talking about to the present . And who would you say is responsible for shaping that, congress with the money to give out to pursue and protect our National Security interests, the intelligence agencies . Yes. You view the world in another way. You have a sense of all the bad things that can happen. It doesnt permit you to do things that are stupid or illegal, but you tend to look at the world as a place that has a lot of i used to be in charge of the president s intelligence priority system. It carried over from president bush to president obama. Youre not permitted to do stupid things. But everybody gets involved in doing it. So two comments in response. First, so whats changed . Theres something really important going on right now that i havent seen before. That is, were seeing criminal law and foreign intelligence, National Security issues, Law Enforcement and National Security are becoming blended. And were seeing this as many, many different levels. From a scholarship perspective, if you look at the foreign Intelligence Surveillance act, theres always been a carveout for foreign intelligence. Foreign intelligence is seen as being within the purview of the executive branch. It has consistently been carved out over time. Whats happening is the foreign Intelligence Surveillance act is being applied to criminal law when the primary purpose of the investigation is criminal in nature as long as theres a significant possible terrorism, counterterrorism, National Security type aspect to the case. Were starting to see institutions, next generation identification run by the f. B. I. , it blends the terrorism and the National Security aspects with criminal Law Enforcement. You have dual missions. So institutions are becoming bleb blended. Theres a situation where national, local and state officials with upload to the f. B. I. Which can be uploaded to the dods platform. You have a National Security bureaucratic blending, institutionally and in terms of legal authorities. Because of this, the protections that we otherwise have had in terms of carving out criminal law from foreign intelligence, those are becoming increasingly blurred. Its just a major trend thats really affecting the protections that we otherwise had with regard to oversight and reporting. Where you might have had looser standards before, in many ways its not sufficient for whats happening. The second thing id like to make is whether giving money gives blessings. I understand the argument behind that. Weve seen that surface many times through history. However the Supreme Court has rejected this in a number of important cases. If you look at youngstown and kurtis rate, this is the defense view, not the majoritys view, that giving the money is simply sufficient. In the war powers act, war powers resolution, says giving money doesnt give blessing. Its important not to see that as an asset. If youre going to leave your intelligence agencies and your troops undefended, who is going to do that in terms of the money . I think its important for congress to police the line and not to assume that giving money means youre supporting whatever the action is related to the money thats being given. It can be reaffirmed statutorily as well. I thank you for speaking with us today on interesting and important topics. Im curious in at least recent years and im sure this dates back but certainly in the last five or 10 years, the public seems so much more fascinated in intelligence communities. We have a number of tv shows that focus on it, and the c. I. A. And twitter and the American People is fascinated and interesting in whats going on. Is there an increasing demand for more information . Frj covert affairs, i walked of the room when that comes on. After i finish yelling at the tv set and my wife reminds me, its got nothing to do with reality but it makes for good tv, lovely tv. Clearly the publics interest probably has to do with what happened after 911. It waxes and wanes. The core of intelligence and ill quote from richard helms, its putting analysis in front of policymakers to help them make decisions. The only good show about intelligence ive ever seen in the 1980s, there was a british series called the sandbaggers. So much about it is about bureaucratic policy. So i have a slightly different take. I think people have always been interested in intel. My mother loves james bond, and james bond has been around quite some time, ian flemings series. So what i want to point out, whats changing is technology. We have new forms of information we didnt have before. Social Network Analysis never existed before. The types of information we can get from data mining couldnt be done before. Tracking people as we move through public space using facial recognition technology. This is new technology. Unfortunately all of our jurisprudence comes from the 1970s, a time when Maxwell Smart was talking on his shoe phone and it was being mocked. Its when star trek, the plot lines were based on losing the communicator, not being able to communicate with the mother ship and it being stolen. The case came out in 1970s, in 1976, that a woman was robbed at gunpoint in baltimore maryland and she saw a 1975 monte carlo at the scene of the crime, described it to the police and went home and someone started calling her on her telephone. She went out on her porch and she called the police and the police saw the 1975 monte carlo in the neighborhood and they went to the Telephone Company and they said, excuse me, could you place a trace device on her phone . They said whats that . Back then, they didnt have a list of all the phone calls. The police said we have this device that will track all the phone numbers and wed like to do that. They said sure, go ahead. They gave their consent. They put it on the phone line. The next day, this man, smith, called the woman and they got a warrant to go into his house and they find a phone book turned to her name. The Supreme Court confronted with this and was this a violation of michael lee smiths privacy . It was not. He voluntarily gave the information to the phone company. Fast forward 30 or 40 years and suddenly its not whether you call the woman but its where youre located 24 hours a day 7 days a week, who you tell, who your social networking sites are, what your religion is, what you read, who you wake up with, where you go, all of this is recorded on our cell phones. So for the courts or the administration to treat this as Third Party Information controlled by a case decided the same year get smart was on television and not acknowledging the different interests at stake is missing the picture in terms of whats happening with technology and the intrusiveness of technology on privacy. Never watch tv shows for reality. Especially reality tv, thats the last place to find reality. There is a limit on how far below the line you can look. Right. Heres where we differ from the u. K. I would again take a slightly different view from mark in terms of whether we have more protections than any other country. The u. K. Has eight different protections on surveillance that we dont have. We cant have a lower chief justice overlooking the executive Branch Activities because we have separation of powers to some extent. One of them is their equivalent of their budgetary entities can look below the lines and we have limits how far into the numbers individuals can go. How much oversight is actually happening through congress . When the president signs a finding, which is how you create a covert action which says i find this is necessary only the president can do. He cant say is joe or john in the room, somebody get me chuck. Cant delegate this. This is one thing in policy that is personal. What is your sensibility for doing covert action . President clinton, fairly high threshold. President reagan, lower threshold. President obama, fairly low threshold, willing to accept a fair amount of violence, death and destruction. When he signs a finding, a memo of notification is sent to the hill, before the two committees. The president has signed a finding they can be told. So they are aware of the fact that covert action is going on. Its only a problem if it leaks. It doesnt leak. I would say that the issue of getting the information that my staff and my members needed when i was the staff director was the thing that occupied most of my time. Sometimes its sort of like the song youre fighting for yards at a time and killing a lot of people. Having said that, the members basically can, you know, have free range of what they can see across the board. I had free range across the board. My staff did not. My staff was compartmentalized. The staff get compartmented, except at the very top. The members can basically but even then there will be struggles. You cant call up the c. I. A. And say send me stuff. Its not going to happen. You have to still spend a fair amount of time arguing about what you get, when you get it and in what form, things like that. Its just part of the invitation to struggle. You keep changing positions here. Its a little incestuous. Its interesting if you look at classification, almost every president issues new orders for classification and how to classify and its deeply political. Every time you have republicans in the administration, you have a narrowing of information sorry an expanding of information thats incorporated into what can be classified. When you have a democrat in office, you have a narrowing of information about how to classify things. This is a problem. If im an intel officer and i have to decide whether to classify, im going to err on the conservative side. So theres been quite a bit of academic ink spilled on whether theres overclassification. Were starting to track more what is classified and what isnt and who are the original classification authorities. Weve seen fewer and fewer people are ocas, but with digit age, were starting track more. Weve looked at this in great depth. Were trying to figure out do we have an overclassification problem or not . And its actually a very difficult question when you get into it and try to look at it. I would highly look at what officials have been doing to try to get ahold of the classification problem. I would caution against the swing, which leads one to ask, you know, is there something we could do to make this more consistent between administrations which i think would be easier to administer at least from an Intel Community perspective. I want to note this administration, which is a liberal Democratic Administration has had more leaks cases prosecuted than all the administrations combined. This is where the swinging swung. No. If you look at the executive order under classification and classification structure, its consistent with this. Youre right about the leaks. Weve also seen under this administration its impact of Technology Going back to the technology point, the damage thats been done by wikileaks and Edward Snowden and all sorts of releases that have occurred have been massive in their scale and impact on National Security. I think were also seeing greater damage that Technology Offers because of the digitzation and because of the institutional changes weve seen since 9 11. If there has been this swinging back and forth, do we know whether or not other than the implications for in a sense bureaucratic behavior and peoples ability to do their jobs, do we know whether or not the swing has actually had a policy impact . Does it make a difference . I mean, we now have a long period of time when weve seen it go one way and another way. Do we have any evidence that in terms of policy making it actually has made a difference or in terms of the effectiveness of policy, has it made a difference, whether its been narrow or wide . I dont think so. First of all, i think the swing is less than laura says from administration to administration with the leftright guidance in which you can swing isnt that wide. Its precisely the point. You default into a particular mode that actually is one that might lead to a greater classification. Now, the question though is what the policy implications are. I havent seen particularly good studies on this. Looking at exactly what that means is a practical matter. I should have made this point. Not all intelligence oversight goes through committee. The Senate Armed Services and house Armed Services do oversight. The Judiciary Committee has oversight of the f. B. I. Programs. A lot of it happens elsewhere. It all goes through the defense appropriations committee. The joke on the hill is authorizes theres another dhs reports to 78 subcommittees. Trust me, theyve got oversight. A lot of oversight. Too much. Yeah, way too much. Theres another way this plays out. The title 10, title 50 debates, there are so many proposals right now on the table. I just read a report that was going through all these, whether there should be a joint Intelligence Committee for the atomic issues between the house and senate and so on. There are advantages and disadvantages to all the models that have been put forward. There are important ways for this to play out. Looking at other modes by which Congress Plays this oversight role, for constitutional reasons, every administration until the Obama Administration has considered it to be unconstitutional, the war powers resolution and yet the Obama Administration says its constitutional, they make their first reports on libya, the second report they dont make, on the grounds were just providing intel or support for the operations being conducted in libya. If were engaged in intelligence gathering going to a warmaking effort, does it take you outside the war powers resolution framework . If you go with the Founding Fathers and the formulation behind the joint Foreign Affairs and warmaking powers given to congress and the president , you dont want the United States to be able to engage in overseas exists to draw us into the war, not just because of boots on the grounds, one can make the case the intelligence operations that are going to support interNational Military activities, regardless whether it is our soldiers based overseas that congress should have oversight because it could move the nation to a status of war and i would defend that on constitutional grounds. Activities undertaken by the United States to affect the political conditions overseas and conduct it in such a way that the role of the United States would not be obvious. Its written into the law. Weve defined covert action law. Covert and clandestine do not mean the same thing. So we were defining and attributing the activity in legislation. I love this country. Everybody needs to learn history and needs to have an Oxford English dictionary at their fingertips. Every job ive had in the government ive had a copy of the constitution on my desk. One thing to note about that, there is exception for traditional military activity. In the drone world, its a common weapons platform, it could come under a traditional military activity. But if you dont, right, you can see it as a covert action, depending on how its being used and whether the u. S. Intends to ever acknowledge it or not, that particular action. Theres various ways in which new technologies are, shall we say, raising attention on the exceptions in the covert actions statutes. And intelligence collection activities do not count. If im sending someone overseas undercover to collect intel, its not covert action. Its intelligence action. I think everyone understands the rules. There is a ban on assassinations, which weve kept since the ford administration. What about Osama Bin Laden . Yes, we did. It was not a political assassination. The drone strikes are against people waging war on the United States. Its not an assassination