Hey, Hayden, not doing it right = more leaks. Get it?

Two pieces of information circulated today cause me to revive my comment from the other day: that leaks are increased when a Federal agency pushes the legal envelope ( http://scatablog.blogspot.com/2006/05/irony-of-it-all-once-again-bushs.html )

Think about this. The FISA courts operate in secret. If the NSA had followed the rules, then there would have been no NSA employees concerned about whether they were breaking the law or not – i.e. nothing to whistle-blow.The irony is that doing it unlawfully made it much more likely for the whole thing to be disclosed to the public.

First, we get this quotation from NSA head Michael Hayden in 2002 – picked up by Armondo posting on Daily Kos ( http://www.dailykos.com/ )

. . . [I]n the mid 1970s . . . one of my predecessors sat here nearly mute while
being grilled by members of Congress for intruding upon the privacy rights of
the American people. Largely as a result of those hearings, NSA is governed
today by various executive orders and laws and these legal restrictions are
drilled into NSA employees and enforced through oversight by all three branches
of government.

Then, as reported in Salon ($), the Baltimore Sun is reporting that a Clinton NSA program that really had been designed carefully to comply with FISA law and the 4th Amendment was shelved by Hayden because, mainly, he wanted to do his own thing – for"turf protection and empire building."

As Gorman explains, the NSA's ThinThread program involved the collection and automated analysis of phone and e-mail records in encrypted form. To alleviate privacy concerns, human analysts could request decryption of specific records only after the NSA's computers identified a pattern or a threat. The system also contained an automated auditing function that would have prevented analysts from misusing the data that was being collected.

Gorman's sources says ThinThread underwent "rigorous testing" in 1998 and got "high marks" for everything it was supposed to do. So what happened to it? After 9/11, Gorman says, Hayden's NSA shelved the program "because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers." Translated: NSA officials didn't want to pursue the program because they thought it would "humiliate" another program, called Trailblazer, that Hayden himself had
initiated.

Really, can these guys do anything right? They always want to strut the tough-guy stuff, yet there's a huge difference between pretending to be the tough guy and actually being one. They complain about leaks, apparently with no clue how they create the sieve themselves.