Ethical argument framework and applications

NSA & CIA - "Civilian" Agencies Using Questionable Ethical Standards

Government has several agencies that are doing military and quasi-military tasks, but those agencies operate as supposedly "civilian" agencies. Two of those agencies are the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA). This paper will review past and current NSA activities, what the NSA is legally authorized to do and what ethical issues are raised by some of the NSA activities. It will also provide some information about the abuses and arrogance of the civilian-focused CIA which performs military tasks.

What is the National Security Archive?

The National Security Archive" (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/the_archive.html)(referred to hereafter in this paper as Archive) is an "independent non-governmental research institute and library" that is funded and operated by The George Washington University (GWU) on the GWU campus. The Archive uses the "Freedom of Information Act" (FOIA) in order to gather and publish "declassified documents" from the NSA and other agencies that cover a diverse range of issues such as "national security, foreign, intelligence, and economic policies" of the U.S. The Archive obtains much of its information through the FOIA, a law that allows journalists and other researchers to obtain documents that have to do with U.S. Government activities. The Archive also gets material for its library through the "Mandatory Declassification Review," presidential paper collections, congressional records, and "court testimony," according to "About the National Security Archive."

If the FOIA law was not in place, millions of documents - that do not place the security of the U.S. In jeopardy but that allow the public to be informed about how its tax-supported government is behaving - would be kept secret by various government agencies; and hence, the strategies and decisions which affect the American people, their jobs and their communities, would not be known. Without the FOIA, the same way totalitarian and communist governments keep information away from their citizens would be the norm here in the U.S. American is a democracy, and the FOIA assures that, to come degree at least, America is an open society and its elected officials and paid government employees can be made to be accountable.

What are the Duties of the NSA?

According to Archive documents, the NSA headquarters is located at Ford George G. Meade, Maryland. It was established by the "1952 Truman Memorandum," as part of the Department of Defense; and it is defined in its own documents as "the nation's cryptologic organization... [and has] two primary missions - exploiting foreign communications, also known as Signals Intelligence (SIGINT), and protecting U.S. information systems, also called Information Assurance (IA)."

The language used by the NSA makes it sound civilian; "NSA supports military customers, national policymakers, and the counterterrorism and counterintelligence community, as well as key international allies." The word "customers" sounds like the NSA is just perhaps a corporation, like Starbucks, serving something besides coffee to its customers. But far from coffee, the NSA is supposedly, according to Archive documents, "a workforce...of highly talented military and civilian members with a wide array of skills and expertise: mathematicians, physicians, cryptanalysts, intelligence analysts, linguists, computer scientists, and engineers."

Some of the "customer demands" that NSA takes on with its "highly talented" people include "transnational terrorism, narcotics trafficking, organized crime, counterintelligence, alien smuggling, asymmetric threats," among other "customer demands." The NSA brags about its work, claiming it has been "credited with preventing or significantly shortening military conflicts, thereby saving lives" of civilians and soldiers.

But, it is fair to ask, if the NSA is so efficient, so high tech - and if it is, as it claims to be, "the premier information agency of the industrial age" - why did it fail to prevent the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? And why is the NSA spying on innocent Americans today?

What are the Ethical Issues that Surround the NSA?

In an article published on May 29, 2006, by the New Yorker - written by one of the most respected investigative journalists in the U.S., Seymour Hersh - abuses by the NSA leading to the establishment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978 were pointed out. In the "mid-nineteen-seventies," Hersh writes, paraphrasing a recently retired NSA official, the NSA "has illegally intercepted telegrams to and from the United States." And so Congress passed the FISA, "to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance."

And yet, investigative reporters revealed in December, 2005, the NSA "was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries"; and in May, 2006, Hersh notes that USA Today reported the NSA was "collecting information on millions of private domestic calls." Why? It can be assumed that after the embarrassment that the FBI, CIA, and NSA suffered because they failed to anticipate and stop the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the NSA was going to go all out to make sure it didn't happen again, even if it meant violating civil rights of innocent citizens, and even violating the FISA laws.

Hersh writes that as regards the "millions" of private citizen phone calls made, the FISA law "requires the government to get a warrant from a special court if it wants to eavesdrop on calls made or received by Americans." But no warrants were sought by the NSA. And, further, although the NSA and the Bush Administration said that they were not actually listening in to conversations, that they were just reviewing the "call logs" (recording through computers what numbers were called from which numbers; when and how often the calls were made) looking for possible links to terrorist groups, Hersh's NSA source said the fact is that untold tens of thousands of citizens' conversations were listened to. Was it effective? "The vast majority of what we did with the intelligence was ill-focused and not productive," an unnamed NSA source told Hersh.

The NSA, which "has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals" (Eggen, 2005), has also monitored emails of "thousands of people" according to the Washington Post. The "secret order" by Bush, which gave the NSA power to spy on millions of Americans and authorized the NSA to hide its real activities from the FISA, "may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity," according to Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, who was quoted in the Washington Post story written by Dan Eggen.

Meantime, is it ethical for the CIA to decide what constitutes news and what does not constitute news? That issue has come up in 2006, and the CIA in fact has been challenged in court by the Archive, because the CIA "claims the right to decide what is news," the Archive reported in a press release (June 14, 2006). When a news organization or bona fide research-gathering organization such as George Washington University's National Security Archive requests documents through the FOIA, it is expected that some photocopying fees will be charged by the CIA. But the CIA "last year began claiming authority to assess additional fees if the [CIA] decides any journalist's request is not newsworthy enough," the Archive reported.

The lawyer for the Archive in this suit against the CIA, Patrick J. Carome, was quoted in the Archive press release: "If the CIA succeeds in exercising broad discretion to charge additional fees to journalists, despite the plain language of the law, then too often we will find out only what the government wants us to know." The Archive is indeed a bona fide journalistic agency, and hence "cannot be charged for searches for records requested under the FOIA," the Archive's press release continues. The Archive received a 2005 Emmy Award for "Outstanding Achievement in News and Documentary Research, among "numerous awards" for journalism. And yet, in October 2005, the CIA "demanded that the Archive show that its requests for records meet several criteria that are not found in the FOIA itself," the Archive explained in the press release of June, 2006.

And so, not only does the CIA unethically charge journalists more money than it needs to under the law for various documents (depending on the CIA's interpretation of the document's value), the CIA also is making its own laws above and beyond the laws of Congress (like FOIA, for example). Indeed, the CIA (since October, 2005) is demanding that the Archive only ask for and receive documents that "concern current events" and are of "interest to the general public" and "enhance the public understanding of the operations and activities of the U.S. Government," the press release reports.