Michael Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance

The former head of the NSA asserted that one can't know whether spying is legitimate or not unless one knows all the details about it.

Reuters

Is state surveillance a legitimate defense of our freedoms? The question was put to Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, during a debate Friday evening in Toronto. Alan Dershowitz joined him to argue the affirmative. Glenn Greenwald and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian argued against the resolution.

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Going in, I expected to disagree with Hayden, who presided over the NSA's illegal program of warrantless wiretapping in the years after the September 11 attacks. But I want to emphatically agree with the very first remarks he made in the debate.

"State surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms," he said, restating the resolution. "Well, we all know the answer to that. It depends. And it depends on facts."

He quickly clarified:

It depends on the totality of circumstances in which we find ourselves. What kind of surveillance? For what kind of purposes? In what kind of state of danger?

And that's why facts matter.

In having this debate, in trying to decide whether this surveillance is a legitimate defense of our freedoms, we really need to know exactly what this surveillance is.

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Michael Hayden's Unwitting Case Against Secret Surveillance