{"id":8064,"date":"2015-05-13T06:02:19","date_gmt":"2015-05-13T11:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8064"},"modified":"2015-05-13T06:02:19","modified_gmt":"2015-05-13T11:02:19","slug":"many-of-the-nsas-loudest-defenders-have-financial-ties-to-nsa-contractors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8064","title":{"rendered":"Many of the NSA&#8217;s Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/05\/12\/intelligence-industry-cash-flows-media-echo-chamber-defending-nsa-surveillance\/\" target=\"_blank\">Many of the NSA&#8217;s Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors<\/a><\/h3>\n<p>The debate over the NSA\u2019s bulk collection of phone records has reached a critical point after a federal appeals court last\u00a0week\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/05\/07\/appellate-court-rules-nsas-bulk-collection-phone-records-illegal\/\">ruled<\/a>\u00a0the practice illegal, dramatically raising the stakes for pending Congressional legislation that would fully or partially reinstate the program. An army of pundits promptly took to television screens, with many of them brushing off concerns about the surveillance.<\/p>\n<p>The talking heads have been backstopping the NSA\u2019s mass surveillance more or less continuously since it was revealed. They spoke out to support the agency when NSA contractor Edward Snowden released details of its programs in 2013, and they\u2019ve kept up their advocacy ever since \u2014 on television news shows, newspaper op-ed pages, online and at Congressional hearings. But it\u2019s often unclear just how financially cozy these pundits are with the surveillance state they defend, since they\u2019re typically identified with titles that give no clues about their conflicts of interest. Such conflicts have become particularly important, and worth pointing out, now that the debate about NSA surveillance has shifted from simple outrage to politically prominent legislative debates.<\/p>\n<p>As one example of the opaque link between NSA money and punditry, take the words of Stewart Baker, who was\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.steptoe.com\/professionals-Stewart_Baker.html\">general counsel<\/a>\u00a0to the NSA from 1992 through 1994. During a Senate committee hearing last summer on one of the reform bills now before Congress, the USA FREEDOM Act,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/04\/28\/nearly-two-years-snowden-congress-poised-something-just-much\/\">which<\/a>would\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/05\/05\/usa-freedom-act-desperately-important-laughably-pathetic\/\">partially<\/a>\u00a0limit mass surveillance of telephone metadata, Baker essentially said the bill would aid terrorists.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cFirst, I do not believe we should end the bulk collection program,\u201d he told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. \u201cIt will put us at risk. It will, as Senator King strongly suggested, slow our responses to serious terrorist incidents. And it is a leap into the dark with respect to this data.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Many of the NSA&#8217;s Loudest Defenders Have Financial Ties to NSA Contractors The debate over the NSA\u2019s bulk collection of phone records has reached a critical point after a federal appeals court last\u00a0week\u00a0ruled\u00a0the practice illegal, dramatically raising the stakes for pending Congressional legislation that would fully or partially reinstate the program. An army of pundits [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[5381,249,577,5382,765,5380,4810],"class_list":["post-8064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-conflict-of-interest","tag-edward-snowden","tag-nsa","tag-senate-select-committee","tag-surveillance","tag-us-patriot-act","tag-usa-freedom-act"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8064"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8065,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8064\/revisions\/8065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}