Safeguarding Privacy, Inside and Outside Government

Paul R. Pillar

Intelligence, United States

Respect for the right balance between privacy and security is worth a few hassles for those who work in the other agencies.

A recent report in the New York Times, about impending new rules that would permit the National Security Agency to share more extensively with other U.S. intelligence agencies intercepted communications without first applying privacy protections, ought to be of concern to more people than just those who habitually oppose any possession by the government of such communications. It also ought to concern those who recognize the national security needs that are appropriately and necessarily served by communications intelligence. The Times report gives us only a partial glimpse of proposed new procedures that are said to be still under review, but evidently the procedures would cover not only purely foreign communications but also those that have an American end or say something about Americans. Intercepted communications that involve U.S. persons in some way have, of course, been the subject of multiple public controversies in recent years.

To understand why and how the reported new procedures are worrisome, one should bear in mind that there are two basic ways to place limits on governmental handling of intercepted communications to safeguard the public's interest in privacy. One is to limit what any government agency collects in the first place. The other is to limit what a government agency does with the material after collecting it. Public discussion of the subject has placed far greater emphasis on the first method rather than the second. That is a mistake.