Blind Men

General Michael Hayden, the former Director of the National Security Agency, spoke at the National Press Club on January 23, 2006. Read these few short paragraphs about the NSA program created by President Bush's still-unseen executive order (bold below is mine):

The purpose of all this is not to collect reams of intelligence, but to detect and prevent attacks. The intelligence community has neither the time, the resources nor the legal authority to read communications that aren't likely to protect us, and NSA has no interest in doing so. These are communications that we have reason to believe are al Qaeda communications, a judgment made by American intelligence professionals, not folks like me or political appointees, a judgment made by the American intelligence professionals most trained to understand al Qaeda tactics, al Qaeda communications and al Qaeda aims.

Their work is actively overseen by the most intense oversight regime in the history of the National Security Agency. The agency's conduct of this program is thoroughly reviewed by the NSA's general counsel and inspector general. The program has also been reviewed by the Department of Justice for compliance with the president's authorization. Oversight also includes an aggressive training program to ensure that all activities are consistent with the letter and the intent of the authorization and with the preservation of civil liberties.

Let me talk for a few minutes also about what this program is not. It is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations that we then sort out by these alleged keyword searches or data-mining tools or other devices that so-called experts keep talking about.

This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda.

You know that story about the blind men and the elephant?

The media and the blogosphere are grasping at things, swearing that from what they can feel, they have the snake in hand. But they haven't really touched a snake, have they? They just touched just something that they assume is a snake, and have proclaimed out loudly that it is a snake, and we have laws against having snakes.

Well, the NSA story is a new animal in the zoo and I've touched ... something, part of it, far away from where everyone else is standing and yelling. I can only sense a fraction of it, but I've touched just enough to think I've got something different on my hands that what anyone else has touched so far, and a zookeeper I've come in contact with has provided a vague confirmation of, "yeah, that's something different, all right."

I don't know what I've got. But I know it is something quite different than a snake, and I know just enough to know that the people grasping at snakes are wrong about what they are touching, and that laws against snakes do not apply.