http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/11/us/poll-shows-complexity-of-debate-on-trade-offs-in-government-spying-programs.html?pagewanted=all

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: barry levine 
Date: Thu, Jul 11, 2013 at 9:42 AM
Subject: re: Poll Shows Complexity of Debate on Trade-Offs in Government Spying Programs
To: "letters@nytimes.com"

To the Editor:

  It is plain that James Clapper, like Keith Alexander, lied to Congress. As long as such grave breaches of the public trust go unprosecuted, we the People will rely on Snowdens and Mannings and Drakes and Ellsbergs to tell us the truth. Any anyone who persecutes them for blowing the whistle is setting himself against the will of the sovereign People.

Barry Haskell Levine

Find more of my (largely one-sided) correspondence with the New York Times at:
htt://forgottencenter.blogspot.com/
Or write a letter of your own. Democracy only works when we engage in
the issues of our day

Poll Shows Complexity of Debate on Trade-Offs in Government Spying Programs

Mario Tama/Getty Images

A rally last month for Edward J. Snowden, whose disclosures of government surveillance have prompted a national discussion.

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: July 10, 2013 57 Comments

WASHINGTON — When Edward J. Snowden risked prison to go public with classified documents about National Security Agencysurveillance, he said he wanted to give the public a chance to weigh in on what he considered an excessive intrusion on the privacy of Americans.

It is still unclear whether Mr. Snowden, the 30-year-old former N.S.A. contractor now holed up at a Moscow airport, will escape punishment. But he has succeeded in opening the government spying’s trade-offs between civil liberties and security to the broadest and best-informed public debate in many years, even as intelligence officials are horrified at the exposure of their methods and targets.

Gregory F. Treverton, former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, said he found Mr. Snowden’s leaks “reprehensible.” But he said there had been nothing in the past quite comparable to the recent national discussion on government eavesdropping and data collection.

“It is kind of paradoxical that it took Snowden to get to this debate,” said Mr. Treverton, now with the RAND Corporation. “I’m disappointed that neither the intelligence committees nor the administration pushed this debate sooner.”

While both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have labeled Mr. Snowden a traitor, the American public apparently disagrees. In a national poll from Quinnipiac Universityreleased Wednesday, voters said by 55 percent to 34 percent that he was a whistle-blower, not a traitor.

The poll showed that the view of Mr. Snowden as a whistle-blower predominated among nearly every subgroup, regardless of political party, gender, income, education or age. The concerns about privacy and government power raised by the N.S.A. disclosures do not break down along conventional ideological lines, with libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats alike questioning the surveillance.

The poll showed continuing division, and perhaps some confusion, in the views of Americans about the surveillance programs Mr. Snowden revealed. In the same poll, for instance, 54 percent of the voters questioned said the security agency’s collection of data on Americans’ phone calls “is necessary to keep Americans safe.” But in a separate question, 53 percent said the same program “is too much intrusion into Americans’ personal privacy.”

“Americans’ views on antiterrorism efforts are complicated,” said Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “They see the threat from terrorism as real and worth defending against, but they have a sense that their privacy is being invaded and they are not happy about it at all.”

Peter D. Feaver, a political-science professor at Duke who studies public opinion and foreign policy, said that “it would be a mistake to say that the public has a settled and coherent view” on the surveillance programs a month after they were disclosed. But he said that sympathy for Mr. Snowden appeared to be growing.

“You could say that Obama has gotten the debate he said he wanted,” Professor Feaver said, referring to a remark President Obama made when the news of Mr. Snowden’s disclosures first broke. “But he is not prevailing, and he has not really engaged in the debate.”

Mr. Obama “doesn’t want to spend his political capital on this,” said Professor Feaver, who served in the George W. Bush White House. “He wants to spend it on immigration.”

While intelligence officials have tried to explain and defend the N.S.A. programs, their efforts have been seriously handicapped by accusations of inaccuracy.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, was forced to admit publicly that his previous assurance in Senate testimony that the N.S.A. was not collecting data on millions of Americans was false. A fact sheet was withdrawn after two senators charged that it contained errors. And officials who testified about terrorist plots uncovered with the help of the N.S.A. programs got the details of some cases wrong.

The Snowden disclosures, meanwhile, have prompted a flood of discussion, including Congressional hearings, research organization panels and newspaper editorials and opinion articles, both supportive and critical of the security agency. At least five federal lawsuits have been filed challenging the programs.

The debate culminated in Tuesday’s all-day “workshop” of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal panel that invited former government officials and civil libertarians to discuss two of the security agency programs: the collection of data on nearly all telephone calls made in the United States and the interception of e-mail and other messages sent by foreigners overseas using major Internet companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Skype.

A former judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees eavesdropping orders and programs in secret, said he thought the debate was overdue. The retired federal judge, James Robertson, argued for several changes, including adding a privacy advocate to the court’s closed hearings to allow an adversarial process.

Intelligence officials have expressed concern about damage done by the leaks to the N.S.A.’s collection efforts, as terrorism suspects and others have tried to switch communications methods to avoid detection. They have also noted that Mr. Snowden’s revelations have gone far beyond programs touching on the rights of Americans.

While Mr. Snowden initially explained his leaks to The Guardian as a defense of American privacy, he has made it clear that he opposes surveillance of foreign citizens, as well. By exposing a range of operations by the N.S.A. and its British equivalent against China, Russia, Brazil and the European Union, he has gone far beyond the debate over American privacy and set off a series of international disputes.

Mr. Snowden, who has asylum offers from Venezuela and other countries but has not yet found a way to leave Moscow, spoke again with The Guardian in recent days to defend his actions. In interviews with Glenn Greenwald, a Guardian columnist, Mr. Snowden denied widespread speculation that he had shared the thousands of N.S.A. documents he reportedly has on four laptops with Chinese or Russian intelligence, either deliberately or unwittingly.

“I never gave any information to either government, and they never took anything from my laptops,” Mr. Snowden told the newspaper. He did not explain how he could be certain that intelligence officers of the two countries, which have very sophisticated electronic spying abilities, had not gotten access to the information on his laptops.