WASHINGTON, DC– In comments after giving the opening plenary presentation of the Intelligence & National Security Summit, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said that the disclosures made by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden had driven the intelligence community to become more transparent to citizens about how it does business. In response to a question about the impact of Snowden's disclosures on the intelligence community asked through moderator and former Director of National Intelligence Ambassador John Negroponte, Clapper said, "On one hand, it forced some needed transparency, particularly on programs that had an impact on civil liberties and privacy in this country. If that had been all he had done, I could have tolerated it."
But, Clapper added, Snowden "exposed so many other things that had nothing to do with" civil liberties and privacy, including information about the US intelligence community's operations that did tangible damage to operations. "He has [done] untold damage to our collection activities," Clapper said, asserting that "terrorists have gone to school on what Snowden leaked." And programs that had a real impact on the security of American forces overseas, including one program in Afghanistan, "which he exposed and Glenn Greenwald wrote about, and the day after he wrote about it, the program was shut down by the government of Afghanistan," Clapper noted.
That statement was likely an allusion to the NSA's monitoring of virtually all the phone calls in the Bahamas and one other country—a country that Wikileaks later outed as Afghanistan.
The majority of Clapper's remarks focused on the need for the intelligence community to integrate transparency into its organizational culture where possible. After being involved in the intelligence community (starting as a military signals intelligence officer) for much of the last five decades, Clapper said, "The kind of transparency we're engaging in now is almost genetically antithetical to me. But one of my major takeaways is that, yes, we have to protect our secrets, our tradecraft—but we have to be more transparent about what we can talk about." Alluding to Snowden, he added, "That's a lesson we didn't learn quickly enough, and that's why more and more we're discussing our work, to show that we're worthy of America's trust, and that we make contributions that are valuable."
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence's Tumblr blog, ODNI On The Record, has been part of that effort to be more transparent, Clapper said. So has the declassification of over 5,000 documents, "especially about the oversight of our work. And by publishing these documents, we reach millions of people around the world, including our adversaries," he said. While the documents the ODNI has published may have been used by adversaries to better understand the US government's intelligence services, "we've determined transparency is worth the cost," Clapper noted.
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