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There was a time when the US National Security Agency was so secretive that government officials dared not speak its name in public. NSA, the joke went, stood for “No Such Agency.”
That same agency this month held an on-the-record conference call with reporters, issued a lengthy press release to rebut a newspaper story, and posted documents on a newly launched open website - icontherecord.tumblr.com (which stands for intelligence community on the record).
The steps were taken under pressure as President Barack Obama’s administration tries to calm a public storm over disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the surveillance agency and its British counterpart scoop up far more Internet and phone data than previously known.
The NSA’s moves out of the shadows were meant to show that it operates lawfully and fixes mistakes when they are detected, but not everyone is convinced that it is a fundamental shift toward more openness at the intelligence agencies.
Some steps toward openness were unprecedented.
The government for the first time released opinions - previously labeled Top Secret - from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which never publicly airs its decisions on the electronic eavesdropping and communications collection by the NSA.
The move came despite resistance from some Justice Department lawyers and some NSA and CIA officials concerned about the amount of unredacted material going public in the three FISA Court opinions released, US sources said.
In the end, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made the decision on how much material was released from the previously secret court opinions.
“There is no disagreement across the community with regard to whether or not we need to be more transparent and it is just a question of determining how far we can safely go,” Shawn Turner, DNI spokesman, said.
Obama and other officials have said the NSA surveillance programmes are lawful, have been approved by Congress and the FISA Court, and are aimed at detecting and disrupting terrorist plots.
The FISA court said the NSA may unintentionally have collected as many as 56,000 e-mails of Americans a year from 2008 to 2011 and may have violated the Constitution before adjustments were made.
Some analysts said intelligence agencies had not necessarily entered a brand new world of public displays of information.
“I wouldn’t call it a seismic shift towards a greater transparency. The federal government put these documents out under duress,” said Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
“The problem is they just keep releasing materials bit by bit and so the scandal never goes away.”