Making Sense with Sam Harris - #72 — Privacy and Security

Episode Date: April 17, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with General Michael V. Hayden about the reality of spying, the difference between the NSA and the CIA, the ethics of secrecy, Edward Snowden, the Russian Hacking of the 2016 US Presidential election, and other topics.  If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Today I'm speaking with General Michael V. Hayden. General Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and the only man to have ever run both the NSA and the CIA. He did that sequentially. He is currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy founded by the former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

And he's also a professor at George Mason University at their School of Public Policy, Government, and International Affairs. And he's the author of the book, Playing to the Edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror, which is well worth reading. And this was a slightly unusual interview for me in that it was a straight interview. The general and I had some technical difficulties getting on Skype. It was amusing not to be able to get on Skype with the former head of the NSA and the CIA. So we had to conduct this interview on FaceTime. All of that wrangling took a little while, and his schedule was tight. So I had about a half hour for this interview. So it could not be one of

my leisurely conversations. It was really just my questions and his answers, but I think you'll find it interesting nonetheless. We talk about many things. We talk about the ethics of spying and the trade-off between privacy and security, and we get into Edward Snowden and the consequence of his leaks, and I also get General Hayden's opinion about the Russian hacking of the U.S. election. So, please enjoy, and now I give you General Michael V. Hayden's opinion about the Russian hacking of the U.S. election. So please enjoy. And now I give you General Michael V. Hayden. I am here with General Michael V. Hayden. General, thanks for coming on the podcast. Oh, thank you very much. Listen, let's just, I want to talk to you about your book because it is fascinating. It is playing to the edge, American Intelligence in the Age of Terror. But let's just talk about your background for a moment. You are a retired four-star general in the Air Force and then went on to head both the NSA and the CIA. Am I right in thinking that no one has run both those organizations before? That's right.

I'm the first one to have been head of CIA and NSA. But an additional wrinkle, the head of NSA is always military, so I was in uniform for that. A bit unusual, but I was also in uniform for most, not all, but most of my time at CIA as well. Did you know you wanted to go into intelligence, or were you expecting a more ordinary career in the Air Force? Actually, intelligence is what I asked for. I was a history major. The Air Force was kind enough to let me get a master's degree before I came on active duty. I thought the art and discipline of history well suited me for intelligence work. They apparently agreed and allowed me to go ahead and do that.

And for most of my career, you know, a good two thirds of it, I was in what could only be defined as intelligence jobs. So now we're going to talk about things that I think most people in the general public only dimly understand, and I count myself among them, not being among the things that are only dimly understood, but among the people who dimly understand them. What is the main difference between the CIA and the NSA? How would you characterize those organizations? So what we have done in the United States, and you don't have to do it this way, but we did, is that we organized our big, muscular national intelligence agencies by the way they collect information.

And so NSA collects information through intercepted communications and communications in all of its forms, phone calls, faxes, emails. CIA gathers information through human sources, the classic spy stuff that you see in the Hollywood movies. So that's, I mean, there are other differences, but that's the fundamental dividing line between the two. And what's the relationship like between the various branches of the intelligence community? I guess you could throw the FBI in there as well. Are there rivalries? Look, I mean, look, these are all bureaucracies and that's good news and bad. I mean, bureaucracies are how humans organize themselves in order to be most efficient with a specific task. But you know, the way I've always put it

is that it takes one kind of culture to intercept communications for which you are not the intended recipient, that's NSA, and another kind of culture to suborn people to give you information that, frankly, the organization to which they belong doesn't want you to have.

Those are different things. And so they build up a bit of different kinds of cultures. The magic is to preserve enough of those cultures so that they can actually do what they're supposed to do in the first place. But they also cooperate and synchronize and harmonize their activities. And is there efficient sharing of information at this point? Yeah, there is. And look, my irreverent way of answering that, if God were giving us a grade and God were marking on a curve

comparing us to other countries, we'd get an A. But neither God nor the American people should mark us on the curve. It should be on an absolute scale. And so the sharing of information, again, created in these different kinds of organizations, the sharing of information is have different liabilities. I think at one point you say this in the book that the CIA has often been faulted for, in its use of human intelligence, for collaborating with bad people. The NSA has the opposite problem. They have the problem of eavesdropping on good people. Well, so here's – that's a great way of teeing it up. Well, so here's, that's a great way of teeing it up. So from time to time, when CIA goes through a dark period, it's generally criticized for the company it keeps. All right. Because you, you know, it's Boy Scouts generally don't know the secrets you need to know.

And so you establish relationships with folks who are out there in these targeted organizations. NSA, as you correctly suggest, NSA is out there a bit cleaner in the American culture. You know, it's technology. It's not suborning someone. It's intercepting communications. it's hard to intercept the communications of people who, frankly, I think you want us to listen to without bumping in to the communications of Americans. And there's always great distrust that NSA intentionally or inadvertently listens to people it shouldn't be listening to. Perhaps you should define this term signals intelligence or SIGINT. Sure. Yeah. So we put a three-letter syllable in front of the word INT, which means intelligence. And so you have MINT, imagery intelligence, the picture guys. You've got SIGINT, signals

intelligence. That's the NSA folks, the electrons and photons of modern communication. And then you meant human intelligence, which is the work of CIA. The politics of spying are pretty interesting because there are many things we do which everyone knows or assumes that we do. And so they're essentially open secrets. But when a secret is made explicit, people seem to react very badly to this information. So I'm thinking in particular of our surveillance or claimed surveillance of Angela Merkel's cell phone that was revealed, I believe, by Edward Snowden, or at least alleged by Edward Snowden. You know, this created an international incident, but isn't it the case that all major governments, both our allies and not, assume that this sort of spying goes on all the time? They do. And in their quieter moments, they understand. They're not enthusiastic about it, but they do accept that that kind of stuff is an accepted international practice. So I was in Germany visiting at a

conference during the height of the kerfuffle we had after Snowden's allegations. And I told a story to the Germans, which was simply, you know, after Senator Obama was elected, he had run his campaign through his blackberry. And of course, we saw that and said, Mr. President-elect, don't know that you should be doing that now. And he just refused to give it up. I mean, he's quoted, I think, on CNBC back in late 2008. He sounded like a Second Amendment bumper sticker. He said, they're going to have to pull it from my fingers in order to get my BlackBerry.

So we said, OK, we got it. You're going to keep it, but can we borrow it for a little period of time? And we kind of tightened it up and the president-elect agreed to limit some of his usage on it. But what's the backstory on that? The backstory is we were telling the soon to be most powerful man in the most powerful nation on earth that if he used his BlackBerry in his national capital, his emails, text messages, and phone calls would be intercepted by a big number of foreign intelligence services. And we didn't rend our garments or feign outrage. We just understood that's the way things are. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so now in your book, you describe how stressful the job of being a SIGINT analyst can be.

And you describe situations that I think most of us really haven't thought of in any detail. So for instance, you talk about people who spend weeks and months listening to the phone calls of specific targets and getting to know them very intimately. And then when these people are discovered to be terrorists and are located and direct action is taken against them, which is to say they're killed, these analysts then witness the aftermath. They're monitoring the calls of distraught family members. And this can be very stressful work that some intelligence operatives find they just can't do.

We had that experience at NSA because that's what they do. And it's even worse than you've laid out. I mean, sometimes when you've done all your homework and you've created exquisite intelligence and you know the location of the phone, but you want to be absolutely certain this wasn't the day that this bad guy gave his phone to his cousin, all right, for whom we have no interest, that you actually, during an intercept, might turn to the analyst and say, is that him? Is that his voice? And the analyst knows full well that if the answer is yes, you're going to go do what it was you suggested, take direct action. So you've got that decision and you've got the aftermath. I mean, one thing in intelligence,

it's really hard to dehumanize even the enemy because intelligence, you actually get up close and know people. And so, you know, in the face of these Hollywood epics that give a cartoonish view of what espionage is, people who actually have to do it bear an additional burden. It seems that the public's trust in the intelligence community is now fairly low. I don't know if it's the lowest point historically, but it's at the lowest point I can remember. And this is largely the result of the revelations of Edward Snowden. And we'll talk about Snowden in a minute. But the history of the NSA and CIA targeting American citizens precedes Snowden. And so you have the 1975 Church Committee report, which revealed the NSA was spying on people like Jane Fonda and Joan Baez. And history goes back even further than that.

How do you view this history? So that was then. This is now. That's not acceptable behavior. I'd have to find out a different way. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast,

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