Snooping and keeping secrets

Michael Ledeen is

worried about the current practice of the FISA Court to approve requests for all data the government claims might be “relevant” to national security. Its critics are calling it a “parallel Supreme Court” that only hears the government’s side of the request, and last year it approved all of the 1800 requests it received. Nobody’s perfect, and that number tells me that oversight–the purpose of the court, after all–is insufficient. It also suggests that the court is being entranced by the “big data” dream.

But I’m even more worried about the government’s obsession with keeping its own secrets. Not just classified information, which is kosher, but things it would prefer we don’t know.

The president has unleashed a little-noted but truly scary “spy on your colleagues” campaign within the federal bureaucracy, calling on government workers to report suspicious behavior by their cohorts. The mission is to identify potential leakers before they spill the beans on what our government is up to. This (classic McCarthyite) campaign is being applied to all manner of information, including stuff in the Agriculture Department and the Peace Corps, that is not remotely classified.

The thing is so ugly that civil servants have been warned that they may be singled out for punishment for failure to report suspicious behavior.

Read even more here.