14 DAY TRIAL // James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, has taken the time to respond to a new series of leaks regarding the NSA’s efforts to break through Tor’s encryption network.
Unsurprisingly, he chose to keep up the story that the end justifies the means, namely the fight against terrorism and other types of threats should allow all types of actions from the NSA.
“Recently published news articles discuss the intelligence community's interest in tools used to facilitate anonymous online communication. The articles accurately point out that the intelligence community seeks to understand how these tools work and the kind of information being concealed,” Clapper wrote.
“However, the articles fail to make clear that the intelligence community's interest in online anonymity services and other online communication and networking tools is based on the undeniable fact that these are the tools our adversaries use to communicate and coordinate attacks against the United States and our allies,” he continues.
Once more, he takes the time to mention that the NSA employees and those throughout the Intelligence Community, for that matter, are abiding the law, which is, of course, questionable since the agency has pretty much made up its own laws and accounted for little of the mistakes it made over the years.
Case in point, the “misinterpretation” of an order given out by the FISA court that led to over two years of listening in to thousands of people that weren’t on the suspect list. This privacy violation led to no consequences for the NSA.
Furthermore, Clapper says the agency’s employees are respecting the rights of the citizens, once more – arguable, and that they’re doing everything they can to help keep the United States safe. This latter point has also been debunked by the NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, who admitted that only 13 out of the 54 terrorist plots mentioned to have been foiled with the help of mass surveillance were actually real.