The chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence said he believes the intelligence collection programs he oversees adhere to the law better than most other government programs, but he will seek this month to increase transparency to address public concerns.
Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) said at a Washington Post Live Cybersecurity Summit yesterday that he and fellow House and Senate intelligence committee members spent the summer “trying to find these confidence-builders” for the public.
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| Photo courtesy Rep. Mike Rogers. |
“Can we do some things that improve transparency? Are there some things we had classified that maybe we can declassify at some certain point to give the broader public a sense that there is a true oversight and there’s lots of checks and balances in these systems?” he said.
Rogers said he believed the threats facing the United States were more complex now than ever, and the intelligence programs are vital to the country’s safety. That being said, he added, “we understand we can’t continue to do this if we don’t have the public’s support, so we’re working on those issues on transparency.”
Rogers said that after working with his House and Senate colleagues, he’d have a legislative package of National Security Agency reforms ready to go out by mid-October that would hopefully address public concerns while keeping intelligence collection capabilities strong. Rogers told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in late September that he was looking at eight to 15 items to include.
“I do think it makes some good strides in protecting sources and methods–which we are charged with, we have that responsibility–but making it more open so people can see the sheer level of oversight,” he said.
During the summit, Rogers also spoke about the fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks, part of the reason the public has lost so much trust in the intelligence community.
Rogers said the committee is looking into the possibility that Snowden had outside help in stealing government secrets to leak.
“There’s some things in there that just don’t add up,” he said. “We’re a little concerned there may be more to the story than meets the eye.”
For example, Rogers said, the search queries Snowden performed were more advanced than he could perhaps have done on his own. He would have had to know that documents existed in order to find them, and someone in his job should not have known about these items. Rogers also pointed to Snowden’s travel arrangements after stealing the documents.
Michael Hayden, former NSA director and former Central Intelligence Agency director, said at the same event that he was concerned because Snowden didn’t just stumble upon something and leak it because he was offended by what he had found. Rather, Hayden classified Snowden’s actions as a “sustained, long-term campaign that he had undertaken in order to take this information,” moving around from job to job to get what he needed.
Both men agreed there was a short-term impact in that secret information had been leaked, but that the bigger long-term impact was that Snowden could continue to do harm by shedding light on intelligence collection methods for any other government or non-state actor interested in those details.