Date: July 27, 2006 8:36:29 AM PDT
Subject: [SPY NEWS] Watching the Watchers: An Intelligence Official Works to Keep Agencies in Bounds
Watching the Watchers: An Intelligence Official Works to Keep Agencies in Bounds
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: July 25, 2006
WASHINGTON, July 24 — The United States’ spy agencies employ 100,000 people and a global eavesdropping network to keep Americans safe from terrorists and other threats. Alexander W. Joel’s job is to keep Americans safe from the agencies.
Mr. Joel, a former Central Intelligence Agency lawyer, was formally appointed last Dec. 8 as the first civil liberties protection officer for the office of the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte. A week later, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping in the United States without court warrants, setting off the most sweeping debate about privacy, security and intelligence in three decades.
“It was not propitious timing,” Mr. Joel said in an interview at the intelligence director’s temporary offices at Bolling Air Force Base in Southeast Washington.
Mr. Joel, 41, projects an earnest dedication to bedrock American principles, carrying in his pocket a small booklet containing the Constitution, with the federal employee’s oath to defend it taped inside.
“We can’t do our job without the trust of the American people,” Mr. Joel said. And winning trust is not easy for agencies that operate in secret and wield technology with formidable power to collect, sort and store information, he said.
So, just what does the civil liberties protection officer think about the much-debated N.S.A. program?
Alas, he cannot say. “It’s being handled directly by the president and the attorney general,” Mr. Joel said. “It’s not my job to tell the president what the rules are.”
Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Mr. Joel’s cautious stance reflected an inherent problem with such posts, which were recommended by the Sept. 11 commission and have also been created at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security.
“Those offices are crippled by their lack of authority,” Ms. Fredrickson said. “They are directly under the supervision of whoever’s running their agency.”
But Mr. Joel said he had the clout he needed. He has worked closely with another new enterprise, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, since it first met in March. The board was established by the intelligence reform act of 2004, but it took months for President Bush to appoint its five members and more months for the Senate to confirm its chairwoman, Carol E. Dinkins, a Texas lawyer and a former deputy United States attorney general.
Ms. Dinkins said neither her board nor the civil liberties officers needed immense legal powers to do their work. “We’re able to bring a strong power of suasion in saying, ‘Here’s what needs to be considered and here’s why,’ ” she said. Among other issues, the board has been discussing the government’s terror watch lists and how people can get off them, she said.
The amiable but cautious Mr. Joel made a splash last month by hiring a former colleague of Ms. Fredrickson’s, Timothy H. Edgar, who had been the A.C.L.U.’s top national security lobbyist for five years. Given the organization’s outspoken attacks on Bush administration intelligence policies, including those regarding its treatment of detainees and domestic surveillance, it was an unexpected move. “He’s been working the same issues from the other side,” Mr. Joel said of Mr. Edgar.
Mr. Joel was born in Laos and grew up in Guatemala, El Salvador, Panama and Jamaica as his father traveled for the United States Agency for International Development. His father, a German-born Jew whose family fled the Nazis, met his mother, a Korean, while both were working for the United Nations during the Korean War, Mr. Joel said.
Mr. Joel worked as a privacy and technology lawyer for the Marriott Corporation before being prompted by the Sept. 11 attacks to join the general counsel’s office at the C.I.A.
There he worked on the legal rules governing American spies when they encounter American citizens in their work. He was part of what he called the “civil liberties infrastructure” created by the intelligence reforms of the 1970’s, which established inspectors general, Congressional oversight committees and new laws like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
“These rules were developed to try to avoid the mistakes that led to the abuses” exposed by the Church Committee in the Senate in the 1970’s, he said. That history of invasions of privacy is part of his standard slide show at training sessions, he said.
Now, as the government pushes for greater sharing of information on terrorist threats among federal, state and local agencies, Mr. Joel is working on guidelines to make sure privacy is not sacrificed in the process, he said. He also wants to explore how to expand the use of software to protect privacy rather than invade it, by “anonymizing” data so that analysts can do searches without looking at real names and personal information.
Mr. Joel said he taught intelligence officers “the civil liberties SAFE-T cycle” — “Spot issues, Assess rules, Formulate protection, Execute protection, Test compliance.” But he is trying not to duplicate the efforts of the lawyers already at work in the spy agencies who have long conducted training on such matters.
“We’re not here to create an additional layer of bureaucracy,” he said, addressing a common complaint about Mr. Negroponte’s office.
The existing offices often respond to complaints and problems, Mr. Joel said. “My job is to try to get involved early and try to avoid problems.”
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