NSA: It Would Violate Your Privacy to Say if We Spied on You
Gen. Keith Alexander, center, the head of the National Security Agency, visits Afghanistan, 2010. Photo: ISAF — The surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won't tell two powerful United States Senators …
Context & Ripple Effects
This refusal lands three months after Gen. Keith Alexander's repeated congressional denials of Wired's domestic-spying report in March 2012, when the NSA chief answered questions about domestic surveillance more than a dozen times without conceding the story's premise. The new twist is procedural rather than substantive: asked directly by two sitting senators whether they themselves were surveilled, the agency has invoked the targets' privacy as the reason it will not say.
The story traveled widely for a surveillance-agency non-answer — pickups at The Verge, Techdirt, Slashdot, and DSLreports all within days — which suggests the press read it less as a routine FOIA-style dodge than as an oversight problem: the people constitutionally positioned to check the NSA cannot learn whether the agency checked them.
First-order effects
- Two US senators seeking to perform their oversight function are told the answer would violate their own privacy, leaving Congress with no confirmed record of whether its members were swept up in NSA collection.
- Keith Alexander's agency extends its March posture — deny specifics in open hearing, decline confirmation in writing — into a formal position that disclosure itself is the harm.
Second-order effects
- The privacy rationale hands other agencies a reusable template for stonewalling elected overseers, while giving surveillance critics like Techdirt and Slashdot's communities a concrete artifact to argue that congressional notification requirements are effectively voluntary.
- If lawmakers conclude that direct questioning yields nothing, pressure shifts toward structural fixes — statutory reporting thresholds or inspector-general review — rather than testimony-by-testimony interrogation of Alexander.
Third-order effects
- The episode hardens a structural asymmetry: an agency whose collections touch Americans' communications also controls what those Americans — including their senators — may learn about it, making 'privacy' a shield that operates in only one direction.
- Sustained over time, this pattern pushes the surveillance debate away from individual incidents and toward the legitimacy question of secret interpretation and self-certified compliance, the fault line along which future reform fights organize.
The trend: US surveillance agencies are converging on neither-confirm-nor-deny as standard practice even toward their own congressional overseers, converting oversight hearings into contests over disclosure rules rather than facts.