Whatever the Spook State Wants...

Tulsi Gabbard is the latest to go into a room and come out reformed

Senator James Langford tells NBC News he’ll now support Tulsi Gabbard for DNI chief thanks to her 180-reversal on domestic surveillance

There’s an often-told, fanciful story that goes like this: Each new president, after inauguration, goes into a room at the request the CIA and is shown a film of the Kennedy assassination … shot from the grassy knoll. And the end of the film, the lights come on and the CIA person says, “Any questions, sir?” In the story, there’s no response.

Fanciful yes, but fiction that tells a truth.

The view from the Grassy Knoll (source)

Mike Johnson Goes Into a Room…

Last April, FISA Section 702 was up for renewal. As originally written, 702 was already a backdoor around the prohibition against collecting data of non-foreign individuals — i.e., citizens.

While Section 702 prohibits the NSA and FBI from intentionally targeting Americans with this mass surveillance, these agencies routinely acquire a huge amount of innocent Americans' communications “incidentally.” The government can then conduct backdoor, warrantless searches of these “incidentally collected” communications.

This “incidental” collection could then be searched and used for any reason at all, allowing the security apparatus to, basically, surveil any American it wanted to without a warrant. According to the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), in 2021 alone, “the FBI reported conducting up to 3.4 million warrantless searches of Section 702 data using Americans’ identifiers.”

That’s what they reported. Whether the security state even follows this thin-as-a-cheesecloth restriction is beyond the scope of this discussion. Channeling I.F. Stone: The State always lies.

Responding to this obvious abuse, Senate Republicans and Democrats introduced a deeply flawed but still valuable amendment to FISA Section 702 that would add a warrant requirement before allowing the government to search this “incidentally collected” data on U.S. citizens.

House Speaker Johnson supported adding that warrant requirement. Until…

[Johnson:] “When I was a member of Judiciary I saw the abuses of the FBI, the terrible abuses over and over and over, the hundreds of thousands of abuses. And then when I became Speaker I went to the SCIF and got the confidential briefing on sort of the other perspective on that to understand the necessity of section 702 of FISA and how important it is for national security. And it gave me a different perspective.” [emphasis added]

A SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) is a secure room or area designed for processing, storing, and discussing sensitive information regarding U.S. military, security and intelligence operations. State secrets. Keys to the security vault. In real life, a SCIF looks like this.

So Speaker Mike Johnson, who in 2023 said this to Glenn Greenwald…

[Johnson:] “That is what keeps us up at night, Glenn, we're worried about what has become of these agencies that have such broad and expansive powers. The top law enforcement agency in the country, that is supposed to be protecting and serving the American people, is being used against them.”

…that same Mike Johnson went into a room and suddenly came out reversed. (Greenwald: “Whatever they did to him, it absolutely worked.”) In April 2024, Johnson pushed for (and got) FISA reform-without-reform and with expansion. In May, he got his reward — Democrats did their part and saved him as Speaker. Teamwork. Who says security state partners can’t work together?

Tulsi Gabbard Goes Into a Room…

Which brings us to Tulsi Gabbard. Regular readers will recall that last November I supported supporting her nomination for Director of National Intelligence, the nation’s top Spook State position. The reason: while Gabbard’s nomination was a very mixed bag, her positives were those not offered by any other candidate.

Tulsi Gabbard's DNI Nomination

Among those positives, I listed her opposition to domestic surveillance, not least because of her own experience as a target. Of this Gabbard said, “Given this environment, it's impossible to feel free. No American deserves this. No American deserves to live in fear of our own government.” My conclusion at the time: The State wants a robot in office, and she’s not it.

I now take all of that back. Security robot she is. In her case, the only room she walked into had GOP lobbying inside. She was told to cave and she did. Her reward is the job.

Tulsi Gabbard waving hello (Nick Hagen / The New York Times)

Punchbowl News, which broke this story, has inside accounts of the lobbying Gabbard endured. Sen. Tom Cotton, a surveillance enthusiast, is quoted as saying this (emphasis mine):

[Cotton:] “Tulsi Gabbard has assured me in our conversations that she supports Section 702 as recently amended [i.e., enhanced] and that she will … support its reauthorization as DNI. That last part is important because, if confirmed as DNI, Gabbard would need to certify the statute annually in order for intelligence collection to continue under the 702 program.”

Resistance Is Futile?

Seems so. Thanks to Johnson, Gabbard, and NatSec members of Congress (almost all of them), we’re in for another decade of enhanced surveillance, if not many more.

And who knows what, under Trump, new enhancements will show up? After all, with a climate crisis on the horizon, the State will need all the domestic control it can get.

Whatever the Spook State wants, it seems to get. America goes into a room…