US Director of National Intelligence Admits He Was Wrong About Data Collection

Gunkerty Jeb writes "In a highly unusual move, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said Tuesday that he misspoke when he told a Congressional committee in March that the National Security Agency does not collect data on millions of Americans. Clapper said at the time that the agency does not do so 'wittingly,' but in a letter to the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Clapper admitted this statement was 'erroneous.' Clapper, the top U.S. intelligence official, has been quite vocal in his defense of the NSA's now-public surveillance programs such as PRISM and the metadata collection program. In statements published shortly after the leak of classified documents by Edward Snowden about those collection efforts Clapper said that they both have been repeatedly authorized by Congress and the executive and judicial branches over the years."

Re:The fall guy

[CunningPike]

Not forgotting (seeminly multiple) countries closing their airspace [bbc.co.uk] on the chance that you might be on board.

White House petition to prosecute Clapper

[ApharmdB]

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/prosecute-director-national-intelligence-james-clapper-lying-congress/HNfsgGlm [whitehouse.gov]

Re:What's this then?

[ducomputergeek]

This issue was addressed a couple thousand years ago by a man name Plato. The work is called The Republic. You might want to consider reading it because it addresses this exact problem with direct democracy: it ends with the tyranny of the majority where minority opinions don't matter.

That's why we're a Constitutional Republic with checks and balances. At least on paper. That was the original intent of the Founders. What we are today is more or less an oligarchy. Politics here are controlled by a couple families, one Republican, one Democrat. One seems to hold one half of the state and federal offices, the other one holds the rest and occasionally job titles change as they reach term limits or get elected to a federal post.

Re:It's not an 'error', it's a 'lie'

[Anonymous Coward]

During the late 1980's, 800 bank officials went to jail for the Savings and Loans failures. In the last bank collapse, no one went to trial. http://www.frumforum.com/three-years-on-still-no-major-arrests-from-crisis/

Land of the fee and home of the slave.

DNI is a Powerless Office; Probably was Ignorant

[Koreantoast]

In all honesty, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) has always been a toothless, powerless position. While the job was created post-9/11 to be an integrator for all the different US intelligence services, it was structured in a way that it had no leverage (read budget control) over any of the organizations. The CIA resents DNI because it's position in theory is what the Director of the CIA is traditionally supposed to be doing. The DoD intel services get their money from the Pentagon and the FBI from the Justice Department. If anything, the DNI has been a bit of a joke in Washington DC, a cursed appointment that never amounts to anything. It gets no credit for the few public successes and is a cheap scapegoat when things go wrong. I honestly think that the DNI really didn't fully know what was going on when he went to make his presentation.