Citizen Eavesdrops On Former NSA Director Michael Hayden's Phone Call

McGruber writes "The Washington Post has the news that former head of the NSA Michael Hayden took a call while on the Acela train between D.C. and Boston. Hayden was talking to a journalist 'on background', which means the reporter is not allowed to cite Hayden by name. Unfortunately for Hayden, another train passenger overhead the call and live-tweeted it. 'Mattzie continued to livetweet Hayden’s conversations slamming the Obama administration, all the while insisting that he be referred to only on background. The conversation also seemed to touch on Hayden’s time as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President George W. Bush as well. "Hayden was bragging about rendition and black sites a minute ago," Mattzie wrote. Hayden has in the past defended the use of waterboarding against detainees held in various sites around the world, and dismissed torture as a "legal term."'"

Fascinating.

[Obfuscant]

Of course, it would be worth a lot more if we got more than someone's probably biased interpretation of one side of a phone call. Like, actual quotes would be a lot better. Even then, who knows what the questions were.

Re:Bragging about torture

[Dunbal]

Torture is not the NSA's job. That's more CIA.

Re:This might help the situation

[ak3ldama]

This is not a privacy violation. He did this outside his home, in public. He has no expectation of privacy. Crow.

Re:Bragging about torture

[Ralph Wiggam]

Obama ordered Gitmo closed on his first day in office. Congress overruled him.

Re:Bragging about torture

[aeranvar]

We're not torturing anyone anymore? I'm pretty sure the United Nations [latimes.com] disagrees.

Re:Bragging about torture

[stox]

Please don't confuse our dear friend with facts, they get in the way of perfectly good arguments.

this is not eavesdropping it's reporting

[WillAffleckUW]

Reporting on how our government ignores our Rights under all the amendments in the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions.

Everyone is a reporter now.

Everyone.

Hit Record.

Re:Bragging about torture

[evil_aaronm]

Gotta call BS on this. The media were called "message force multipliers" under the Bush administration specifically because they were so amenable to whatever Bush wanted the rest of us to hear. It was independent outlets, like McClatchey, or foreign news services, that reported what might be called "truth."

Re:Bragging about torture

[Ralph Wiggam]

The President is the Commander in Chief of the military. But he can't spend a dollar that hasn't been budgeted by Congress.

Re:How the heck ...

[gstoddart]

Worth remembering that the only evidence is the guy who was tweeting. Who do you trust, the head of the NSA, or some guy who tweets? The answer is neither.

Horseshit.

See, the fact that Hayden has actually responded to this and asserted the guy was a liberal activist [calgaryherald.com] who misunderstood him

Someone eventually tipped off Hayden, who finished a call, stood up and walked over to Matzzie.

"Would you like a real interview?" Hayden asked.

"I'm not a reporter," Matzzie replied.

"Everybody's a reporter," Hayden said.

The Post said the two then talked about the U.S. Constitution's s Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and NSA surveillance, and then Hayden posed for a photo with Matzzie.

Hayden told the Post later he wasn't disparaging Obama or his administration. Matzzie "got it terribly wrong," Hayden said, dismissing the tweets as an inaccurate "story from a liberal activist sitting two seats from me on the train hearing intermittent snatches of conversation."

"I didn't criticize the president," Hayden said. "I actually said these are very difficult issues. I said I had political guidance, too, that limited the things that I did when I was director of NSA. Now that political guidance (for current officials) is going to be more robust. It wasn't a criticism."

I trust the fact that it happened, I trust the fact that Hayden responded to it, and I don't trust Hayden at all. This is a guy who has claimed that torture was merely a legal definition which could be skirted around -- which in my books makes him a bit of a sleazebag.

Are you suggesting there is evidence this never happened? Or that the guy overhearing truly got it all wrong? People like this love to try to weasel on what they actually said and what it actually meant, but I find it much more plausible than "guy sitting on train makes up conversation between NSA former director and someone else".

Re:Bragging about torture

[BobMcD]

Oh, it's worse than just them:

http://www.cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php [cpj.org]

Six government employees, plus two contractors including Edward Snowden, have been subjects of felony criminal prosecutions since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Act, accused of leaking classified information to the press - compared with a total of three such prosecutions in all previous U.S. administrations.

Re:Bragging about torture

[NeutronCowboy]

The mainstream media had (IMHO thankfully) a bit of a hate-on for Bush, so every little thing his administration did wrong was broadcast loud and clear.

Not during the crucial parts of the Bush administration, where things were radically fucked up the most: the first 3 years or so of his administration, where he lied to the world about the Iraq invasion, let Osama escape in Tora Bora, legitimized torture and set up huge budget-busting tax-cuts and Medicare expansions. It took multiple, world-history-course-changing mistakes for the media to finally start questioning him.

They don't seem to have the same diligence towards the current administration, which means we the public doesn't get to see anything ugly until it becomes too big of a story to ignore, and even then it's usually quieted down or distracted from awfully quick.

Simply put, the mistakes haven't been as numerous or as significant, and the accomplishments have actually been more significant. We've got a long way to go before we ever get a president as bad as Bush Jr.

Set aside any partisan feelings you may have and let me put it this way: If the Bush administration handled, say, the whole Benghazi incident exactly the same way our current administration had, would there or would there not be calls for impeachment from the likes of CNBC (as there were very loudly during much of Bush's latter years in office)?

Uh, no, there wouldn't have. How do I know? The massive bungling of the Tora Bora offensive was never questioned while he was in office. By anybody. Contrast letting the entire reason we were in Afghanistan get away due to poor decisions by Bush himself with not optimally responding to an attack on an isolated consulate in what was still basically a war zone. Which one had more long-term ramifications? Which one could have been improved, by how much, and at what cost? That's why your comparison needs to be answered with a massive "No."

The mainstream media (yes, including FOX) tends to be a bit kinder to our current president than the media really should be.

You can't be serious when you include FOX News. They're basically calling him Hitler, Mao and Stalin on a daily basis, call him a Muslim, and do everything just shy of calling for someone to shoot him. Even if you just average FOX News in, it skews the average so far out that the only way to even it out is if MSNBC sends out journalists to literate fellate him under the podium.

And that's even disregarding just the qualititative differences between the two presidencies. Obama is far from perfect - I'm actually starting to think that Clinton was the better politician and president - but he is still miles above what is the worst president in at least the last 70 years. Comparing the two should lead to a difference in treatment.