There’s more than one way to uncover state secrets

Tomorrow at noon, StopWatching.US plans to rally at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station to protest the ransacking of personal privacy by our good friends in the industrial surveillance complex.

I’d be surprised if they find a sympathetic ear in this administration or from more than a handful of members of Congress, let alone the intelligence bureaucracy. Nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle is complicit in this.

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But they’d probably get Germany and Brazil on board pretty quick, after revelations that the NSA wiretapped phone calls from the leaders of both countries. While governments often turn a blind eye to other intelligence agencies spying on their citizens, being personally spied upon is a different matter.

According to Reuters, Germany wants its own Internet, one where the spooks can’t just listen in whenever they please. For the record: I want my own Internet too.

All ears on Acela

Sometimes, though, this story takes a sudden lurch from the frightening to the absurd. For example, yesterday former NSA director Michael Hayden got the tables turned when his “on background” phone conversation with a reporter was overheard by a passenger sitting directly behind him. Tom Matzzie, founder of renewable energy firm the Ethical Electric Company and a former political activist with MoveOn.Org, proceeded to spend the next hour tweeting about what he heard, like this one:

Those tweets earned Matzzie 15 nanoseconds of fame on HuffPost Live, CNN, MSNBC, and elsewhere. It also got him a lot more Twitter traffic, which he used to good advantage to talk about global climate change.

Apparently, somebody in the spy realm saw Matzzie’s tweets and alerted Hayden, who then turned around and had what sounds like a reasonable conversation with him. Matzzie even got a photo with Hayden out of it. (Yes, Hayden does look a lot like the actor who played John Locke on “Lost.” No, says Matzzie, he was not using a shoe phone. )

Unlike the emails and phone calls the NSA lives to log, a conversation in a public space like that doesn’t rate very highly on the “reasonable expectation” scale for privacy (though mom always said it’s rude to eavesdrop).

One of Matzzie’s more alert Twitter followers (@bonkydog) tracked down one of those “background” quotes that sounds an awful lot like the conversations Matzzie described, this one to Foreign Policy Magazine about the reaction of German and Brazilian officials to NSA wiretap revelations:

“There’s a mixture of hypocrisy and feigned outrage along with real objections here,” said a former senior intelligence official. “I don’t know where the line is. The idea that political leaders are out of bounds for foreign intelligence is amusing. But on the other hand this business about trusting allies is a big thing. My guess is there’s a real annoyance here” on the part of foreign allies.

What’s interesting is that what Hayden was doing isn’t much different than what Jofi Joseph (aka @NatSecWonk) was doing via Twitter: anonymously trashing the administration’s national security policies. The only real differences were that a) Hayden is now a former, not current, employee, b) he was using a phone, not Twitter, and c) his statements were not instantly published to the masses (though by talking to national reporters, Hayden’s comments probably found their way to a larger audience than NatSecWonk’s 1,600 followers).

For what it’s worth, Hayden told the Washington Post later that Matzzie’s account was a “[bull—-] story from a liberal activist sitting two seats from me on the train hearing intermittent snatches of conversation.” Then again, this is the former director of national intelligence speaking. Is there a less credible person on the planet right now?

As the Post’s Ezra Klein tweeted:

Or maybe he just doesn’t care. Because what’s doing to happen to him? He doesn’t have to worry about getting renditioned to some third-world hellhole. At worst, Hayden may lose his favorite table at The Palm.

Spook the spooks

Still, this could have a far greater impact than, say, gathering on a lawn and watching public speakers preach to the converted for hours on end. There’s nothing a good spy hates more than publicity.

Congress can ignore a problem for years until it starts happening to them, then they’re all over it. The same has to be true of the industrial surveillance complex. We need a citizen spy agency — people like Matzzie who will eavesdrop and report on what the spooks are really doing and saying. If we can’t legally tap their phones, we can make everything they do in public, well, public. I think that’s only fair. What do you think?

Should we spy on the spies? Post your secret plans below or email me: cringe@infoworld.com.

This article, “There’s more than one way to uncover state secrets,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the crazy twists and turns of the tech industry with Robert X. Cringely’s Notes from the Field blog, follow Cringely on Twitter, and subscribe to Cringely’s Notes from the Underground newsletter.