I was also in military intelligence (Army SIGINT, 89-93) and worked in DoD and the intelligence community as a contractor for more than a decade afterward. I don't think I'm completely unqualified from making an evaluation, either.
I agree that issues involving the citizenry should be handled by civilian police organizations and the justice system. In the open and transparent, as much as existing privacy laws permit.
Your argument is basically, "well, private sector is going to do this shit anyways" but that's ridiculous to say that we should continue to be complicit in letting the NSA exist just because if we don't let them do it, someone else will.
No, my argument is that if you turn all of this over to the military, you're going to add a whole new set of problems and you're not guaranteed to solve the existing ones. I am certainly not fine with what appears to be an increasingly lackadaisical approach to collection against previously off-limits targets and an inability to properly protect citizens against online threats.
You're still going to have corruption. You're still going to have waste, fraud and abuse. But if you're turning your workforce from civilian to military, you're now introducing additional issues of training and retention. Think about the E-1s through E-3s in any unit you've served with: they're a mixed bag, some of them may not even really be qualified to be there, they generally lack much of the actual training they need to be effective in their job, and a good number are just counting the days until they can be out.
I was also in military intelligence (Army SIGINT, 89-93) and worked in DoD and the intelligence community as a contractor for more than a decade afterward. I don't think I'm completely unqualified from making an evaluation, either.
I agree that issues involving the citizenry should be handled by civilian police organizations and the justice system. In the open and transparent, as much as existing privacy laws permit.
Your argument is basically, "well, private sector is going to do this shit anyways" but that's ridiculous to say that we should continue to be complicit in letting the NSA exist just because if we don't let them do it, someone else will.
No, my argument is that if you turn all of this over to the military, you're going to add a whole new set of problems and you're not guaranteed to solve the existing ones. I am certainly not fine with what appears to be an increasingly lackadaisical approach to collection against previously off-limits targets and an inability to properly protect citizens against online threats.
You're still going to have corruption. You're still going to have waste, fraud and abuse. But if you're turning your workforce from civilian to military, you're now introducing additional issues of training and retention. Think about the E-1s through E-3s in any unit you've served with: they're a mixed bag, some of them may not even really be qualified to be there, they generally lack much of the actual training they need to be effective in their job, and a good number are just counting the days until they can be out.