March 30, 2015–The wire news service Associated Press is reporting this morning that our spooks of the National Security Agency (NSA) have been, in effect, dishonest as well as disingenuous. Readers of this space–and those who have followed the NSA dragnet eavesdropping controversy–will know that the spy agency defended itself against the Snowden revelations by making a big deal about how important was the dragnet. The spooks indulged in a series of misleading claims about how many terrorism cases had been based on the mass recording of people’s phone connections, how many plots had been broken up due to this information.

The NSA claimed not just that national security had been damaged as a result of the public discovering that the government is watching people 24/7, but also that the United States could not afford to do without this intelligence. This assertion formed the basis not only for the agency’s defense of its illegal and unconstitutional surveillance, against Congress and national-level policy reviews, but of NSA’s appeals to President Obama to permit it to continue the eavesdropping.

Now the Associated Press tells us that months before the Snowden leaks, officials within the NSA themselves proposed to terminate the dragnet surveillance. The recommendation was based on the proposition that the eavesdropping yielded little intelligence of value while requiring substantial dollar outlays to store the data obtained! Attentive readers will notice that NSA officials here were making the identical argument to what many said following the Snowden bombshells, when the National Security Agency openly asserted the opposite–that the surveillance data was invaluable.

There can be no plainer illustration of the arrogance and complete lack of integrity of our intelligence services. The latest report again indicates that our spooks seek to preserve any program they are capable of implementing, not those spy programs that are producing valuable intelligence. This is not “national security,” it is pure posturing–on a level with the CIA’s attempt to keep open the option to resume torture even after the black prisons project had been revealed and President George W. Bush had closed the prisons and sent the detainees along to Guantanamo Bay. The worthlessness of a “strategy” built on a basis like this is palpable.

Legal authority for the dragnet surveillance expires this year along with the sunset of the legislation that created it, let me remind–on the basis of NSA misleading Congress then too. It is time to get rid of this albatross which continues to discredit America’s intelligence community.