John le Carré:

In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.

Never mind the credibility and integrity of parliament and centuries of British justice: our spies come first. And remember, these aren’t criminal courts. These are civil courts where anyone attempting to obtain redress for a real or perceived injustice perpetrated against him by British or American secret agencies must have his claims heard and dealt with in secret.

Paul Carr:

If we’ve learned anything in the past few days it’s that the NSA does precious little of its own spying, relying instead on companies like Palantir and Booz Allen Hamilton. Indeed, Palantir is just one of dozens – hundreds? – of Silicon Valley companies developing and operating the tools used by intelligence agencies like the NSA. If the dystopian drama that Arrington imagines ever actually plays out, it’ll likely do so using tools created by a private company located within a dozen miles of Palo Alto.

As the Financial Times’ April Dembosky reminds us, the relationship between the Valley and Homeland Security is nothing new. The Internet started out as a government project, designed to keep communication lines open in the event of a nuclear attack. In 1999 the CIA established In-Q-Tel, a venture capital fund to invest in technology companies that might be useful to the folks in Langley or Fort Meade.

A look at In-Q-Tel’s board of trustees shows how close the relationship between the geeks and the sneaks has become. The board is almost indistinguishable from that of a major Valley VC firm: Jim Barksdale former CEO and president of Netscape – sits next to Howard Cox of Greylock, sits next to Ted Schley of KPMG… sits across from David E. Jeremiah, the Chairman of Wackenhut Services Inc and A.B. “Buzzy” Krongard, Former Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In-Q-Tel’s investment portfolio, at least on first glance, also seems remarkably similar to that of a regular Valley fund, with Web 2.0-y names like “illogic” and “Delphix” and “Connectify”. The only difference is that the companies on the list are all “focused on new and emerging commercial technologies that have the potential to give the CIA and broader U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) mission-advantage today and in the future.”

In-Q-Tel’s highest profile investment is Palantir – the data mining firm founded with additional money from Valley uber-Libertarian Peter Thiel – but In-Q-Tel’s entire portfolio includes over 100 companies, all reflecting the CIA’s current big obsessions: “big data”, video surveillance and encryption.

Glenn Greenwald:

I haven’t been able to write this week here because I’ve been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week’s NSA stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though, want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA officials on the agency’s previously secret surveillance activities:

“What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today. . . . I can’t speak to what we learned in there, and I don’t know if there are other leaks, if there’s more information somewhere, if somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it’s the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it’s just broader than most people even realize, and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”

The Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is merely “the tip of the iceberg” of what the NSA is doing in spying on Americans and the world. She’s also right that when it comes to NSA spying, “there is significantly more than what is out in the media today”, and that’s exactly what we’re working to rectify.