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Comment by Involute | Hacker News Reader

As far as I can tell, Clapper was asked about a classified program during an open session of Congress. Confronted with a conflict between his oath to tell the truth and his obligation to preserve the secrecy of the program, he chose the latter and corrected his testimony later in private. Maybe I'm misconstruing what happened, but, if not, why is this controversial?

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The legitimate response in such a situation is to officially dodge the question. It doesn't even have to be public since they're given the questions in advance and have veto power. But Clapper went before Congress explicitly allowing them to ask him about this program and knowingly lied about it.

What's unfortunate is that it's not controversial. It seems Clapper has the backing of a pretty big group in Congress.

According to the article, ODNI's attorney was given the question in advance, but it wasn't passed on to Clapper, so he improvised. Maybe the attorney's just covering for him, but that's what it says.

> The legitimate response in such a situation is to officially dodge the question.

That is absolutely, 100% not the case. Dodging the question, for this particular question is as much a leak of classified information as giving up the answer directly.

This is by the same principle used by hacktivists called the "warrant canary", which they think they invented: But the same thing happened to a CIA director (Helms?) in the 1970s and he did the same thing because the same principle applied back then too.

That's actually not 100% right. He did correct his testimony, but he said he testified in error essentially because, under the strain of coming up with an unclassified answer, he forgot about the collections authorized under the Patriot Act.

You can read the letter: http://www.lawfareblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/2013-0...

Because he lied during testimony in front of Congress without any consequences?

There were ways to answer the question without jeopardizing a classified program. It has been done before and will be done again.

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