How is it not possible to believe that if a lowly contractor sysadmin can access anyone’s email, that the head of an organization with a $52 billion dollar budget does not get a daily summary of subject matter of the private emails of the most powerful people in the nation?
Would it not be the height of irresponsible behavior as the guardian of Our Homeland’s security to protect against the, ahem, possibility that one of our leaders had been co-opted? Compromised?
And if you had that information, or could get it with wiggle of your finger (presumably he’d be too intelligent, unlike certain former DCIAs, to write the order down, or email it, or say it on the phone – and if not intelligent enough to surmise, to learn by example), do you think your budget would ever be disclosed, much less cut, or that you’d be prosecuted like a lowly baseball player for lying under oath to the highest body in the land?
Does not the example of the former head of a competing agency give sufficient warning to those in legislative and executive councils, those who have to stand to election, to keep their dogs on a short leash?
I assume that no man is without sin. But if JC himself came back, do you think that emails could not be made to appear, documents found? The opposite of the GWB docs. Even JC in his own day didn’t survive a government that didn’t want him around. Think the Romans had anything on this empire?
The French have a phrase: pour encourager les autres. Detainments at Heathrow, harassment at every border for the rest of your life, years of solitary confinement, black prisons, orange jumpsuits, exile to a small room in a foreign embassy or on the run in a cold hostile land waiting for the umbrella or black car or compromised water glass, or having all vestiges of power stripped (one wonders who the DCIA pissed off, or how did he not keep enough files on hand to protect himself).
If the penalty for refusal to cooperate is prison, consider the encouragement those in high places must receive, logged only in files that are not accessible to the public. You have no right to know who your leaders speak to, or more precisely, who speaks to them.
You of course have no such protections.