On
November 4th, 1952, a new federal agency was created in secret,
chartered with spying on foreign adversaries around the world. There
was no mention in the press. There was no discussion on the floor of
Congress. The existence of the agency appeared nowhere in the Federal Register.
Since then, much of what the public knows about the National Security Agency has been the stuff of Sneakers and West Wing
legend. Its budget — part of the secretive US “black budget” — is
largely unknown. The NSA has even been nicknamed “No Such Agency”
because of its extreme secrecy. Its headquarters, located in Fort
Meade, Maryland, literally resembles a giant black box.
But this year, the box was cracked open.
National Security Agency headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland
An
unprecedented cache of the NSA’s secrets were stolen in bulk this year
by a single independent contractor with administrative access to the
intelligence community’s network — a feat unmatched by previous NSA
whistleblowers who provided the world mostly with eyewitness accounts
of the agency’s behavior. The former contractor, Edward Snowden, fled
the United States before teaming up with journalists to disseminate the
NSA files, and now resides in Russia where he sought asylum and
protection from US prosecution.
We
now know that nearly five decades after its creation, the NSA began to
operate what would become a global surveillance network of breathtaking
scale. Today, it collects records about every phone call placed in the
United States. It works with overseas partners and telecommunications
companies to directly tap into the arteries of the internet, and scoops
up massive amounts of data including emails, chats, VoIP calls, and
more. It collects billions of records every year, many belonging to
ordinary US citizens with no suspicion of wrongdoing.
Nearly each week since June 5th when The Guardian
published the first Snowden documents, new internal files and facts
about bulk NSA surveillance have been released. Snowden is said to have
leaked upward of 50,000 files from the government. The journalists to
whom he's passing the data, like Glenn Greenwald, say more revelations
are coming.
Signals
Signals
intelligence, or SIGINT, encompasses the interception of electronic
signals and communications intelligence, and was an enormous factor in
20th-century wars and diplomacy. In World War I, when radio was still a
novel concept, the US and other nations primarily gained access to
communications by tapping undersea telephone cables. The United States
entered World War I after British intelligence intercepted a coded
telegram in which the German Empire proposed that Mexico join Europe’s
Central Powers, if the US joined the fight on the side of Britain and
France.
The
role of SIGINT was dramatically expanded in World War II, which was a
truly global war with widespread use of radio and encoded
communications. Cryptography and cryptanalysis were essential to all
sides, and intensive code-breaking efforts aided Allied forces greatly
in their victory.
In
1952, President Harry Truman issued a memo which led to the creation of
the National Security Agency, consolidating the military’s SIGINT
responsibilities. In the decades following, the NSA would play a
crucial role in signals intelligence during the Cold War, the Vietnam
War, and in the modern war on terrorism.
Even
before the pivotal national security era that began on September 11th,
2001, the NSA recognized the SIGINT opportunities presented by the
internet. In an unclassified December, 2000 transition report, the
agency outlined the intelligence landscape, noting “the explosion in
global communications,” and a need to be at the forefront of advances
in technology. The document states that “to perform both its offensive
and defensive missions, NSA must ‘live on the network.’” As leaked
documents from Edward Snowden show, the NSA has largely accomplished
the mission it envisioned more than a decade ago. But according to
critics, it has systematically dodged or violated federal law in doing
so.
Following
9/11, the NSA’s ability to gather the communications of US citizens was
greatly enhanced by the Patriot Act of 2001, the Protect America Act of
2007, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, and secret interpretations of US
law that have only recently begun to enter the public view —
interpretations that have surprised and concerned even the Patriot
Act’s original authors. Documents leaked this year have revealed that
the NSA is operating a massive global surveillance network, one that
once seemed only possible in Hollywood fantasy, and that privacy
advocates and some politicians fear is highly intrusive, dangerous, and
unwarranted. Furthermore, the surveillance of US citizens appears to go
well beyond the NSA’s explicit charge of collecting data “for foreign
intelligence and counterintelligence purposes” as set forth in
Executive Order 12333. Instead of just collecting data on foreigners,
the NSA now appears to want all available communications data in the
pursuit of terrorists.
, Don jazzy and D'bang were enjoying themselves at FOZ concert! 
