By Michael Krieger: The warning signs were all there. Long, long
ago they were all right there. Reading this article from the New York
Times, published when I was just five years old, brings forth emotions
of frustration, disappointment and even a sense of resentment.
Resentment that many of those that came before us knew about all of this
and basically did nothing. While those were my initial reactions, those
negative emotions have turned into a strong sense of resolve and
purpose. Many of us that are faced with the challenge of changing this
messed up world we live in had very little to do with its creation, but
that’s ok. This is our destiny and it is our duty.
There are several key takeaways from this
article. First, and most importantly, sophisticated spy technologies
with little oversight will ALWAYS be abused. This is not just the case
today, but it was the case in the 1950′s, 60′s and 70′s as well. As the
article points out, “the N.S.A. between 1952 and 1974 developed files on approximately 75,000 Americans” and “the
agency also developed files on civil-rights and antiwar activists,
Congressmen and other citizens who lawfully questioned Government
policies.”
Second, no institution should ever be trusted to come clean on what they are up to. The N.S.A. has a long history of lying to everyone
and anyone who questions it. It is only when leaks of their
unconstitutional practices are made public that they cease any
surreptitious activities (or at least pretend to).
Third, the most dangerous thing we can allow is the union of “public” and “private” intelligence security functions.
These inevitably merge into one giant totalitarian nightmare such as
what we suffer from today. The writing was on the wall long ago. It’s
time to finally deal with this problem once and for all.
Below are some
choice excepts from this excellent New York Times article:THE SILENT POWER OF THE N.S.A.
By David Burnham
Published: March 27, 1983
A Federal Court of Appeals recently ruled that the largest and most
secretive intelligence agency of the United States, the National
Security Agency, may lawfully intercept the overseas communications of
Americans even if it has no reason to believe they are engaged in
illegal activities. The ruling, which also allows summaries of these
conversations to be sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation,
significantly broadens the already generous authority of the N.S.A. to
keep track of American citizens.
Over
the years, this virtually unknown Federal agency has repeatedly sought
to enlarge its power without consulting the civilian officials who
theoretically direct the Government, while it also has sought to
influence the operation and development of all civilian communications
networks. Indeed, under Vice Adm. Bobby Ray Inman,
N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, the agency received an enlarged
Presidential mandate to involve itself in communications issues, and
successfully persuaded private corporations and institutions to
cooperate with it.
Yet over the three decades since the N.S.A. was created by a classified executive order signed by President Truman in 1952,
neither the Congress nor any President has publicly shown much interest
in grappling with the far-reaching legal conflicts surrounding the
operation of this extraordinarily powerful and clandestine agency. A
Senate committee on intelligence, warning that the N.S.A.’s capabilities
impinged on crucial issues of privacy, once urged that Congress or the
courts develop a legislative or judicial framework to control the
agency’s activities. In
a nation whose Constitution demands an open Government operating
according to precise rules of fairness, the N.S.A. remains an unexamined
entity. With the increasing computerization of society, the conflicts it presents become more important.
The power of the N.S.A., whose annual budget and staff are believed to
exceed those of either the F.B.I. or the C.I.A., is enhanced by its
unique legal status within the Federal Government. Unlike
the Agriculture Department, the Postal Service or even the C.I.A., the
N.S.A. has no specific Congressional law defining its responsibilities
and obligations. Instead, the agency, based at Fort George Meade, about
20 miles northeast of Washington, has operated under a series of
Presidential directives. Because of Congress’s failure to draft a law
for the agency, because of the tremendous secrecy surrounding the
N.S.A.’s work and because of the highly technical and thus thwarting
character of its equipment, the N.S.A. is free to define and pursue its own goals.
According
to an unpublished analysis by the House Government Operations
Committee, the N.S.A. may have employed 120,000 people in 1976 when
armed-services personnel were included in the official count.
(According to a letter from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overseas
listening posts numbered 2,000.) In comparison, the F.B.I. had one
employee for every six working for the N.S.A. The House report also estimated that the agency’s annual expenditures were as high as $15 billion.
During the course of the investigation, its chairman, Senator
Frank Church, repeatedly emphasized his belief that the N.S.A.’s
intelligence-gathering activities were essential to the nation’s
security. He also stressed that the equipment used to watch the Russians
could just as easily ”monitor the private communications of Americans.’‘
If such forces were ever turned against the country’s communications
system, Senator Church said, ”no American would have any privacy left. …
There would be no place to hide.”
The N.S.A. gradually developed a ”watch list” of Americans that included those speaking out against the Vietnam War.
According to the subsequent investigation
by the Senate Intelligence Committee, a total of 1,200 Americans were
targeted by the N.S.A. between 1967 and 1973 because of their political
activities. The subjects – chosen by the F.B.I., the Secret Service, the
C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency -included members of radical
groups, celebrities and ordinary citizens. When it appeared that Congress might learn about the eavesdropping, the surveillance halted.
The
records obtained by the committee indicate that from the project’s
earliest stages, both Government officials and corporate executives
understood that the surveillance flatly violated a Federal law against
intercepting or divulging telegrams. Certainly, they
were aware that such interception violated the Fourth Amendment,
guaranteeing against unreasonable searches and seizures, which also
holds that a court warrant can be issued only when there is probable
cause to believe a crime has been committed.
Using the information thus gathered, the
N.S.A. between 1952 and 1974 developed files on approximately 75,000
Americans, some of whom undoubtedly threatened the nation’s security.
However, the agency also developed files on civil-rights and antiwar
activists, Congressmen and other citizens who lawfully questioned
Government policies. For at least 13 of the 22 years the agency was
building these files,
the C.I.A. had access to them and used the data in its Operation Chaos,
another computerized and illegal tracking system set up during the
Vietnam War. At its peak, the Chaos files had references to more than
300,000 Americans.
Certainly, prececent had been established in 1971, when
the N.S.A. was the lead agency in the Nixon Administration’s attempt to
stop newspapers from printing the Pentagon Papers, the bureaucratic
history of the war in Vietnam. After blocking
publication for 15 days, the Supreme Court ruled that the Government had
failed to show why the material should not be published and that
”without compelling reasons” prior restraint would be an unreasonable
infringement of the freedom of the press.
Until that time, the Federal Government
sought to control and protect only those military and diplomatic secrets
that had been declared confidential, secret or top secret under a
long-established and formally prescribed classification procedure. But
now, President Carter had decided to create a huge new category of
material worthy of Government protection: information that ”would be
useful to an adversary.”
A few years before, the director of the National Science
Foundation, Richard C. Atkinson, and Inman had begun privately
discussing whether the role of the spy agency in supervising
cryptographic research should be expanded. The precise outcome of the
talks remains murky, but the N.S.A. apparently won the debate. Today,
the National Science Foundation routinely allows the N.S.A. to review
any request for the funding of cryptographic research.
Speaking before the annual meeting of the
American As-sociation for the Advancement of Science last year, Inman
said that other areas where restrictions were required because
publication of certain ”technical information could affect the national
security in a harmful way. Examples include computer hardware and
software, other electronic gear and techniques, lasers, crop projections
and manufacturing procedures.”
The American Association for the
Advancement of Science passed a brief resolution on the day Inman spoke:
”Whereas freedom and national security are best preserved by adherence
to the principles of openness that are a fundamental tenet of both
American society and the scientific process, be it resolved that the A.A.A.S. opposes governmental restrictions on the dissemination, exchange or availability of unclassified knowledge.”
Every day, in almost every area of culture and commerce, systems
and procedures are being adopted by private companies and organizations
as well as by the nation’s security leaders that make it easier for the N.S.A. to dominate American society should it ever decide such action is necessary.
Well ladies and gentlemen, the N.S.A. has already decided to
dominate. It is now our duty to deal with this unconstitutional
perversion before it’s too late.
Full article here.
In Liberty,
Mike
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