National Security Agency
========================

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the U.S. signals-intelligence agency. In John Kiriakou's account it is an institution with an unusual birth and an inverted rule: it was not created by an act of Congress but arbitrarily created by the Pentagon and "foisted upon us," with the Pentagon denying its existence until 1978.

The rule that used to hold

The NSA's charter, Kiriakou says, prohibits it from collecting information on U.S. persons, a U.S. citizen, or anyone in the country on a green card or as a permanent resident alien.

When he first entered government the rule had teeth. If the NSA picked up the communications of an American or a U.S. person, even accidentally, heads rolled: Congress had to be informed, the information had to be deleted from NSA's databases, and an investigation was launched. "It was a big deal."

What it became

"That's all they do now," Kiriakou says: access to every phone call, every email and every text message that every American sends and receives, every single day. The measure he reaches for is the agency's facility in the Utah desert, which he describes as large enough to hold copies of every email, the metadata from every phone call and every text message made by every American for the next five hundred years. Nor does he confine the reach to Americans: there is not a country on earth, he says, that is not vulnerable to having its people's personal information collected by the NSA and the CIA.

His objection is not framed around what a given person has to hide. Americans have a constitutional right to freedom of speech, which the Supreme Court has interpreted to include a right to privacy, and what people say in their personal communications is simply none of the government's business. To the standard reply, "I don't have anything to hide", his answer is that this was never the issue: anyone who has spent time in the intelligence community will tell you that a case can be built against you for just about anything using metadata alone, and that the CIA, FBI and NSA can see the websites you visited as well. What the agency should be doing, in his view, is collecting overseas to protect the country: "we are not the enemy here."

Snowden

Kiriakou credits Edward Snowden with the public's entire knowledge of the scale, "we wouldn't have any idea really the extent to which NSA spies on us if it hadn't been for Ed Snowden", and calls him a bona fide American hero, because he knew exactly what he was getting into and took the risk anyway to tell the American people their government was spying on them.

Drake's account (not Kiriakou's)

The corpus also holds testimony from NSA whistleblower Tom Drake, recorded in the documentary Silenced. These are Drake's words, not Kiriakou's, and are noted here as such. Drake says the agency came, after 9/11, to "instrument the United States of America" and treat the country "as the equivalent of a foreign country for the purposes of dragnet blanket electronic surveillance on a vast scale." In the same documentary he states that the NSA "abysmally failed the nation" in the run-up to the September 11 attacks: information on al-Qaeda and associated movements that he says could have gone a long way toward rolling up the plot was already present in its database, but the agency's systems were so poor that no one knew it was there.

The argument for spending the money here instead

Kiriakou frames the case against human sources as one he hears from political leaders rather than one he makes: that technology has advanced so far, DARPA is working five generations ahead of where offensive technology stands today, that human intelligence is unreliable precisely because it is human, and that the money would be better spent at the NSA, at the State Department, or on following the foreign media. His own answer elsewhere is that no volume of intercepted communications substitutes for a source who is in the room.

See also

- Edward Snowden
- Thomas Drake
- NSA surveillance
