The National Security Agency (NSA) is the U.S. signals-intelligence agency. In the documentary Silenced, NSA whistleblower Tom 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.”[1]
In the same documentary, Drake also 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.[2]