The National Security Agency is a US signals-intelligence agency that John Kiriakou discusses both as part of the broader US intelligence community and as a subject of criticism in its own right. Kiriakou says the NSA was secret “into the late ’70s,” but that there are no longer any truly secret intelligence agencies, the NSA included. [1]
Kiriakou says a massive NSA facility built in the Utah desert has bragged of having enough storage capacity to hold every American’s phone calls, text messages, emails, and voicemails for the next 500 years. [2][3] He says billions of dollars are spent spying on Americans by the NSA, CIA, and FBI alike, and that nothing about Americans’ communications is truly secret from these agencies. [4]
By contrast, Kiriakou describes the Defense Intelligence Agency — a separate agency from the NSA that focuses on order-of-battle analysis, tracking troop and unit positions — as the most boring and least relevant work he encountered in his career.[5]