"You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."—George Orwell, 1984
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Supposedly the National Security Administration is going to
stop collecting certain internet communications that merely mention a foreign intelligence target.
Privacy advocates are hailing it as a major victory for Americans whose communications have been caught in the NSA's dragnet.
If this is a victory, it's a hollow victory.
Here's why.
Since its creation in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a
secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government's foreign intelligence activities, the agency has been covertly spying on Americans, listening in on their phone calls, reading their mail, and monitoring their communications.
For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the
Saturday Evening Post reports, "Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents."
Not even the
passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated, managed to curtail the NSA's illegal activities.
In the wake of the 9/11 attacks,
George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans' phone calls and emails.
Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the
violations worsened, with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments.
It was only after whistleblower
Edward Snowden's revelations in 2013 that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had been betrayed once again.
What this brief history makes clear is that the NSA cannot be reformed.This is an agency whose very existence—unaccountable and lacking any degree of transparency—flies in the face of the Constitution.
Comment: Stimulus and reaction, a working combination proven, so far, by the numbers.