In recent weeks, Senate hearings have taken place, and the director of the NSA, Keith Alexander, has repeatedly lied to the Senate about the scope of the NSA's data mining3. Furthermore, internal NSA documents instruct NSA employees to use 9/11 to justify the actions of the agency4.
9/11 was 12 years and 2 months ago. As an essay in Der Spiegel, the famous German newspaper, notes,
"It is often assumed that intelligence agencies are worlds of their own, and that they sometimes act on their own authority. However, they are also an expression of the societies in which they exist, especially of their fears. In other words, it is quite possible that there are not just paranoid agents, but also paranoid democracies that act in hysterical ways out of fear. They are characterized by a strong freedom myth, which leads to paranoia. It, in turn, poses a threat to freedom. The United States is currently in a late phase of this cycle."5The German nation itself has been deeply offended by the actions of the NSA, following revelations that Chancellor Merkel's own personal cell phone had been tapped6.
Other, similar abuse of the NSA's surveillance apparatus is reportedly rampant: The Guardian again published a story on how one employee stalked nine women with the power granted to him by the NSA apparatus:
A National Security Agency employee was able to secretly intercept the phone calls of nine foreign women for six years without ever being detected by his managers, the agency's internal watchdog has revealed.If the stated intent of the NSA's surveillance programs are to gather actionable intelligence on terrorist threats, then why spy on Angela Merkel? I can only conclude that the NSA has grown far beyond its stated raison d'etre, and has become a machine whose sole purpose is to feed itself. It should thus be immediately dissolved.
The unauthorised abuse of the NSA's surveillance tools only came to light after one of the women, who happened to be a US government employee, told a colleague that she suspected the man – with whom she was having a sexual relationship – was listening to her calls.
The case is among 12 documented in a letter from the NSA's inspector general to a leading member of Congress, who asked for a breakdown of cases in which the agency's powerful surveillance apparatus was deliberately abused by staff. One relates to a member of the US military who, on the first day he gained access to the surveillance system, used it to spy on six email addresses belonging to former girlfriends.7
Some in our government are pushing for the reformation of the NSA, believing--albeit falsely--that it would be possible to transform the culture inside the NSA into something other than what it inherently is. By its very nature, the NSA must, in order to fulfill not only its stated purpose but also its own diseased hunger, harbor a culture that exhibits both an extreme paranoia, as well as a cavalier attitude toward the autonomy of others (citizens) and the law itself. No matter what sanctions are placed on the NSA, the power, thanks to its inherent attitude, will absolutely be abused to such an extent that it places the very ideals of the free world--personal autonomy and freedom of the press, among others--in extreme jeopardy.
I had a brief discussion with someone who attended the anti-surveillance protests in Washington DC, and I asked him what he thought of the NSA. What he said struck me as a little misguided: His objection to the actions of the NSA were based on the stated legality of its activities; if we are to be spied on, that would be acceptable so long as the gross intrusion is codified into law. His position reminded me of Socrates' acceptance of his fate in The Crito, where he turns himself in to the Greek government because, in his mind, he chose to live there and implicitly accepted their rule, even if it means that he should die.
This does not work for two reasons: Codified or not, the NSA's activities are a blatant contradiction to our democratic ideals, and severely impinge on our fundamental rights as citizens and human beings. Writing them into law does not make them any less egregious. The second, and arguably more important reason, is that the NSA's actions affect nearly every single human being on the planet, and thus it is absolutely impossible to "choose" whether or not to accept the NSA's existence. If the NSA can decide to tap Angela Merkel's phone (Germany is [was, now] a strong ally of the United States), who could possibly be above suspicion? Beyond that, the NSA gathers data from ISPs and Internet services companies, so innocent people are caught up in the storm at the source and would thus really have to make significant changes to how they send and receive traffic over the Internet.
The Guardian had published an article on October 8th, 2013 detailing the actual effectiveness of the NSA's mass surveillance apparatus, concluding that the apparatus is not at all effective in gathering actionable intelligence. It writes,
The admissions Leahy forced out of the NSA heads and DNI Clapper that they have been systematically overstating the effectiveness of bulk collection are consistent with the only other official assessments of bulk collection. The sole publicly available FISC opinion (pdf) that assesses the impact of bulk collection from 2006 to 2009 was unimpressed that:Here, we can conclude that the NSA is not living up to its stated purpose, and calls into question the justifications for its existence and continued activity. The terrifying part about this particular revelation is that it proves that my earlier summation regarding its behavior is indeed correct. The almost non-existent "success rate" (insofar as stopping terrorist threats is still a criterion of success, as opposed to how many people it can possibly ensnare in its system) clearly proves that either the NSA is woefully incompetent and unable to accurately distinguish from good and bad intelligence (and therefore warrants dissolution for ineffectiveness), OR that its publicly stated goal, to produce actionable intelligence on terrorist threats, is not its real mission (therefore also warrants dissolution for the danger posed to democracy).
"[T]he government's submission cites three examples in which the FBI opened three new preliminary investigations of persons in the US based on tips from the BR metadata program. [Emphasis mine --MiSaNtHrOpE] Judge Walton wrote that this achievement "does not seem particularly significant"8.
It is worth noting that other nations--including Germany, France, and Great Britain--all have their own respective variants of the NSA. Great Britain's GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) most notably attempted to destroy computers belonging to The Guardian as the NSA leaks were being published9. The Guardian notes that the GCHQ's eavesdropping activities were funded by the United States. It is not known yet just how far the NSA has gone to align itself with other similar organizations within allied nations.
The solution is clear: The NSA, as I have explained, must be dissolved. Its culture, its very existence, is anathema to the ideals of the free world, and places every single human being on the planet at risk for being falsely identified as a threat to the United States government, even where no evidence to that effect exists. I will not venture a guess as to what the NSA truly wants, as I know such dystopian fantasies are often the tools of hyperbole, but I will say that whatever it is, it cannot help us. Attempting to alter its culture is fundamentally misguided, as the nature of such an apparatus is inherently paranoid and dismissive of the rule of law.
1) http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/11/googlers-say-f-you-to-nsa-company-encrypts-internal-network/
2) http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-reports-nsa-secretly-intercepts-data-links?CMP=twt_fd&CMP=SOCxx2I2
3) http://www.forbes.com/sites/seanlawson/2013/06/06/did-intelligence-officials-lie-to-congress-about-nsa-domestic-spying/
4) http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/10/30/revealed-nsa-pushed911askeysoundbitetojustifysurveillance.html
5) http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/paranoia-has-undermined-united-states-claim-to-liberal-democracy-a-932326.html
6) http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nsa-scandal-berlin-restricted-by-close-relationship-with-us-intelligence-a-931503.html
7) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/27/nsa-employee-spied-detection-internal-memo
8) http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/08/nsa-bulk-metadata-surveillance-intelligence
9) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-files-drives-destroyed-london
