The Daily Background

NYT is running a feature by James Bamford titled “The Agency That Could Be Big Brother”- reffering of course to the now household name- the NSA. A few choice quotes:

Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people,” he said in 1975, “and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”

He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. “could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person’s mind.

NYT has the rest of the article here, and also perhaps of interest, Cryptome has two recent entries eyeballing the NSA, which can be found here, and here.

Filed under: NSA Wiretaps, Z-TDB Blog