U.S. investment immigration focuses on important political news in the United States: [Reuters London, June 10] Title: Establishing a Secret Surveillance State in America (by Reuters columnist John Bamford)
There is an old joke circulating at the National Security Agency: "We trust in God, we monitor everyone else."
First, The Guardian reported details about a domestic phone data collection program, in which Verizon Communications was compelled to provide the National Security Agency with all detailed information about domestic and even local phone communications. Then, The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed another large-scale surveillance program by the National Security Agency, codenamed "PRISM," which required major U.S. internet companies to secretly submit information including emails, photos, videos, chat services, file transfers, stored data, logins, and video conferencing.
Building the world's largest spy agency, despite the Obama administration and members of the Senate Intelligence Committee arguing that information surveillance is crucial for combating terrorism, this program is merely the latest chapter in over a century of government pressure on telecommunications companies to secretly cooperate with the National Security Agency and its predecessors. However, as rapidly advancing technology allows more personal information to be transmitted to the government through these links, the danger of America becoming a secret surveillance state has increased exponentially.
Due to the budget increase after the September 11 attacks, the National Security Agency was flooded with funds, leading it to embark on extensive construction and significantly expand its eavesdropping capabilities. The agency established secret workspaces within large telecommunications facilities. For example, in the 10-story switching building of AT&T located in San Francisco, mirrored copies of data and phone communications from abroad were directed to a workspace equipped with special hardware and software to filter emails and phone information, with the results sent to the National Security Agency for analysis.
New spy satellites were launched, and new listening stations were established. Recently, a business center opened in Augusta, Georgia, designed to accommodate over 4,000 listening agents wearing headsets, making it the largest electronic eavesdropping base in the world.
Meanwhile, at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, which conducted top-secret research for the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, the National Security Agency is secretly constructing the fastest and most powerful computer in the world. This computer will be capable of sorting through massive amounts of data—such as all the phone calls made by people across the United States every day.
Today, the National Security Agency is the largest spy agency in the world, employing tens of thousands of people, with its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, covering an area nearly equivalent to a small city. However, in 1920, the agency's earliest predecessor—then known as the "Black Chamber"—was merely housed in a narrow row house on East 37th Street in Manhattan.
Secret agreements with telecommunications companies have existed for decades. This pattern has repeatedly played out: the National Security Agency or one of its predecessors secretly reached agreements with major U.S. telecommunications companies to illegally obtain the private communications of American citizens. As World War II's gunfire began to quiet, communication privacy laws were reinstated. At that time, Brigadier General Preston C. Code, who served as the head of the "Signal Intelligence Service"—another predecessor of the National Security Agency—faced the same dilemma that Herbert Yardley, head of the "Black Chamber," encountered after World War I: the lack of authority to access telegram communications entering and leaving the United States and within the country.
Thus, the government struck deals with major telegraph companies, stipulating that the latter would provide the "Signal Intelligence Service" (and later the National Security Agency) with access to their communication services. Under an arrangement codenamed "Operation Cloverleaf," agents would arrive at the back door of each telecommunications company's New York headquarters around midnight to collect the day's telegram communications and deliver this data to an office disguised as a television tape processing company.
There, agents would use machines to copy all computer tapes containing telegram content, then return the original tapes to the telecommunications company within a few hours.
This secret agreement lasted for 30 years, ending in 1975 when a series of disclosures about secret intelligence activities shocked the nation, revealed by an investigation led by Senator Frank Church. The illegal and large-scale secret surveillance operations astonished everyone, including both the left and right, Democrats and Republicans.
After September 11, eavesdropping was no longer bound by legal constraints. Thus, both parties jointly drafted new legislation to ensure that similar incidents would not occur again. This legislation, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established a secret court, the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court," to ensure that the National Security Agency could only conduct eavesdropping on American citizens when there was reason to suspect their involvement in serious national security crimes—such as espionage or terrorist activities. For the next quarter-century, the National Security Agency adhered to this law, directing its vast reach abroad, away from the daily lives of American citizens.
However, shortly after the September 11 attacks in 2001, all of this changed. The Bush administration initiated an unauthorized eavesdropping program. Thus, the director of the National Security Agency once again sought secret cooperation from the U.S. telecommunications industry to gain access to communication channels and links.
And these telecommunications companies once again complied, even though doing so violated the law and infringed upon the privacy of millions of customers. Ultimately, when this operation was discovered, many groups filed lawsuits against these companies; however, Congress passed legislation granting them immunity.
Therefore, for nearly 100 years, whenever the government knocked on the door of the telecommunications industry, demanding that they violate the law and hand over countless private communications, the telecommunications companies had no choice but to comply. These companies were more than willing, knowing that even if they broke the law, they would never face any punishment.
Now, according to the latest details exposed by the media, it seems that the National Security Agency, in addition to seeking assistance from many large internet companies, has once again approached Verizon Communications and other telephone companies to obtain secret access to a large amount of private communications. There are still many questions to be answered regarding the legal basis for this operation.