History News Network

National Security Agency

Originally published 09/27/2013
Secret Cold War documents reveal NSA spied on senators

...along with Muhammad Ali, Martin Luther King, and a Washington Post humorist.

Originally published 08/19/2013
The NSA Needs to Stop Digging

The latest revelations demonstrate that the agency is out of control.

Originally published 07/15/2013
The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020

Sadly, Mark Twain was right when he warned us just over 100 years ago that America could not have both empire abroad and democracy at home.

Originally published 07/14/2013
Demystifying the NSA Surveillance Program

The NSA scandal is fast becoming the most serious diplomatic disaster in recent American history. For a host of reasons the surveillance needs to stop right now.

Originally published 06/11/2013
Yes, PRISM Really is a Big Deal

The truth is that the terrorist threat is much diminished from what it was when the Patriot Act was adopted in 2001, or even from 2008, when amendments to that law opened the door to PRISM.

Originally published 06/10/2013
Rick Perlstein: The NSA Doppelganger

Rick Perlstein is the author of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history, and Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008), a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications.What goes around comes around.The latest news in the National Security Agency spy scandal: that the NSA has been Hoovering up your emails, documents, and connection details directly from the servers of nine US Internet companies. And that, according to NBC News, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the United States ever since the passage of the Patriot Act. And they have been doing so with legal immunity. Barack Obama has been helping with that, since well before he was president; and now that he is, he does what presidents do, which is to aggrandize the power of their office by whatever means at their disposal.We have been here before.