National Security Agency

• 
• SOURCE: The Daily Beast
  9-9-16
  

  The Time U.S. Spies Thought Al Qaeda Was Ready to Nuke D.C.

  American intelligence chiefs were so worried in late 2003 of a nuclear terror attack, they asked the British to take over their spying in case something ‘catastrophic’ went down.

• 
• 10-18-15
  

  We’ve Just Learned the Origins of Illegal Surveillance in the United States Go Back to the 1930s

  by Steve Usdin

  An oral history just released shows that cryptologists working for the Army knew they were breaking the law when they conducted secret electronic surveillance.

• 
• SOURCE: Foreign Policy
  9-25-13
  

  Secret Cold War documents reveal NSA spied on senators

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

• 

• The NSA Needs to Stop Digging

  by John Prados

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

• 

• The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020

  by Alfred W. McCoy

  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. 

• 

• Demystifying the NSA Surveillance Program

  by John Prados

  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.

• 

• Yes, PRISM Really is a Big Deal

  by John Prados

  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.

• SOURCE: The Nation
  6-7-13
  

  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.