SWJED
01-02-2006, 09:19 AM
1 Jan. Washington Post - The NSA's Overt Problem (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001594.html).
In any war, surveillance of the enemy is critical. Today, in the eyes of at least some Americans, surveillance itself has become the enemy.
It was not always so. As any intelligence maven knows, some of the heroes of World War II were eavesdroppers, not soldiers...
Who are our masters of surveillance today? Most are located at the National Security Agency, the giant "Crypto City" complex located off Interstate 95 between Washington and Baltimore. The agency vacuums up 650 million intercepts a day -- called signals intelligence, or sigint -- from satellites, ground stations, aircraft, ships and submarines around the world. And it hunts for patterns that might lend seemingly ordinary words significance in the war on terrorism.
But the agency and its experts are not being hailed as heroes right now. The NSA, so secretive that its letters are commonly said to stand for "No Such Agency," has been uncomfortably in the limelight in recent weeks after the New York Times revealed that as the result of a presidential order, the agency has been monitoring thousands of Americans over the phone and by e-mail without court authorization.
As the controversy over the legality and propriety of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency rages on, one question has not been adequately addressed: Is the NSA's approach really the best way of tracking terrorists? While there's no question that the NSA's covert move into domestic surveillance raises serious legal and ethical issues, the equally important and less examined question is whether -- more than four years after 9/11 -- the agency's methods are suited to tracking the jihadists...
In any war, surveillance of the enemy is critical. Today, in the eyes of at least some Americans, surveillance itself has become the enemy.
It was not always so. As any intelligence maven knows, some of the heroes of World War II were eavesdroppers, not soldiers...
Who are our masters of surveillance today? Most are located at the National Security Agency, the giant "Crypto City" complex located off Interstate 95 between Washington and Baltimore. The agency vacuums up 650 million intercepts a day -- called signals intelligence, or sigint -- from satellites, ground stations, aircraft, ships and submarines around the world. And it hunts for patterns that might lend seemingly ordinary words significance in the war on terrorism.
But the agency and its experts are not being hailed as heroes right now. The NSA, so secretive that its letters are commonly said to stand for "No Such Agency," has been uncomfortably in the limelight in recent weeks after the New York Times revealed that as the result of a presidential order, the agency has been monitoring thousands of Americans over the phone and by e-mail without court authorization.
As the controversy over the legality and propriety of domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency rages on, one question has not been adequately addressed: Is the NSA's approach really the best way of tracking terrorists? While there's no question that the NSA's covert move into domestic surveillance raises serious legal and ethical issues, the equally important and less examined question is whether -- more than four years after 9/11 -- the agency's methods are suited to tracking the jihadists...