Back in 1973 when there were real threats, I worked in Alaska as a military member of the Army Security Agency (ASA). We collected signals and electronic intelligence on the old Soviet Union - their satellite launches and ICBM practices. ASA, along with the Air Force Security Service and the Naval Security Group (I believe they were called) reported directly to authorities, military and civilian, at the National Security Agency, Ft. Meade, MD., and not through a strictly military chain. (That changed soon-there-after when they kicked everyone out of ASA and back into grunt-work with the combat arms and other units.)
We didn't collect meta-data, but teletype, morse code, and telemetry, and whatever satellite intelligence those guys in the other building collected. This was all reported back to NSA utilizing teletypes "via commint channels only". That was it.
Yes, there were rudimentary computers, and NSA was known to have (and always did have) the most advanced computers in the world. One NSA director likened signals intelligence to putting a firehose down your mouth - so much data you couldn't analyze it all.
I also worked years later (late '80s) for a Military Intelligence unit where regular visits to the (original) puzzle palace in Ft. Meade were made. I was wowed by the capability of our government - but it was directed at a real threat to my way of thinking. Several times, I saw Special Forces soldiers dressed in combat gear getting ready for a mission and were there in the halls of NSA to get the latest.
Just as I was about the leave the service, we were getting inklings that NSA may be used to fight the "war on drugs." I saw old hands in our signals intelligence rigs "roll off" American frequencies so as not to violate NSA's former principles (no spying on Americans or on American soil). They weren't all that happy with the possibility of being used in a domestic operation, no matter how couched it was in suspect legalities.
I guess all that has changed. With 9-11 and everyone hyping the threat, NSA had to justify new missions. And apparently it's gotten bigger and better, so to speak. I don't doubt those running these programs believe they're constitutional and all that. But...this isn't even a slippery slope. Now that we've gone down the path, and even built large data mining facilities out in the boonies, who's to say this won't stray into a hugely oppressive entity? Well, we're the ones who have the say. The intelligence-industrial complex is huge and should be brought into the light.
NSA needs to be shaken up with a thorough review. And it's not just NSA, but the entire intelligence community. The secrecy regime and the high-tech regime are too much of a threat. Let's ask that other programs be declassified as much as possible so we can discuss this stuff. Having news outlets break the stories is fine. But it's piecemeal and prone to inaccuracies. A quicker way to get at the problem of too much classification and secrecy is to investigate and publicize the overall goals, and the specific intrusions, these programs address.
In the mid-'70s, Senator Frank Church and Congressman Otis Pike set up select committees to investigate abuses at the CIA and other agencies. Church had called the CIA a "rogue elephant." Pike, addressing CIA concerns about revealing classified topics, responded that he had no -
...intention of destroying US intelligence. What he wanted, he told [CIA Director William] Colby, was to build public and Congressional understanding and support for intelligence by "exposing" as much as possible of its nature without doing harm to proper intelligence activities.
This information is in the CIA's own
review of those times.
The committee investigations led to numerous reforms, to include greater oversight with the institution of the FISA law and special courts. Have these reforms been countered too much by public acceptance of post-9/11 crackdowns? As wiki notes about the Church Committee:
The Committee's work has more recently been criticized after the September 11 attacks, for leading to legislation reducing the ability of the CIA to gather human intelligence.[11][12][13][14] In response to such criticism, the chief counsel of the committee, Frederick A.O. Schwarz Jr., retorted with a book co-authored by Aziz Z. Huq, denouncing the Bush administration's use of 9/11 to make "monarchist claims" that are "unprecedented on this side of the North Atlantic".[15]
In 2006, the University of Kentucky held a
forum called "Who's Watching the Spies?" A member of the forum was former Vice President Walter Mondale. He made a statement at the forum that rings true in light of current events:
We have a big stake as Americans in guaranteeing that our system of constitutional law is sustained. Every big power that was around when America was born decided its future was to be found in some kind of imperial, magisterial power with no rights to the citizen. We started with the idea that this would be a government of the people, by the people, and under the law. Read the oath of office, read the constitution, read the federalist papers. We wanted a government that was accountable. And that has made America, I believe, more than anything else, the greatest, strongest nation on earth. And we lose something when we take lightly this idea of constitutional and legal rights of our people.
The place we supported in Alaska was called DEFSMAC (Defense Special Missile and Aerospace Center), pronounced "Deaf-Smack". As I recall, this word was even classified. It is no longer. NSA has published a history of DEFSMAC. You can read it
here (PDF).
Here's another document that's been largely declassified by NSA, a sort of academic appraisal of DEFSMAC, with a few redactions (PDF).
As a final thought: Remember the Pueblo. This was the spy ship captured by the North Koreans. It performed Sigint and Elint operations. Commander Bucher and his crew suffered terrible torture at the hands of the North Koreans. The fragmented command structure on board meant that Bucher commanded the functioning of the ship, but the Officer in Charge of the Naval Security Group detachment ran everything else and also reported, essentially, to NSA.
This idea that "these are my apples and this is my secret playground" exists today. What will cure this attitude is for the public at large to point the firehose at the intelligence community, clean it up, and wash away attitudes that contribute to secrecy at the expense of basic liberties.
This is another of NSA's declassified reports by its historian on the Pueblo incident. Exposure is a good thing.