NSA



On a mountain halfway between Reno and Rome, We have a machine in a Plexiglas dome, Which listens and looks into everyone's home. The National Security Agency (NSA) is one of the most secretive parts of the United States' intelligence community; anything more secretive probably does not officially exist. It was also referred to as "No Such Agency" for this reason. They mostly deal in signals intelligence (SIGINT ) and other technical forms of intelligence gathering. A secondary mission is information security (INFOSEC) — that is, protecting the USA's sensitive communications; or more cynically, keeping other countries from doing to the USA what it does to them.

The majority of the NSA is privatized, with contractors like the firm Booz Allen Hamilton doing quite a bit of the dirty work and being unaccountable to the democratic process. This whole private-public apparatus we call the NSA is headquartered in Maryland. Interestingly, the NSA probably works more closely with American allies than any other part of the American intelligence community. It is well-known that the US shares SIGINT information with the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as part of the "Five Eyes" spy network (also known as ECHELON). Moreover, the NSA works closely with Taiwan's NSB to spy on China, though as a result of the it also had two bases in western China to monitor the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Conspiracy theorists and other people have long speculated that the NSA has been spying on Americans (and others) over a long period of time. Unfortunately for all of us, they were proven right in 2013 when news about the PRISM project (which collects information from most social media sources and also wiretaps millions of phones, especially from Verizon) was leaked by The Guardian, through information provided by Edward Snowden, a whistleblower and former NSA contractor employee. The PATRIOT Act has no bounds, it seems.