It’s been called the 4th secret branch of government. Now, it’s about time to gather intel on the NSA—what are they doing, why they are doing it, who are they doing it to, etc. As Senator Bernie Sanders has said, these folks got a lot of expensive toys at their disposable and they are out of control. This is an agency which employs about 25,000 people and has a budget of $52.6 billion of our tax dollars. A lot of money and power plus little regulation is a recipe for absolute abuse. From the scope of the spying, citizens’ phones and computers are subject to surveillance regardless of “probable cause.”
I would venture to say that most Americans were unfamiliar with the National Security Association (NSA) until Edward Snowden created a global stink by leaking damaging governmental documents. Most Americans are too pre-occupied with digging themselves out of the financial hole created by (and still being perpetrated by) Wall Street to follow the Snowden saga. Behind the curtains of secrecy is one of the most powerful and autonomous agencies within U.S. government.
What caught the initial attention was the NSA’s PRISM program which retrieves information from prominent tech companies with their permission but without court orders or subpoenas. They are now being called the Naughty Nine: Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Google, Apple, PalTalk, YouTube and Skype. When you give bullies an inch, they will surely take a mile. Now Google and Yahoo find out that NSA has secretly broken into their data centers around the world and they’re hopping mad. It was quite ok when the communication moguls were allowing our data to be mined without our approval. As Aretha Franklin would say, who’s zooming who?
The latest hair-raising information confirms the NSA spied on 36 world leaders, many of them considered U.S. allies. The NSA spied on 60 million phone calls in Spain and 46 million calls in Italy—all in one month. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cell phone was tapped and thousands of Germans took to the streets in protest of U.S. spying. Germany took particular exception as the country has its own ugly history of surveillance and repression during the Nazi years. President Obama has a heap of explaining to do.
Americans will have to hold the President and the military industrial complex accountable to both domestic and international laws. Let’s keep the spotlight of scrutiny on the NSA and other such agencies and halt the erosion of our privacy rights under the guise of national security.
