En
uno de sus apartes la nota dice que “un avión del Departamento de Defensa que
volaba a 60, 000 pies de altura pudo establecer en un momento dado la
localización de guerrilleros de las FARC y algunos de sus planes”, todo lo cual
fue a parar a manos del ejército colombiano. El artículo no especifica la fecha
en que ocurrió eso.
Más
adelante, cuenta cómo en una operación antidroga a finales del año 2011 la
agencia interceptó las comunicaciones entre Ricketts, un presunto
narcotraficante jamaiquino que vivía en el Ecuador y que andaba en líos con
alias Gordo, un colega, a quien le
había entregado 250, 000 dólares sin haber recibido nada a cambio. Ese
operativo llevó a “establecer cómo funcionaba toda una red de traficantes” de
mucho o poco rango que trabajaba ilegalmente en “Holanda, Nueva Escocia, Panamá
y Bogotá”.
La
NSA, tene 35.000 trabajadores y un presupuesto anual de 10.800 millones de
dólares,.
Para
ver el artículo de The New York Times en ingles:
No Morsel Too Minuscule for
All-Consuming N.S.A./By SCOTT SHANE
When
Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, sat down with President
Obama at the White House in April to discuss
Syrian chemical weapons, Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and climate change,
it was a cordial, routine exchange.
The National
Security Agency nonetheless went to work in advance and intercepted
Mr. Ban’s talking points for the meeting, a feat the agency later reported as
an “operational highlight” in a weekly internal brag sheet. It is hard to
imagine what edge this could have given Mr. Obama in a friendly chat, if he
even saw the N.S.A.’s modest scoop. (The White House won’t say.)
But it
was emblematic of an agency that for decades has operated on the principle that
any eavesdropping that can be done on a foreign target of any conceivable
interest — now or in the future — should be done. After all, American
intelligence officials reasoned, who’s going to find out?
From
thousands of classified documents, the National Security Agency emerges as an
electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its
way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets,
all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations. It spies
routinely on friends
as well as foes, as has become obvious in recent weeks; the agency’s official
mission list includes using its surveillance powers to achieve “diplomatic
advantage” over such allies as France and Germany and “economic advantage” over
Japan and Brazil, among other countries.
Mr.
Obama found himself in September standing uncomfortably beside the president of
Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, who was furious at being named as a target of N.S.A.
eavesdropping. Since then, there has been a parade of such protests, from the
European Union, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain. Chagrined American officials
joke that soon there will be complaints from foreign leaders feeling slighted
because the agency had not targeted them.
James
R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, has repeatedly dismissed
such objections as brazen hypocrisy from countries that do their own share of
spying. But in a recent interview, he acknowledged that the scale of
eavesdropping by the N.S.A., with 35,000 workers and $10.8 billion a year, sets
it apart. “There’s no question that from a capability standpoint we probably
dwarf everybody on the planet, just about, with perhaps the exception of Russia
and China,” he said.
Since
Edward J. Snowden began releasing
the agency’s documents in June, the unrelenting stream of disclosures has
opened the most extended debate on the agency’s mission since its creation in
1952. The scrutiny has ignited a crisis of purpose and legitimacy for the
N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, and the White House has
ordered a review of both its domestic and its foreign intelligence collection.
While much of the focus has been on whether the agency violates Americans’
privacy, an issue under examination by Congress and two review panels, the
anger expressed around the world about American surveillance has prompted far
broader questions.
If
secrecy can no longer be taken for granted, when does the political risk of
eavesdropping overseas outweigh its intelligence benefits? Should foreign citizens,
many of whom now rely on American companies for email and Internet services,
have any privacy protections from the N.S.A.? Will the American Internet
giants’ collaboration with the agency, voluntary or otherwise, damage them in
international markets? And are the agency’s clandestine efforts to weaken
encryption making the Internet less secure for everyone?
Matthew
M. Aid, an intelligence historian and author of a 2009 book on the N.S.A., said
there is no precedent for the hostile questions coming at the agency from all
directions.
“From
N.S.A.’s point of view, it’s a disaster,” Mr. Aid said. “Every new disclosure
reinforces the notion that the agency needs to be reined in. There are political
consequences, and there will be operational consequences.”
A
review of classified agency documents obtained by Mr. Snowden and shared with
The New York Times by The Guardian,
offers a rich sampling of the agency’s global operations and culture. (At the
agency’s request, The Times is withholding some details that officials said
could compromise intelligence operations.) The N.S.A. seems to be listening
everywhere in the world, gathering every stray electron that might add, however
minutely, to the United States government’s knowledge of the world. To some
Americans, that may be a comfort. To others, and to people overseas, that may
suggest an agency out of control.
The
C.I.A. dispatches undercover officers overseas to gather intelligence today
roughly the same way spies operated in biblical times. But the N.S.A., born
when the long-distance call was a bit exotic, has seen its potential targets
explode in number with the advent of personal computers, the Internet and
cellphones. Today’s N.S.A. is the Amazon of intelligence agencies, as different
from the 1950s agency as that online behemoth is from a mom-and-pop bookstore.
It sucks the contents from fiber-optic cables, sits on telephone switches and
Internet hubs, digitally burglarizes laptops and plants bugs on smartphones
around the globe.
Mr.
Obama and top intelligence officials have defended the agency’s role in
preventing terrorist attacks. But as the documents make clear, the focus on
counterterrorism is a misleadingly narrow sales pitch for an agency with an
almost unlimited agenda. Its scale and aggressiveness are breathtaking.
The
agency’s Dishfire database — nothing happens without a code word at the N.S.A.
— stores years of text messages from around the world, just in case. Its
Tracfin collection accumulates gigabytes of credit card purchases. The fellow
pretending to send a text message at an Internet cafe in Jordan may be using an
N.S.A. technique code-named Polarbreeze to tap into nearby computers. The
Russian businessman who is socially active on the web might just become food
for Snacks, the acronym-mad agency’s Social Network Analysis Collaboration
Knowledge Services, which figures out the personnel hierarchies of
organizations from texts.
The spy
agency’s station in Texas intercepted 478 emails while helping to foil a
jihadist plot to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn pictures of the Prophet
Muhammad. N.S.A. analysts delivered to authorities at Kennedy International
Airport the names and flight numbers of workers dispatched by a Chinese human
smuggling ring.
The
agency’s eavesdropping gear, aboard a Defense Department plane flying 60,000
feet over Colombia, fed the location and plans of FARC rebels to the Colombian
Army. In the Orlandocard operation, N.S.A. technicians set up what they called
a “honeypot” computer on the web that attracted visits from 77,413 foreign
computers and planted spyware on more than 1,000 that the agency deemed of potential
future interest.
The
Global Phone Book
No
investment seems too great if it adds to the agency’s global phone book. After
mounting a major eavesdropping effort focused on a climate change conference in
Bali in 2007, agency analysts stationed in Australia’s outback were especially
thrilled by one catch: the cellphone number of Bali’s police chief.
“Our
mission,” says the agency’s current five-year plan, which has not been
officially scheduled for declassification until 2032, “is to answer questions
about threatening activities that others mean to keep hidden.”
The
aspirations are grandiose: to “utterly master” foreign intelligence carried on
communications networks. The language is corporate: “Our business processes
need to promote data-driven decision-making.” But the tone is also strikingly
moralistic for a government bureaucracy. Perhaps to counter any notion that
eavesdropping is a shady enterprise, signals intelligence, or Sigint, the term
of art for electronic intercepts, is presented as the noblest of callings.
“Sigint
professionals must hold the moral high ground, even as terrorists or dictators
seek to exploit our freedoms,” the plan declares. “Some of our adversaries will
say or do anything to advance their cause; we will not.”
The
N.S.A. documents taken by Mr. Snowden and shared with The Times, numbering in
the thousands and mostly dating from 2007 to 2012, are part of a collection of
about 50,000 items that focus mainly on its British counterpart, Government
Communications Headquarters or G.C.H.Q.
While
far from comprehensive, the documents give a sense of the agency’s reach and
abilities, from the Navy ships snapping up radio transmissions as they cruise
off the coast of China, to the satellite dishes at Fort Meade in Maryland
ingesting worldwide banking transactions, to the rooftops of 80 American
embassies and consulates around the world from which the agency’s Special
Collection Service aims its antennas.
The
agency and its many defenders among senior government officials who have relied
on its top secret reports say it is crucial to American security and status in
the world, pointing to terrorist plots disrupted, nuclear proliferation tracked
and diplomats kept informed.
But the
documents released by Mr. Snowden sometimes also seem to underscore the limits
of what even the most intensive intelligence collection can achieve by itself.
Blanket N.S.A. eavesdropping in Afghanistan, described in the documents as
covering government offices and the hide-outs of second-tier Taliban militants
alike, has failed to produce a clear victory against a low-tech enemy. The
agency kept track as Syria amassed its arsenal of chemical weapons — but that
knowledge did nothing to prevent the gruesome slaughter outside Damascus in
August.
The
documents are skewed toward celebration of the agency’s self-described
successes, as underlings brag in PowerPoints to their bosses about their
triumphs and the managers lay out grand plans. But they do not entirely omit
the agency’s flubs and foibles: flood tides of intelligence gathered at huge
cost that goes unexamined; intercepts that cannot be read for lack of language
skills; and computers that — even at the N.S.A. — go haywire in all the usual
ways.
Mapping
Message Trails
In May
2009, analysts at the agency learned that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, was to make a rare trip to Kurdistan Province in the country’s
mountainous northwest. The agency immediately organized a high-tech espionage
mission, part of a continuing project focused on Ayatollah Khamenei called
Operation Dreadnought.
Working
closely with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which handles
satellite photography, as well as G.C.H.Q., the N.S.A. team studied the Iranian
leader’s entourage, its vehicles and its weaponry from satellites, and
intercepted air traffic messages as planes and helicopters took off and landed.
They
heard Ayatollah Khamenei’s aides fretting about finding a crane to load an
ambulance and fire truck onto trucks for the journey. They listened as he
addressed a crowd, segregated by gender, in a soccer field.
They
studied Iranian air defense radar stations and recorded the travelers’ rich
communications trail, including Iranian satellite coordinates collected by an
N.S.A. program called Ghosthunter. The point was not so much to catch the
Iranian leader’s words, but to gather the data for blanket eavesdropping on
Iran in the event of a crisis.
This
“communications fingerprinting,” as a document called it, is the key to what
the N.S.A. does. It allows the agency’s computers to scan the stream of
international communications and pluck out messages tied to the supreme leader.
In a crisis — say, a showdown over Iran’s nuclear
program — the ability to tap into the communications of leaders,
generals and scientists might give a crucial advantage.
On a
more modest scale, the same kind of effort, what N.S.A. calls “Sigint
development,” was captured in a document the agency obtained in 2009 from
Somalia — whether from a human source or an electronic break-in was not noted.
It contained email addresses and other contact details for 117 selected
customers of a Mogadishu Internet service, Globalsom.
While
most on the list were Somali officials or citizens, presumably including some
suspected of militancy, the document also included emails for a United Nations
political officer in Mogadishu and a local representative for the charity World
Vision, among other international institutions. All, it appeared, were
considered fair game for monitoring.
This
huge investment in collection is driven by pressure from the agency’s
“customers,” in government jargon, not only at the White House, Pentagon, F.B.I.
and C.I.A., but also spread across the Departments of State and Energy,
Homeland Security and Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative.
By many
accounts, the agency provides more than half of the intelligence nuggets
delivered to the White House early each morning in the President’s Daily Brief
— a measure of success for American spies. (One document boasts that listening
in on Nigerian State Security had provided items for the briefing “nearly two
dozen” times.) In every international crisis, American policy makers look to
the N.S.A. for inside information.
Pressure
to Get Everything
That
creates intense pressure not to miss anything. When that is combined with an ample
budget and near-invisibility to the public, the result is aggressive
surveillance of the kind that has sometimes gotten the agency in trouble with
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a United States federal court that
polices its programs for breaches of Americans’ privacy.
In the
funding boom that followed the Sept. 11 attacks, the agency expanded and
decentralized far beyond its Fort Meade headquarters in Maryland, building or
expanding major facilities in Georgia, Texas, Colorado, Hawaii, Alaska,
Washington State and Utah. Its officers also operate out of major overseas
stations in England, Australia, South Korea and Japan, at overseas military
bases, and from locked rooms housing the Special Collection Service inside
American missions abroad.
The
agency, using a combination of jawboning, stealth and legal force, has turned
the nation’s Internet and telecommunications companies into collection
partners, installing filters in their facilities, serving them with court
orders, building back doors into their software and acquiring keys to break
their encryption.
But
even that vast American-run web is only part of the story. For decades, the
N.S.A. has shared eavesdropping duties with the rest of the so-called Five
Eyes, the Sigint agencies of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. More
limited cooperation occurs with many more countries, including formal
arrangements called Nine Eyes and 14 Eyes and Nacsi, an alliance of the
agencies of 26 NATO countries.
The
extent of Sigint sharing can be surprising: “N.S.A. may pursue a relationship
with Vietnam,” one 2009 G.C.H.Q. document reported. But a recent G.C.H.Q.
training document suggests that not everything is shared, even between the
United States and Britain. “Economic well-being reporting,” it says, referring
to intelligence gathered to aid the British economy, “cannot be shared with any
foreign partner.”
As at
the school lunch table, decisions on who gets left out can cause hurt feelings:
“Germans were a little grumpy at not being invited to join the 9-Eyes group,”
one 2009 document remarks. And in a delicate spy-versus-spy dance, sharing
takes place even with governments that are themselves important N.S.A. targets,
notably Israel.
The
documents describe collaboration with the Israel Sigint National Unit, which
gets raw N.S.A. eavesdropping material and provides it in return, but they also
mention the agency’s tracking of “high priority Israeli military targets,”
including drone aircraft
and the Black Sparrow missile system.
The
alliances, and the need for stealth, can get complicated. At one highly valued
overseas listening post, the very presence of American N.S.A. personnel
violates a treaty agreed to by the agency’s foreign host. Even though much of
the eavesdropping is run remotely from N.S.A.’s base at Fort Gordon, Ga.,
Americans who visit the site must pose as contractors, carry fake business
cards and are warned: “Don’t dress as typical Americans."
“Know
your cover legend,” a PowerPoint security briefing admonishes the N.S.A. staff
members headed to the overseas station, directing them to “sanitize personal
effects,” send no postcards home and buy no identifiably local souvenirs. (“An
option might be jewelry. Most jewelry does not have any markings” showing its
place of origin.)
Bypassing
Security
In the
agency’s early years, its brainy staff members — it remains the largest
employer of mathematicians in the country — played an important role in the
development of the first computers, then largely a tool for code breaking.
Today,
with personal computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones in most homes and
government offices in the developed world, hacking has become the agency’s
growth area.
Some of
Mr. Snowden’s documents describe the exploits of Tailored Access Operations,
the prim name for the N.S.A. division that breaks into computers around the
world to steal the data inside, and sometimes to leave spy software behind.
T.A.O. is increasingly important in part because it allows the agency to bypass
encryption by capturing messages as they are written or read, when they are not
encoded.
In
Baghdad, T.A.O. collected messages left in draft form in email accounts
maintained by leaders of the Islamic State of Iraq, a militant group. Under a
program called Spinaltap, the division’s hackers identified 24 unique Internet
Protocol addresses identifying computers used by the Lebanese militant group
Hezbollah, making it possible to snatch Hezbollah messages from the flood of
global communications sifted by the agency.
The
N.S.A.’s elite Transgression Branch, created in 2009 to “discover, understand,
evaluate and exploit” foreign hackers’ work, quietly piggybacks on others’
incursions into computers of interest, like thieves who follow other
housebreakers around and go through the windows they have left ajar.
In one
2010 hacking operation code-named Ironavenger, for instance, the N.S.A. spied
simultaneously on an ally and an adversary. Analysts spotted suspicious emails
being sent to a government office of great intelligence interest in a hostile
country and realized that an American ally was “spear-phishing” — sending
official-looking emails that, when opened, planted malware that let hackers
inside.
The
Americans silently followed the foreign hackers, collecting documents and
passwords from computers in the hostile country, an elusive target. They got a
look inside that government and simultaneously got a close-up look at the
ally’s cyberskills, the kind of intelligence twofer that is the unit’s
specialty.
In many
other ways, advances in computer and communications technology have been a boon
for the agency. N.S.A. analysts tracked the electronic trail left by a top leader
of Al Qaeda in Africa each time he stopped to use a computer on his travels.
They correctly predicted his next stop, and the police were there to arrest
him.
And at
the big N.S.A. station at Fort Gordon, technicians developed an automated
service called “Where’s My Node?” that sent an email to an analyst every time a
target overseas moved from one cell tower to another. Without lifting a finger,
an analyst could follow his quarry’s every move.
The
Limits of Spying
The
techniques described in the Snowden documents can make the N.S.A. seem
omniscient, and nowhere in the world is that impression stronger than in
Afghanistan. But the agency’s capabilities at the tactical level have not been
nearly enough to produce clear-cut strategic success there, in the United
States’ longest war.
A
single daily report from June 2011 from the N.S.A.’s station in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, the heart of Taliban country, illustrates the intensity of
eavesdropping coverage, requiring 15 pages to describe a day’s work.
The
agency listened while insurgents from the Haqqani network mounted an attack on
the Hotel Intercontinental in Kabul, overhearing the attackers talking to their
bosses in Pakistan’s tribal area and recording events minute by minute.
“Ruhullah claimed he was on the third floor and had already inflicted one
casualty,” the report said in a typical entry. “He also indicated that Hafiz
was located on a different floor.”
N.S.A.
officers listened as two Afghan Foreign Ministry officials prepared for a
meeting between President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Iranian officials,
assuring them that relations with the United States “would in no way threaten
the interests of Iran,” which they decided Mr. Karzai should describe as a
“brotherly country.”
The
N.S.A. eavesdropped as the top United Nations official in Afghanistan, Staffan
de Mistura, consulted his European Union counterpart, Vygaudas Usackas, about
how to respond to an Afghan court’s decision to overturn the election of 62
members of Parliament.
And the
agency was a fly on the wall for a long-running land dispute between the mayor
of Kandahar and a prominent local man known as the Keeper of the Cloak of the
Prophet Muhammad, with President Karzai’s late brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, as a
mediator.
The
agency discovered a Taliban claim to have killed five police officers at a
checkpoint by giving them poisoned yogurt, and heard a provincial governor tell
an aide that a district police chief was verbally abusing women and clergymen.
A
Taliban figure, Mullah Rahimullah Akhund, known on the United States military’s
kill-or-capture list by the code name Objective Squiz Incinerator, was
overheard instructing an associate to buy suicide vests and a Japanese
motorbike, according to the documents.
And
N.S.A. listened in as a Saudi extremist, Abu Mughira, called his mother to
report that he and his fellow fighters had entered Afghanistan and “done
victorious operations.”
Such
reports flowed from the agency’s Kandahar station day after day, year after
year, and surely strengthened the American campaign against the Taliban. But
they also suggest the limits of intelligence against a complex political and
military challenge. The N.S.A. recorded the hotel attack, but it had not
prevented it. It tracked Mr. Karzai’s government, but he remained a difficult
and volatile partner. Its surveillance was crucial in the capture or killing of
many enemy fighters, but not nearly enough to remove the Taliban’s ominous
shadow from Afghanistan’s future.
Mining
All the Tidbits
In the
Afghan reports and many others, a striking paradox is the odd intimacy of a
sprawling, technology-driven agency with its targets. It is the one-way
intimacy of the eavesdropper, as N.S.A. employees virtually enter the office
cubicles of obscure government officials and the Spartan hide-outs of drug
traffickers and militants around the world.
Venezuela,
for instance, was one of six “enduring targets” in N.S.A.’s official mission
list from 2007, along with China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Russia. The
United States viewed itself in a contest for influence in Latin America with
Venezuela’s leader then, the leftist firebrand Hugo Chávez, who allied himself
with Cuba, and one agency goal was “preventing Venezuela from achieving its
regional leadership objectives and pursuing policies that negatively impact
U.S. global interests.”
A
glimpse of what this meant in practice comes in a brief PowerPoint presentation
from August 2010 on “Development of the Venezuelan Economic Mission.” The
N.S.A. was tracking billions of dollars flowing to Caracas in loans from China
(radar systems and oil drilling), Russia (MIG fighter planes and shoulder-fired
missiles) and Iran (a factory to manufacture drone aircraft).
But it
was also getting up-close and personal with Venezuela’s Ministry of Planning
and Finance, monitoring the government and personal emails of the top 10
Venezuelan economic officials. An N.S.A. officer in Texas, in other words, was
paid each day to peruse the private messages of obscure Venezuelan bureaucrats,
hunting for tidbits that might offer some tiny policy edge.
In a
counterdrug operation in late 2011, the agency’s officers seemed to know more
about relations within a sprawling narcotics network than the drug dealers
themselves. They listened to “Ricketts,” a Jamaican drug supplier based in
Ecuador, struggling to keep his cocaine and marijuana smuggling business going
after an associate, “Gordo,” claimed he had paid $250,000 and received nothing
in return.
The
N.S.A., a report said, was on top of not just their cellphones, but also those
of the whole network of “buyers, transporters, suppliers, and middlemen”
stretching from the Netherlands and Nova Scotia to Panama City and Bogotá,
Colombia. The documents do not say whether arrests resulted from all that
eavesdropping.
Even
with terrorists, N.S.A. units can form a strangely personal relationship. The
N.S.A.-G.C.H.Q. wiki, a top secret group blog that Mr. Snowden downloaded,
lists 14 specialists scattered in various stations assigned to Lashkar-e-Taiba,
the Pakistani terrorist group that carried out the bloody attack on Mumbai in
2008, with titles including “Pakistan Access Pursuit Team” and “Techniques
Discovery Branch.” Under the code name Treaclebeta, N.S.A.’s hackers at
Tailored Access Operations also played a role.
In the
wiki’s casual atmosphere, American and British eavesdroppers exchange the
peculiar shoptalk of the secret world. “I don’t normally use Heretic to scan
the fax traffic, I use Nucleon,” one user writes, describing technical tools
for searching intercepted documents.
But
most striking are the one-on-one pairings of spies and militants; Bryan is
assigned to listen in on a man named Haroon, and Paul keeps an ear on Fazl.
A Flood
of Details
One
N.S.A. officer on the Lashkar-e-Taiba beat let slip that some of his
eavesdropping turned out to be largely pointless, perhaps because of the
agency’s chronic shortage of skilled linguists. He “ran some queries” to read
intercepted communications of certain Lashkar-e-Taiba members, he wrote in the
wiki, but added: “Most of it is in Arabic or Farsi, so I can’t make much of
it.”
It is a
glimpse of the unsurprising fact that sometimes the agency’s expensive and
expansive efforts accomplish little. Despite the agency’s embrace of corporate
jargon on goal-setting and evaluation, it operates without public oversight in
an arena in which achievements are hard to measure.
In a
world of ballooning communications, the agency is sometimes simply overwhelmed.
In 2008, the N.S.A.’s Middle East and North Africa group set about updating its
Sigint collection capabilities. The “ambitious scrub” of selectors —
essentially search terms — cut the number of terms automatically searched from
21,177 to 7,795 and the number of messages added to the agency’s Pinwale database
from 850,000 a day to 450,000 a day.
The
reduction in volume was treated as a major achievement, opening the way for new
collection on Iranian leadership and Saudi and Syrian diplomats, the report
said.
And in
a note that may comfort computer novices, the N.S.A. Middle East analysts
discovered major glitches in their search software: The computer was searching
for the names of targets but not their email addresses, a rather fundamental
flaw. “Over 500 messages in one week did not come in,” the report said about
one target.
Those
are daily course corrections. Whether the Snowden disclosures will result in
deeper change is uncertain. Joel F. Brenner, the agency’s former inspector
general, says much of the criticism is unfair, reflecting a naïveté about the
realpolitik of spying. “The agency is being browbeaten for doing too well the
things it’s supposed to do,” he said.
But Mr.
Brenner added that he believes “technology has outrun policy” at the N.S.A.,
and that in an era in which spying may well be exposed, “routine targeting of
close allies is bad politics and is foolish.”
Another
former insider worries less about foreign leaders’ sensitivities than the
potential danger the sprawling agency poses at home. William E. Binney, a
former senior N.S.A. official who has become an outspoken critic, says he has
no problem with spying on foreign targets like Brazil’s president or the German
chancellor, Angela Merkel. “That’s pretty much what every government does,” he
said. “It’s the foundation of diplomacy.” But Mr. Binney said that without new
leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform, the agency will represent a
threat of “turnkey totalitarianism” — the capability to turn its awesome power,
now directed mainly against other countries, on the American public.
“I
think it’s already starting to happen,” he said. “That’s what we have to stop.”
Whatever
reforms may come, Bobby R. Inman, who weathered his own turbulent period as
N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981, offers his hyper-secret former agency a
radical suggestion for right now. “My advice would be to take everything you
think Snowden has and get it out yourself,” he said. “It would certainly be a
shock to the agency. But bad news doesn’t get better with age. The sooner they
get it out and put it behind them, the faster they can begin to rebuild.”
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