(Reuters) - "God we trust," goes an old National
Security Agency joke. "All others we monitor.
Last week, the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed another
massive NSA surveillance program, called Prism, that required the country's
major Internet companies to secretly pass along data including email, photos,
videos, chat services, file transfers, stored data, log-ins and video
conferencing.
Today the NSA is the world's largest spy organization,
encompassing tens of thousands of employees and occupying a city-size
headquarters complex on Fort Meade in Maryland.
There were three Stepping Stones:
STEP ONE (1920-29)
In 1920, its earliest predecessor, known as the Black Chamber,
fit into a slim townhouse on Manhattan's East 37th Street.
World War One had recently ended, along with official censorship,
and the Radio Communication Act of 1912 was again in effect. This legislation
guaranteed the secrecy of electronic communications and meted out harsh
penalties for any telegraph company employee who divulged the contents of a
message. To the Black Chamber, however, the bill represented a large obstacle
to be overcome-illegally, if necessary.
So the Black Chamber chief, Herbert O. Yardley paid a visit to the headquarters of Western Union. This
was the nation's largest telegram company - the email of that day.
Their object was to convince him to grant them secret access to
the private communications zapping through his company's wires. It was easier
achieved than Yardley had ever imagined.
Time and again over the decades, this pattern has been repeated.
The NSA, or a predecessor, secretly entered into agreements with the country's
major telecommunications companies and illegally gained access to Americans'
private communications.
The influential Republican statesman, Henry L. Stimson, was deeply
offended by the very notion of snooping into people's private communications. As
the new secretary of state in 1929, Stimson shut down the Black Chamber with
the now immortal phrase, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail."
STEP TWO (1942-75)
But when President Franklin D. Roosevelt later appointed Stimson
secretary of war during World War Two, Stimson changed his mind. He wanted to
eavesdrop on every possible communication, especially on the Germans and
Japanese.
Once the guns of World War Two began falling silent, however, the
communications privacy laws again took effect. Thus, Preston Corderman, the
chief of the Signals Intelligence Service faced the same dilemma Yardley
confronted after World War One: a lack of access to the cables flowing into,
out of and through the country.
So, once again, deals were made with the major telegraph companies
to grant the SIS secret access to their communications.
Codenamed "Operation Shamrock," agents would arrive at
the back door at each telecom headquarters in New York around midnight; pick up
all that days telegraph traffic, and bring it to an office masquerading as a
television tape processing company. There they would use a machine to duplicate
all the computer tapes containing the telegrams, and, hours later, return the
original tapes to the company.
The secret agreement lasted for 30 years. It only ended in 1975,
when the nation was shocked by a series of stunning intelligence revelations
uncovered by a congressional investigation led by Senator Frank Church.
The illegality and vast breadth of this one operation stunned both
the left and the right, Republicans as well as Democrats. The parties came
together to create a new law to make sure nothing like it could ever happen
again.
But that all changed soon after Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush
administration began its warrantless wiretapping program.
STEP THREE (2001-13)
Once again, an NSA director sought the secret cooperation of the
nation's telecom industry to gain access to its communications channels and
links. Again, the companies agreed - despite violating the laws and the privacy
of their tens of millions of customers. Eventually, when the operation was
discovered, a number of groups brought suit against the companies, Congress
passed legislation granting them immunity.
The NSA was so flooded with billions of dollars from post-Sept.
11, 2001 budget increases that it went on a building spree and also expanded
its eavesdropping capabilities enormously. Secret rooms were built in giant
telecom facilities, such as AT&T's 10-story "switch" in San
Francisco. There, mirror copies of incoming data and telephone cables are
routed into rooms filled with special hardware and software to filter out email
and phone calls for transmission to NSA for analysis.
Thus, for roughly 100 years, whenever the government knocked on
the telecommunications industry's door and asked them to break the law and turn
over millions upon millions of private communications, the telecoms complied.
EPILOGUE:
Why not, since they knew that nothing would ever happen to them if
they broke the law.
Now, it appears that the NSA has again gone to Verizon and other
telephone companies and obtained secret access to billions of private
communications. But unlike with Yardley and the Black Chamber, the dangers
today of secret cooperation between the telecom and Internet industry and the
NSA are incomparable: access to someone's telephone records and Internet
activity can provide an incredibly intimate window on their life.
Secret agreements between intelligence agencies and communications
companies should not be allowed in a democracy. There is too much at risk.
In a dusty corner of Utah, NSA is now completing construction of a
mammoth new building, a one-million-square foot data warehouse for storing the
billions of communications it is intercepting. If the century-old custom of secret
back-room deals between NSA and the telecoms is permitted to continue, all of
us may digitally end up there.
Contrary to what Simpson may have asserted, gentlemen (and women)
do read each other's mail - at least if they work for the National Security Agency.
And in the future, given NSA's unrestrained push into advanced
technologies, the agency may also be able to read your thoughts as well as your
mail.
(James Bamford writes frequently on intelligence and produces
documentaries for PBS. His latest book is "The Shadow Factory: The
Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America.")
(James Bamford)
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