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May 20 - November 23, 2025
According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations group, which as early as 2006 was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds,”
That operation, which used the cover name MUSCULAR, tapped into U.S. company data from outside U.S. territory. The NSA, therefore, believed it did not need permission from Congress or judicial oversight.
The industry’s response, Smith acknowledged, was driven by a business threat. U.S. companies could not afford to be seen as candy stores for U.S. intelligence.
Both enlisted in the Army during the war in Iraq only to later say they were disillusioned by that conflict.
According to the inspector general’s classified report, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, placed a phone call and “General Hayden had to decide whether NSA would execute the Authorization without the Attorney General’s signature.” He decided to go along.
NSA officials believed that there were no constitutional limits on the collection of digital metadata,
The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force.
By the time President Obama ordered a team of Navy SEALs to storm the site in May 2011, U.S. intelligence officials told the president that, according to their best guesses, the odds that bin Laden was present were 40 percent to 60 percent.
The policy puts leakers of classified information on par with terrorists and double agents, an equivalency that critics of government secrecy find worrisome.
Although the navigational satellite links are encrypted, other drone transmissions are sometimes left unprotected. In 2009, the U.S. military discovered that Iraqi insurgents had hacked into video feeds from Predator and Shadow drones using off-the-shelf software.
The enlarged authority is part of a fundamental shift in the government’s approach to surveillance: collecting first, and protecting Americans’ privacy later.
call into question the effectiveness of an oversight program that depends on accurate disclosure by the NSA to a court that acts in secret and says it lacks the resources to verify independently the agency’s assertions.
Walton’s March ruling also expressed skepticism about the program’s utility, noting the government cited only three FBI preliminary investigations opened as a result of tips gleaned from the database.
The ruling also reaffirmed the government’s contention, upheld by the Supreme Court in 1979, that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy in records of their calls held by phone companies, and a warrant to collect them is not required. A warrant would be required to wiretap the calls.
American people were told one thing about domestic surveillance in public forums while government
“Cyber offense requires a deep, persistent and pervasive presence on adversary networks in order to precisely deliver effects,”
During a single day last year, the NSA’s Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 e-mail address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, according to an internal NSA PowerPoint presentation.
the NSA gathers huge volumes of online communications records by legally compelling U.S. technology companies, including Yahoo and Google, to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.
Smith v. Maryland, involving the surveillance of a criminal suspect over a two-day period. In that case, the Supreme Court said that Americans have no expectation of privacy in the telephone metadata that companies hold as business records, and that therefore a warrant is not required to obtain such information.
