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June 15th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
NSA: No Such Agency
Recently
by Eric Margolis: Turkey’s
Riots Threaten a Decade of Progress
In June, 1942,
the United States Navy achieved one of history’s greatest naval
triumphs over the Imperial Japanese Navy, thanks to a combination
of brilliant leadership, plain good luck, and code-breaking.
US carrier-based
dive bombers led by the intrepid Commander Wade McClusky Jr. swiftly
sank three Japanese carriers. A fourth Japanese carrier was sunk
soon after.
Midway turned
the course of the Pacific naval war and spelled inevitable defeat
for Japan in World War II.
US Navy code
breakers had secretly deciphered Japan’s naval codes, so US Admiral
Nimitz knew the Japanese fleet’s movements and timing. Nimitz positioned
three US carriers northwest of Hawaii and ambushed the oncoming
Japanese fleet heading for Hawaii.
Code breaking
played a key role in the Allied WWII victory. The British and Soviets
also broke many German military codes. The decisive battle of Kursk
and the U-boat war were primarily won thanks to code breaking. Ever
since, the US has made signals intelligence (SIGINT) a key part
of military operations.
Fast forward
to last week’s furor over electronic snooping under the PRISM program
by the US National Security Agency (NSA) into America’s nine big
internet providers. We should not have been surprised. Surveillance
and spying cannot be stopped unless forcefully constrained. Intelligence,
like fire, to quote Ben Franklin, is “a useful servant; but
a terrible master.”
The National
Security Agency is America’s largest but least known spy agency.
In the military, we used to jokingly call NSA, “No Such Agency.”
I was invited to join NSA at the end of my US Army days, but declined.
Investigative
author James Bamford has written fine books and articles about the
top secret workings of NSA. Way back in the 1960’s, we knew that
NSA could listen in to almost every foreign embassy in Washington
and many military transmissions around the globe.
When I was
covering Moscow, NSA managed to eves drop on the private phone of
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. We also know that NSA’s secret “ECHELON”
system was hovering up phone and fax messages around the globe.
That was fine overseas. At home, the Supreme Court ruled that the government
cannot listen to the private communications of Americans.
But 9/11 conveniently
changed all that. President George Bush and his neoconservative
advisors got a cowardly US Congress to enact the pernicious Patriot
Act that tore down America’s constitutional safeguards and allowed
the intelligence agencies to run amok under the guise of national
security. Warrantless wiretaps became common. Unlimited electronic
snooping spread like wildfire to Canada, Britain, Australia and
New Zealand.
Most communications
by phone, email, fax, Skype, Tweets are sucked up by NSA’s big ears
and run through the world’s most powerful computers at NSA HQ at
Fort Meade Maryland and its many branch locations.
President Obama
asserted this week that the PRISM program only collected metadata
– that is, patterns rather than reading mail. NSA’s chief claimed
snooping in the US thwarted numerous terrorist attacks.
Both claims
are hard to believe.
The US security
state keeps growing. Any communications of possible interest are
read under the impossibly vague anti-terrorism laws. If I am a subject
of interest because I read Muslim religious sites on the internet,
then anyone who emails me also becomes a suspect, and anyone who
contacts them, and so ad infinitum.
The endless
faux “war on terror” sanctions all violations of personal
rights. Its is the magic lantern of the far right, a carte blanche
pushing the US and its allies ever further to the right. Once bad
laws like the Patriot Act are established, they rarely go away.
Americans
will just have to get used to acting as if they live in old Communist
East Germany or the Soviet Union. Anything sent electronically becomes
government property. Privacy has been repealed by the 342-page Patriot
Act. The big internet providers are becoming government accomplices.
Amazingly,
polls show a third of Americans think all government surveillance
is good if it protects them from “terrorism,” whatever
that is. Many Germans thought similarly in the 1930’s.
As an American,
I am hugely proud of our code breaker’s triumph at Midway. But dismayed
and angry that today our SIGINT efforts are aimed at our citizens.
June
15, 2013
Eric
Margolis [send
him mail] is the author of War
at the Top of the World and the new book, American
Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving the Conflict Between the
West and the Muslim World. See his
website.
Copyright
© 2013 Eric Margolis
Source Article from http://lewrockwell.com/margolis/margolis345.html
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