The National Security Agency

The National Security Agency (NSA) was created in 1952 and is headquartered in Forte Meade, Maryland. It is under the direction of the Department of Defense and reports to the Director of National Intelligence. Although classified, the NSA has an estimated 37,000 employees (1) and an estimated operating budget of about 11 billion dollars per year, for comparison the Central Intelligence Agency has an estimated 20,000 employees and an operating budget of about 14 billion dollars per year (2). At the moment the director of the NSA is Keith B. Alexander who has served since 2005 and is the 16th director of the NSA since its inception.

Although the NSA was created in 1952 the history and origins of the NSA can be traced backed, though under different aliases, to as early as World War I where the army collected information from foreign radio messages and then in World War II used cryptologists to break German encryptions plus the principal Japanese’s Navy encryption system. Finally President Harry S. Truman officially created the NSA in 1952. (3) After its official inception, the NSA’s first major assignment was Operation Minaret where it was tasked to monitor anti-Vietnam critics such as Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, and amongst others, presumably illegally wiretapping their phone conversations (4). Thereafter the NSA seems to have been flying under the radar from Vietnam until September 11th, 2001 and the War on Terror aftermath, likely due to the lack of released information about operations. However, due to the Edward Snowden whistleblowing efforts new light has been shed upon the NSA’s very recent activities.

Officially, from the mission statement on the NSA’s website, “The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (N...

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...ret; think of the vast scale that could have been enacted if the current NSA capability was available then. Now think if today’s NSA capability was available during McCarthyism. The amount of paranoia surrounding McCarthyism coupled with todays NSA capability would have implicated vast amounts of innocent people, more so than the already vast amount innocent people implicated by McCarthyism. These are not extreme examples either; both of these events have happened in past 50 years, most parents lived through both of these events. An extreme example yet still plausible, disturbingly, is if the government was to use NSA for population. It might sound as perpetuating conspiracy theories and reading fictitious books like 1984, but these scenarios are plausible. Whatever ones belief on the government being benevolent or not, it is a fact the government is not infallible.