James Bamford: Post-September 11, NSA ‘enemies’ include us
"Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide."
“We were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted, to include those of Americans,” Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA “voice interceptor,” told me. She was recalled to active duty after Sept. 11.
“Some of those conversations are personal,” she said. “Some even intimate. … I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and that I was listening to it. … When I was on active duty in ’94 to ’98, we would never collect on an American.”
"So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text."
" Rather, it was years of fearmongering that sent everyone rushing across the bridge. Without these draconian measures, we were told, we were in imminent danger of death by terrorist. For the Bush administration, the constant drumbeat of fear was necessary to launch and support the war in Iraq since no real danger existed.
From the outside, America began resembling Deputy Barney Fife from “The Andy Griffith Show,” shaking and trembling and constantly pointing a gun in every direction. There was Homeland Security with its rainbow of colors for security alerts; the weekly warnings of dire attacks, with no indication of time or location, none of which ever turned out to be credible; messages plastered on buses and billboards warning members of the public to keep a close eye on their neighbors and even their family; and body frisks at airports by security thugs looking for forbidden tubes of toothpaste."
2011 article: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62999.html
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