What used to interest the NSA is not so much what interests it today.
Last edited Mon Aug 19, 2013, 04:44 PM - Edit history (1)
The reason for the founding of the NSA had to do with the cold war. Nuclear proliferation and sword brandishing dictated the need for serious intelligence gathering. Mostly in the Soviet Union and it's puppet countries. The CIA was the human intelligence service, running a network of people who spied on those countries that worried us.
The NSA was about collecting intelligence from electronic sources. All of that is easy enough to understand, and became public knowledge a long time ago. Things like order of battle, distribution of weapons systems, development of new technologies, information on capabilities, and even locations of important people. That was the interest of the NSA. A worldwide network was set up to try to glean this information from a broad variety of sources. That much is publicly known, but I can't really say much more about the details.
As China emerged as a nuclear power and with the Vietnam war, the need for accurate intelligence grew, and so did the NSA and its capabilities. New technologies led to new methods, and the quest for information continued. How much information was gleaned and what it was remains highly classified, and few people actually know about more than small segments of operations. That's intentional.
The Cold War sort of ended. The NSA continued, but changed some of its targets for gathering information. 9/11 happened, which changed things again. How, I don't know, exactly, but changes there were, aplenty.
And so, we have Snowden and Greenwald and others who are attempting to reveal information about the NSA. So far, they haven't revealed much that is new. Information about most of the programs that have been revealed in the limited briefing documents has been available through other channels to anyone interested enough to go seek that information out. Even lowly Wikipedia has had lots of information about NSA programs, along with the other clandestine services. The articles are informative. Before the Internet, there were books and articles about the clandestine agencies. I've read them all. Some are more informative and accurate than others, but there's a ton of information to sort through for those interested in international intelligence operations. It's fascinating stuff.
Most people have been surprised by what has been released. That's raised a lot of hackles and stirred up lots of unease and speculation. The fact is that little is still known, generally, and what is known is not necessarily what it seems to be. The NSA, CIA, and DIA are charged with collecting intelligence outside of the US, but not within the US. They make that public. And yet, things overlap, perhaps too much, leading to all of this confusion and concern. Safeguards are in place to prevent the international intelligence interests from messing about internally, but they may be less effective than they might be, so there is some overlap in collection of information. That's what's being discussed right now with the Snowden/Greenwald releases.
The FBI is the internal intelligence service, and it is everywhere. Yet, we don't talk much about it, because we already know that the FBI is investigating all sorts of domestic stuff. We're shocked, though, to learn that the other agencies sometimes happen on domestic stuff, despite all the attempts at oversight to keep that from happening. The overlapping nature of intelligence, though, makes it almost impossible to exclude some collection of data, despite all of the safeguards and policy statements.
I'm drawing no conclusions. I'm just providing some history and insight, based on my limited actual experience in that field and on my long, continuing interest in such things since I left that field. It's worth whatever anyone wants it to be worth.
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