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| The Spy Within |
They surmise this because the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Diane Feinstein has gotten the message.
The message which whistleblowers Edward Snowden, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, and Pvt. Manning of the Army communicated to all of us.
Others, including the President, are finally getting the message that, in this most recent episode, began to be published by Journalists last June.
Regular readers know that Dredd Blog has been pointing out this message which has been coming from several whistleblowers, and pointing out that the message has been given to us for a long time (see e.g. (A Tale of Coup Cities - 4, The Queens of Stalingrad, The Queens of Stalingrad - 2, and ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller).
The lesson that was not learned was given by General / President Eisenhower, a warning to beware of what was then the Military Industrial Complex.
But before we get into that, since this series is about the origin of the problem, let's get to the origin of the military NSA:
… the Joint Chiefs created the Armed Forces Security Agency [AFSA in 1949 (Wikipedia)] … AFSA was redesignated the National Security Agency, without change in personnel, funds, or facilities.(Creation of the NSA, PDF). That PDF link is to an NSA document on their website, which may go away, so use George Washington University as an additional source if need be.
The military took it upon themselves to create a spy agency which spies on the entire world, making their own rules about how it was to run (On The Origin of Security - 2), which makes one wonder why the name Chuck Hagel has not come up.
No President signed a law passed by Congress, no President issued any Executive Order to create the behemoth, rather the military just up and created it themselves.
When there was dissatisfaction with the military AFSA the military simply renamed it the National Security Agency (NSA), but kept the same personnel, funds, and facilities.
We now know that it has been spying on the world, and the Senate is going to take a look at the rogue military agency that has been doing damage to the reputation of the nation:
One of the National Security Agency's biggest defenders in Congress is suddenly at odds with the agency and calling for a top-to-bottom review of U.S. spy programs. And her long-time friends and allies are completely mystified by the switch.(Foreign Policy). Will the military repeat its past practices and just rename the NSA then hide it somewhere else, or just repaint all the buildings, or will this be a for real correction?
"We're really screwed now," one NSA official told The Cable. "You know things are bad when the few friends you've got disappear without a trace in the dead of night and leave no forwarding address."
In a pointed statement issued today, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Dianne Feinstein said she was "totally opposed" to gathering intelligence on foreign leaders and said it was "a big problem" if President Obama didn't know the NSA was monitoring the phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She said the United States should only be spying on foreign leaders with hostile countries, or in an emergency, and even then the president should personally approve the surveillance.
The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.
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