THE REVELATION by the New York Times of an NSA program to review international communications could only cause surprise among those unfamiliar with the history and mission of the agency. The National Security Agency descended from various post-WWII military signal agencies, a centralized and civilianized intelligence service focused on one task: the exploitation of international communications to keep the United States from suffering another Pearl Harbor.
Given that we had suffered just that kind of attack on September 11, 2001 by allowing existing law to have the most negative interpretation possible for coordination between law enforcement and intelligence services–which would create a storm of criticism from the 9/11 Commission and Congress–the NSA understandably took center stage for the defense of the United States. Combined with the Patriot Act, the government took the position that a wartime administration not only needed to ensure greater cooperation and coordination between agencies, but to get better intelligence on which to act. The discovery that the al-Qaeda terrorists operated with impunity from the American homeland for months, openly communicating with Osama bin Laden’s network from cell phones and email provided by American networks, showed the necessity of watching this front of the war much more carefully.
