The NSA has become too big and too powerful. What was supposed to be a single agency with a dual mission -- protecting the security of U.S. communications and eavesdropping on the communications of our enemies -- has become unbalanced in the post-Cold War, all-terrorism-all-the-time era.
Putting the U.S. Cyber
Command, the military's cyberwar wing, in the same location and under
the same commander, expanded the NSA's power. The result is an agency
that prioritizes intelligence gathering over security, and that's increasingly putting us all at risk. It's time we thought about breaking up the National Security Agency.
Broadly speaking, three
types of NSA surveillance programs were exposed by the documents
released by Edward Snowden. And while the media tends to lump them
together, understanding their differences is critical to understanding
how to divide up the NSA's missions.
The first is targeted surveillance.
This is best illustrated by the work of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) group, including its catalog of hardware and software "implants"
designed to be surreptitiously installed onto the enemy's computers.
This sort of thing represents the best of the NSA and is exactly what we
want it to do. That the United States has these capabilities, as scary
as they might be, is cause for gratification.
The second is bulk
surveillance, the NSA's collection of everything it can obtain on every
communications channel to which it can get access. This includes things
such as the NSA's bulk collection of call records, location data, e-mail messages and text messages.
This is where the NSA
overreaches: collecting data on innocent Americans either incidentally
or deliberately, and data on foreign citizens indiscriminately. It
doesn't make us any safer, and it is liable to be abused. Even the
director of national intelligence, James Clapper, acknowledged that the collection and storage of data was kept a secret for too long.
The third is the deliberate sabotaging of security. The primary example we have of this is the NSA's BULLRUN program, which tries to
"insert vulnerabilities into commercial encryption systems, IT systems,
networks and endpoint communication devices." This is the worst of the
NSA's excesses, because it destroys our trust in the Internet, weakens
the security all of us rely on and makes us more vulnerable to attackers
worldwide.
That's the three: good,
bad, very bad. Reorganizing the U.S. intelligence apparatus so it
concentrates on our enemies requires breaking up the NSA along those
functions.
...Second, all surveillance of Americans should be moved to the FBI.
The FBI is charged with
counterterrorism in the United States, and it needs to play that role.
Any operations focused against U.S. citizens need to be subject to U.S.
law, and the FBI is the best place to apply that law. That the NSA can,
in the view of many, do an end-run around congressional oversight, legal
due process and domestic laws is an affront to our Constitution and a
danger to our society. The NSA's mission should be focused outside the
United States -- for real, not just for show.
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