USSID 18 and Something Stellar in the Wind

"If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees"

Khalil Gibran

Back in the day, certain elements of the Armed Forces did a behind the scenes service for their country by keeping tabs on certain countries that needed to be watched. For those who did this service, it was similar to flying an airplane - 99% boredom and 1% panic. The performance of this function was nothing similar to ad hoc - it was strictly directed and regulated by the National Security Agency.

A document which was in existence back then was called USSID (UNITED STATES SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE DIRECTIVE) 18. For people in the signal intelligence (SIGINT) business, it was like a bible. Now declassified, it wasn't back then. It was classified Secret and the document contained the do's and don'ts of signal intelligence. Anyone in the business was required to read it once a year and sign a certification as such. The main point of the document was under no circumstances, we you allowed to eavesdrop on a United States citizen. Period. You could get in huge trouble if you disobeyed that directive. It is available on the internet, so if on a sleepless night you are looking to get drowsy, it is easy to find.

After September 11, 2001, everything changed. We realized our homeland was vulnerable to attack and separating the good guys from the bad guys on our own shore was becoming difficult. With much consternation and debate, the Patriot Act as well as other lesser know laws came into being. To ensure our safety, something was going to have to give - and what had to give were some of our civil liberties. Warrantless wire taps had gone from strictly illegal to more legal. Sadly, USSID 18 had now become a part of eavesdropping history.

As with any good intentions, often there are unintended consequences. The NSA and the FBI now has different powers, different authority. To isolate embedded terrorists or worse yet, home grown terrorists, our government had to drill deeper into communication and data streams. This amounted to sifting through an almost an incalculable amount of data. In order to store and properly analyse this information, a huge amount of computing power and storage space would be required.

There you have it, without going into too much detail. Our lives are becoming more and more an open book. To stay safe, we had had to pay a price - some say a very steep price. All of us have become like Truman in The Truman Show. Pandora's Box has been opened and may never be closed again. Everything we do, every Google search, every check written, every cent earned, every call made, is now a candidate for viewing, analysis and storage. It is as if our entire existence, our entire life is governed by one big computer "cookie".

Are we safer now? I sure hope so. Are we more vulnerable to information abuse? I think so. Was giving up our privacy and some of our civil liberties the right thing to do? I really, really hope it was. Otherwise, we might have just slipped back in time - to 1984.