The Puzzled Palace

 

 

"Even the best farmer has days when every place he steps is a cow pie..."

 

Oh boy - now what. Just when you thought every bad break that can happen to this Administration has happened - BAM - along comes something even bigger. One of the pundits I was listening to last Sunday said the IRS was the most damaging scandal of all revealed so far. I think the IRS scandal has now met its match.

First a bit of disclosure. I was associated with the National Security Agency from 1970 to 1992. I know a bit about the place and how they operated at that time. It is not my intent to reveal any spy craft about the Agency - my intent is to explain how strange the headlines have become this week concerning the relationship of NSA to the American public.

First some facts - most (if not all) developed countries have some sort of intelligence gathering capability. It would be naïve to think not. I know for a fact the NSA did some fine work for this country in the time I was associated with it. I still believe they  keep us safe. Of all the agencies, the NSA is known as "the brains of the outfit" - some very, very smart people using very sophisticated systems reside at Fort Meade.

That being said, if you were associated with the NSA, there were many different infractions you could do that that would cause you to "loose your ticket" (have your clearance pulled). One of the most egregious was to use the resources of the organization, chartered to gather intelligence from foreign sources, to target United States citizens. It was a huge "NO-NO". In fact, everyone who had a clearance like mine, had to take yearly training on this violation and sign a certificate that the training had been complete. The purpose of this was to ensure if you screwed up, ignorance could never be an excuse.

Fast forward to 9/11. It has been said many times our world changed that day - including at the NSA. As a consequence of the attack, along came new legislation and executive orders. With the enactment of The Patriot Act, the game really changed. It put some real teeth into the FISC Court. (The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) is a US Federal court authorized by statue in October 1978.) FISC allows the government to conduct surveillance on suspected foreign nationals operating within the United States. With specific clearance from the FISC court, NSA could operate outside its original charter.

In 2007, things started to become very murky. Under the auspices of the Patriot Act, the government started collecting meta-data on the communication pattern of United States citizens. The slippery slope was now in effect. Our "lame duck media" got scooped once again, as the UK Guardian broke the latest story about the US Government/Verizon data mining connection. We have gone from pre-FISC, to FISC warrants, to "warrantless wire tapping", to all out "Big Brother". The fact a new NSA multiple terra-byte storage facility opened up in Utah this week is no coincidence.

Now the very bad news (in my opinion). This is just the tip of the iceberg. Where there is smoke, there is fire. Now that the "cat is out of the bag", Congress, along with the ACLU, is going to be all over this issue like white on rice. Hearings will abound in Washington. The United States press will finally wake up and do some investigative reporting.

Tomorrow is the 64th birthday of the publishing of 1984. Orwell wrote this book to be fiction - a dystopia. Little did he know how true it was becoming.