A friend sent me a chilling article from Wired magazine about a new, gargantuan spy center being built by the NSA in Utah. The article started with this short background on the genesis, and current evolution, of the NSA:
For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power. Established as an arm of the Department of Defense following Pearl Harbor, with the primary purpose of preventing another surprise assault, the NSA suffered a series of humiliations in the post-Cold War years. Caught off guard by an escalating series of terrorist attacks—the first World Trade Center bombing, the blowing up of US embassies in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and finally the devastation of 9/11—some began questioning the agency’s very reason for being. In response, the NSA has quietly been reborn. And while there is little indication that its actual effectiveness has improved—after all, despite numerous pieces of evidence and intelligence-gathering opportunities, it missed the near-disastrous attempted attacks by the underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009 and by the car bomber in Times Square in 2010—there is no doubt that it has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created.
I want to channel G Edward Griffin a little bit here. Griffin is the author of The Creature From Jekyll Island, and in this book he put forth the notion that if the results of a policy consistently and widely diverge over time from the stated intentions, one has a sound basis upon which to question the stated intentions of the policy being observed.
In “Creature”, Griffin was discussing the Federal Reserve System and its “dual mandate”– to maintain stable prices and low unemployment. Of course, the Fed has never managed to achieve either one of its objectives since it was founded, leading a skeptical observer to wonder if the Fed was perpetually failing at its stated objective, or consistently succeeding on an unstated one.
Proponents of the NSA will argue that there are many successes we might never know about due to matters of secrecy. We can’t critically examine the veracity of these arguments because we’re not deemed worthy of the trust necessary to obtain the information required to evaluate these claims, so they must be ignored.
What we are sure of, as the paragraph above points out, is that there have been numerous “surprise assaults” that the NSA has done nothing to stop.
And yet, it only grows larger.
Maybe the NSA is succeeding wildly at its true purpose despite appearing to fail at its stated purpose. The construction of this massive, $2 billion facility in Utah is alarming.
But we should be even more alarmed that we do not know what is the true purpose of this multi-billion dollar agency.
A House Rises 