From the NY Times Week In Review



Private Lives
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD
December 25, 2005

Washington

DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden
by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping
bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic
dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone
calls and e-mail messages an hour.

Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post
intercepts all international communications entering the eastern
United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash.,
eavesdrops on the western half of the country.

A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A.
has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The
controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly
ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless
eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats
to call for his impeachment.

According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the
Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first
briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret
operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own
code word - which itself is secret.

Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in
absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is
the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important,
providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and
other spy organizations.

But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in
which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small
cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has
developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts
of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at
home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties
and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally
created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed
to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the
Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on
intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.

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