I think there’s been something lacking in all these wild discussions of the NSA; namely what exactly is their purpose .... and what is their point-of-view? Right here I have to say, that I’m not now, nor have I ever been an NSA employee, so much of this will be speculation. But back when I was in the military (1980’s-90s) I had the chance to work with NSA employees for several years. So maybe I can give just a little perspective of who they are, and what they think they are doing. Maybe.
I always liked that old Native American Proverb - "Never criticize a man until you've walked a mile in his moccasins", so I'm going to try that here. Follow me below the curious orange squiggly thing.
First of all, none of the NSA employees I ever met were the radical fascists that a lot of people here make them out to be. They weren't frothing at the mouth to put liberals into GITMO, or to take over the country. Maybe it was just me at the time, but they seemed like pretty normal Americans. They were perhaps just a little more “introverted” than most Americans, and more knowledgeable about world events. They were linguists of various languages, mathematicians, and computer geeks mostly. I don’t recall many contractors back then, but perhaps I wasn’t paying attention.
The NSA listens to communications from around the world, and reports on what they hear - to the State Department, or to the Pentagon, or to the President. Everybody knows this. But shouldn’t they feel just a little guilty for snooping into unknown people’s lives? What right do they have, and why are they so nosy?
“We listen to people who would otherwise not be heard”. I’m not sure if that’s an exact quote, but pretty close. It was one of the NSA guys trying to justify a part of what they do. All governments in the world put on a facade to the outside world, but people talking to each other on the inside tell the real truth. Some nameless person in a village in Africa tells another nameless person over the phone that her whole village was burned to the ground by a local band of militia. It was around the time of the Rwandan Genocide. Very hard to get any news of what was happening in the country. Foreign journalists were restricted or kicked out out. Local journalists report that everything is fine. Many countries have corrupt or non-existent press, and there is no other way of finding out the real truth about civil wars, mass killings, and political corruption, except by "spying" on the people and government there. The breakup of Yugoslavia is another example. Chinese oppression in Tibet, Bosnia and Kosovo, the Russian, Georgian and Chechnya conflicts, Somalia, North Korea, the whole Middle-East. The world is a huge place with hundreds of languages and billions of communications (every day).
The purpose of any government “intelligence agency” is to try to find out what’s really going on in a foreign country and relay that information back to the leaders in government who need to know. Signals intelligence is the realm of the NSA. Human intelligence (sending spies into a country) belongs to the CIA. There’s also Imagery intelligence (NRO), Imagery & Mapping (NGA), and a number of others (a total of 16). The list on WIKI kind of blurs the lines between intelligence, and counter-intelligence (looking for spies working against the US), and law enforcement (FBI). I have no idea why the US needs so many intelligence agencies - but there they are.
Back to the NSA. Does the US government (through the NSA) have the right to snoop into the communications of foreign countries? The NSA (and other intelligence agencies) belong to our elected politicians (mainly the President) and they are ultimately responsible for what the NSA does. In reality it’s a passive agency; it doesn’t have a police force or federal agents who go out and arrest people, or even talk to the general public. In fact they don’t even seem to have any friendly PR people who are accustomed to talking in public. They quietly listen (and read), write their reports, and pass on any information they view as important to those in the government they think need-to-know (the President, State Department, Pentagon, the embassies).
But do they have the right to listen at all? It's not my place to answer that, but the alternative would be to just trust what foreign officials tell us blindly. And hope that journalists report the news in foreign countries accurately.
Between 1975 (the Church Commission) and 9/11, the NSA was strictly forbidden by policy and regulation to intentionally collect anything off of a US person or a US company. After 9/11 the Patriot Act changed that. It was somewhat somewhat understandable at the time, with so many multinational corporations and foreign visitors, the lines between “foreign” and “US” communications have been completely blurred. With these new secret programs, they've apparently gotten permission to try to collect everything they can (foreign and domestic), and then sort through the whole mess later, using computers. Billions and billions of communications per day, and only about 35,000 employees. Add a few thousand (or even a hundred thousand) contractors and it still could never be enough.
By amassing all these communications and metadata, are the people at NSA “spying” on Americans too? Is the collection of information "spying" if a live person is not reading it or listening to it? I can’t imagine why they would need any intelligence on what's going on in America. They themselves are Americans living in America. They can easily read the newspapers, blogs, comments, Facebook etc. What “intelligence” information about the US would they be looking to report to the President and government that they don't already know? Much of the outrage seems to be about them collecting all this data and the building that humongous computer-repository in Utah to try to store it and sort it all (speculation).
The real danger (IMHO) from these new NSA programs is not that NSA themselves are going to be reading everyone’s e-mail, or listening to your neighbor’s phone conversations. That would be mathematically impossible, even if they hired a million people. The real danger is the potential for this massive archive of stored information, which contains a mixture of NSA's “foreign intelligence” and regular American communications, to be handed over to US law enforcement for monitoring US people like protestors and environmentalists. How tempting that trove of information must be for the FBI. Or the NYPD.
The NSA can truthfully say that they don’t intentionally monitor US persons. They don’t need to. The FBI or other law enforcement agencies can simply take communications out of the NSA trove with a FISA court warrant.
The Patriot Act has made it easier for the different agencies in the government to share information. They removed most of the "legal wall" between foreign intelligence and criminal investigations. It's primarily in Section 218 of the USA PATRIOT ACT. I'm not a lawyer, but many have said that it allows the Justice Department to investigate normal American citizens for non-terrorist criminal matters using secret warrants granted by the FISA Court. Obviously since such warrants are secret, they may not be challenged or appealed by suspects.
So (IMHO) the real demon in all this is The Patriot Act, and to a lesser degree the FISA court. The Patriot Act was originally designed to force government agencies to cooperate in finding terrorists, but it's now allowing law enforcement agencies access to the NSAs foreign surveillance communications, with only a weak and secret FISA court as a buffer.