* * * *

P475: Three decades after its creation, the NSA is still without a formal
charter. Instead, there is a super hush-hush surveillance court that is
virtually impotent; the FISA, which has enough loopholes and exceptions to
render it nearly useless; and an executive order that was designed more to
protect the intelligence community from citizens than citizens from the
agencies. In addition, because it is an executive order, it can be changed
at any time at the whim of a President, without so much as a nod toward
Congress.

P471: On January 24, 1978, President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order
imposing detailed restrictions on the nation's intelligence community. The
order was designed to prevent the long list of abuses of the 1960s and 1970s.

But four years later President Ronald Reagan scrapped the Carter order and
broadened considerably the power of the spy agencies to operate domestically.

P473: Under the Reagan executive order, the NSA can now, apparently, be
authorized to lend its full support - analysts as well as computers - to
"any department or agency" in the federal government and, "when lives are
endangered," even to local police departments.

[ Yea billions of dollars a year military SIGINT support technology...
oh so invisible in its great mass.

A total blurring of the lines between Military
and civilian control of the domestic population.
]


P475-477: Like an ever-widening sinkhole, the NSA's surveillance technology
will continue to expand, quietly pulling in more and more communications and
gradually eliminating more and more privacy.

If there are defenses to such technotyranny, it would appear, at least from
past experience, that they will not come from Congress.

Rather, they will most likely come from academe and industry in the form of
secure cryptographic applications to private and commercial telecommunications
equipment.

The same technology that is used against free speech can be used
to protect it, f