important question given the climate of our times. 2013 is the year that Americans and people around the world woke up to the realization that, yes, governments are collecting unprecedented amounts of information about their citizens and the citizens (and leaders) of their allies around the world. Intelligence collection has expanded well beyond the needs of learning where and when enemy forces will set up camp and strike next. The Cold War produced one of the most extreme and hostile intelligence gathering environments in history because, unlike during a normal wartime, the United States and the Soviet Union did everything possible to avoid going to war with each other even while actively promoting their own interests and working to degrade each other’s opportunities and advantages. That is a mouthfull to speak but the point of the Cold War was for each major super power and its allies to establish a political and military advantage around the world that would accomplish two things: 1. Spread their political and economic systems to other countries 2. Limit the effectiveness of their enemies’ military advantages The secret to the success of the Cold War in staying “cold” was that both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed immense nuclear arsenals that could have, if used, wiped out life on Earth many times over. The very real threat of Mutually Assured self-Destruction (called MAD in most cases) gave world leaders serious reason to pause and consider the consequences of their most blatant actions. But this hesitance did not dissuade the Americans and Soviets from “fighting” with each other. They simply waged their wars on smaller nations, through weaker allies, and by supporting revolutions that threatened governments which were friendly to the “other side”. This vast game of political chess spanned generations and reached every inhabited continent on our planet. And it forced the adversaries to think in terms of how to disrupt the political and economic influence of their enemies and allies. And that is where the National Security Agency comes in. In order to upstage and surprise each other the Americans and the Soviets encrypted their communications with agents around the world. In the United States the NSA was tasked with both protecting American communications from interception and interpretation AND intercepting and interpreting communications between foreign governments and their agents. And because every major government on both sides had been infiltrated by spies, it behooved both the Americans and the Soviets to study the communications among their allies to see if their complex webs of alliances and schemes were threatened by espionage. And it was also important to know if strategic allies were contemplating whether to switch sides or set up their own agendas. For example, although the United States and France have been allies since the late 1700s, during the 1990s and 2000s France often criticized and rejected American foreign policy. The French people pride themselves on pursuing their own political priorities and they don’t want to be treated as a second-class friend and ally (of course, who does?). France, of course, is one of the major nuclear powers of the world. So it behooves every other nation to know that the French nuclear arsenal is not at risk of falling into the wrong hands. The prospect of nuclear weapons and technology being handed over to terrorists and small dictators raised its ugly head after the Soviet Union collapsed and its various constituent nations took responsibility for maintaining the arsenal. The Russian Federation worked closely with several smaller neighbors to consolidate and protect the old Soviet nuclear technology but western analysts believed that some technology components and possibly some nuclear material may have slipped through the cracks. When Al Qaeda launched its war against the United States in 2001 by seizing control over four commercial airliners and crashing them into important buildings, citizens of more than 80 nations were killed. Some analysts argue that the “War on Terror” is our Third World War because dozens of nations mobilized to fight Al Qaeda and similar extremist organizations. Over the past twelve years the alliance of free nations has achieved considerable military success on the battlefield in Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda held several bases, but extremists have now spread their war to nearly 30 countries. To combat these terrorists the National Security Agency and its counterparts around the world have worked to find and monitor communications between Al Qaeda’s “core leadership” and the various regional “cells”, especially the more powerful groups such as Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which seized control over parts of Yemen), Al Shabaab (“the Youth”) in Somalia, and AQIM (Al Qaeda in the Islamic Mahgreb). These groups are not just fighting wars in small nations in Africa and Asia; they are also actively recruiting supporters and new members on the Internet, and they have successfully led hundreds of people around the world to “self-radicalize” and launch terror attacks against their own countries including the United States, Great Britain, Spain, Germany, and more. To find the terrorists the intelligence agencies spread their nets wide and far, capturing as much communications traffic from the Internet as possible. For many years Al Qaeda and their allies did not know how effective this activity was. Then the American traitor Edward Snowden stole many secret documents from the National Security Agency and gave them to anti-democratic activists like Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian, whose policies have opposed governments’ efforts to fight Al Qaeda on the Internet. Snowden’s treason brought NSA actions into the limelight of world public opinion, an opinion that was shaped and influenced by the deliberately misleading articles that Glenn Greenwald and his fellow anarchists published. But now that millions of people are demanding greater knowledge of the National Security Agency’s activities, Al Qaeda has been shown just how many of the operatives were identified and dozens of their vile plots thwarted. The scope of this intelligence disaster has yet to be fully assessed and may not be revealed to people for decades to come. As the backlash against the NSA intelligence collection spreads to new quarters the American government and its allies will have to find new ways to identify and monitor the activities of Al Qaeda, who have changed the way they communicate with each other. The full benefit of having a National Security Agency may sadly be brought home to Americans only if Al Qaeda succeeds in launching another terrorist attack on the United States. If such an attack never materializes citizens will be fortunate, but for years unnamed members of the American intelligence community quietly told the American people that another terrorist attack (after the 9/11 attack) on American soil was only “a matter of when, not if”. And the WHEN occurred on April 15, 2013 when two self-radicalized brothers set up bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring more than 260. In subsequent battles with the police the suspects killed at least 1 police officer and injured another. Critics of the NSA have pointed to the Boston massacre as an example of its failure to prevent a terrorist attack — but the NSA can only see the activity happening. It has no capability for intervening in the activities of terrorists. The Tsarnaev brothers were in fact flagged as security risks by other parts of the defensive system the United States has constructed but that information was either insufficient or disregarded as inactionable, thus allowing them to execute their evil plan without disruption. Because Al Qaeda continues to publish calls to action on the Internet as well as use it to plan new military campaigns and terrorist operations we must continue to remain vigilant; to do so we need a National Security Agency that is not impaired by the treasonous acts of Edward Snowden and former American citizen Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald’s desire to dismantle the institutions of government during a time of war are truly irresponsible and insane. But he is free to act as he does because of the efforts of the National Security Agency, not in spite of them.