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What are the Benefits of Having a National

Security Agency?

That is a very reasonable and


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.

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