http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/politics/22nsa.htmlBy SCOTT SHANE
Published: December 22, 2005
Loch K. Johnson, an intelligence historian now teaching at Yale who served on the Church Committee staff, said the 1978 reforms were the result of lengthy bipartisan negotiations. "To pick up the paper and see that all of the carefully crafted language, across party lines, to put together FISA, has been dismissed by secret executive order is very disheartening," Mr. Johnson said.
Mr. Johnson said he saw a link between the intelligence excesses of the 1970's and the N.S.A. program: fear. "Then the fear was of communism," he said. "Now it's terrorism."
Even after the overhaul of the surveillance act, the N.S.A.'s combination of secrecy, power and size continued to produce intrigue. Movies like "Enemy of the State" (1998), in which the agency is portrayed as an out-of-control surveillance operation that carries out political assassinations and destroys the life of a lawyer played by Will Smith, distorted the agency's purpose and capabilities. Exaggerated reports on an agency program called Echelon asserted that the agency and its counterparts in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia somehow intercepted all world communications.
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
