The NSA Doesn’t Need a Warrant to Watch You
A Decade After Snowden’s Bombshell, Mass Surveillance Continues Unchecked
Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it. —Thomas Paine
The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them. —Patrick Henry
As Thomas Paine and Patrick Henry both warned, freedom isn't self-sustaining. It depends on oversight, accountability, and citizens who are willing to ask hard questions. Yet, too often, the government operates in secrecy, shielded by bureaucracy and national security rhetoric. The system we're told exists—a transparent, representative government accountable to the people—frequently fails to match what’s happening behind closed doors.
Freedom Isn’t Free—It’s a Responsibility
Jon Rappoport’s recent Substack article “To those people who are now citing the US government as the guardian against the data-thief, Elon Musk,” is a case in point. Rappoport vehemently disagrees with the contention that the government is trustworthy in guarding citizens’ personal data. Rappoport points to American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden’s revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) breached domestic and international personal privacy rights.
The trailer below introduces the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which captures Snowden’s 2013 disclosures as they unfolded in real time.
The full Citizenfour documentary is available on the Internet Archive. Rappoport describes what happened and Snowden’s revelation:
[Snowden] took (estimates vary) from 200,000 to over a million documents from the National Security Agency in 2013—most of them detailing NSA spying operations. Spying on Americans and people all over the world.
Snowden: “The NSA specifically targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system, and it filters them, and it analyzes them, and it measures them, and it stores them for periods of time... Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector anywhere.”
According to the NSA, its mission is to,
[lead] the U.S. Government in cryptology that encompasses both foreign signals intelligence (SIGINT) insights and cybersecurity products and services, and enables computer network operations to gain a decisive advantage for the nation and our allies. Throughout the site, NSA/CSS will be referred to collectively as NSA.
Wikipedia notes that “the agency relies on a variety of measures to accomplish its mission, the majority of which are clandestine.” It has about 32,000 employees.
During COVID-19, surveillance expanded significantly, supposedly for our protection. However, as Rappoport quotes Snowden, this is not a recent innovation.
Snowden: “The biggest problem we face right now is the new technique of indiscriminate mass surveillance, where governments are seizing billions and billions and billions of innocents’ communication every single day.”
Snowden revealed several NSA projects designed to collect data on everyone.
NSA’s Data Grab: PRISM and Boundless Informant
PRISM, an NSA program initiated in 2007 pursuant to the Bush Administration’s Protect America Act, gave U.S. and British government agencies access to internet servers, as detailed by Britannica.
A data-mining program that reportedly gave the NSA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Government Communications Headquarters—Britain’s NSA equivalent—“direct access” to the servers of such Internet giants as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple.
An April 25, 2013, foreign intelligence court order gave the NSA access to the metadata of Verizon’s 98.9 million wireless customers, to turn over all its call records for a three-month period following the Boston Marathon Bombing, The Guardian explained. Author Ian Black noted that the untargeted order allowed the agency to snoop on all calls without any suspicion of wrongdoing.
Black also linked Prism to Boundless Informant, a tool that organizes and indexes the information collected by Prism.
The tool categorises communications records rather than the content of a message itself. A fact sheet leaked to the Guardian explains that almost 3bn pieces of intelligence had been collected from US computer networks in the 30-day period ending in March this year, as well as indexing almost 100bn pieces worldwide. Countries are ranked according to how much information has been taken from mobile and online networks, and colour-coded depending on the extent of the NSA's spying operation.
Not only was the NSA engaged in retrieving and cataloging everyone’s data, it was also engaged in lying to Congress about its capabilities, The Guardian also revealed. Writing about Boundless Informant, authors Glen Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill noted the NSA’s:
… powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
XKeyscore: Surveillance Without Limits
XKeyscore is another tool that the NSA developed. This one, as Rappoport described, “could be used to collect virtually EVERYTHING happening on the Internet.”
Wikipedia notes that the NSA had opened up XKeyscore to other countries as well.
XKeyscore (XKEYSCORE or XKS) is a secret computer system used by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) for searching and analyzing global Internet data, which it collects in real time. The NSA has shared XKeyscore with other intelligence agencies, including the Australian Signals Directorate, Canada's Communications Security Establishment, New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, Japan's Defense Intelligence Headquarters, and Germany's Bundesnachrichtendienst.
What exactly is XKS capable of?
XKeyscore is a complicated system, and various authors have different interpretations of its actual capabilities. Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald [a journalist and former First Amendment rights lawyer] have said that XKeyscore is a system that enables almost unlimited surveillance of anyone anywhere in the world, while the NSA has claimed that usage of the system is limited and restricted. According to Snowden, no one is safe from the NSA’s surveillance system:
NSA analysts had unlimited access to global emails.
You could read anyone's email in the world, anybody you've got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you're tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It's a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA's information. ... You can tag individuals ... Let's say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what's called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.
But, according to Greenwald, it’s not restricted to top-level NSA specialists.
… low-level NSA analysts can, via systems like XKeyscore, "listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it's all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst."
NSA even gets alerts about future communications to particular email addresses.
He added that the NSA's database of collected communications allows its analysts to listen "to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you've entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future."
A Decade Later, It Hasn’t Stopped
No Warrant, No Problem
In early December 2023, NSA Director Paul Nakasone admitted in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden that the agency purchases data on Americans, including details about the websites they visit and the apps they use, without a warrant. The letter was declassified and made public in January 2024.
In response, Wyden wrote to the Director of National Intelligence:
The U.S. government should not be funding and legitimizing a shady industry whose flagrant violations of Americans’ privacy are not just unethical, but illegal.
The disclosure was reported by Fox News and widely shared, including in the following tweet from Bad Kitty Unleashed.
To paraphrase Patrick Henry, the liberties of a people are never secure when they stop paying attention, when they trust blindly, stop asking questions, and assume someone else is holding power accountable.
NSA’s Betrayal: What It Hid from Israel and Congress
The NSA, as it also states on its website, is a combat support agency and, as I’ll cover in Part 2 of this series, it chose to withhold critical information from its ally Israel before the Yom Kippur War, resulting in thousands of needless deaths. The agency deceived both an ally and the American people, all behind closed doors and without any accountability.